Letter to My Seven-Year-Old Self

Note: After a great deal of procrastination, I bring to you another sample of my experiences in Africa. It might be two or three months before I write the next piece on Côte d’Ivoire, so enjoy. If you haven’t already read the initial installment, I Am Seven, I recommend you check that one out as well.

Voila, seven-year-old me at school (in Africa)

 

Dear Seven-Year-Old Me,

I know that it’s difficult for you, going back to Africa now that you’re older, now that you’ve had almost two years to build friendships with your fellow students here in America. Naturally, you don’t want to leave them behind for ages and ages, only to find them grown and strange when you return. But I also know that you’re excited as well because, at this point, Africa is still one of your biggest memories, and you’ve been a little lonely since none of your friends have been able to relate to your previous experiences.

Despite how eager you are to get home, you were three when you went over the first time, hardly old enough to understand or worry about the huge cultural leap you were making. And now that you have finally begun to adjust to America, you have to leave again. You have to go back to the place that rejected you like a body rejects a virus. In so many ways, you feel like a ping-pong ball, bouncing back and forth across the little net in the middle of the table. You just want to land somewhere and rest.

Soon enough, you will, but not yet. And I’m sorry that you have to go through so much in the meantime. I promise you’ll be okay.

First of all, the trip over is going to get…interesting. In Liberia, two men will board your plane, claiming to seek asylum. For whatever reason, they will rip up their papers (visas and such, I imagine), but they will get caught. It’s going to be super scary, hearing them yelling as the authorities drag them past you up to the cockpit while the plane you sit in flies through the air, suspended on two flimsy bits of metal, so breakable. At the time, you’ll be watching a movie, and the harsh transition between fiction and reality will jar you. So much so, that, by the time you finally land in Côte d’Ivoire, you’ll be shaken and wishing for the familiar.

Hang in there.

After spending the night at the home of a kindly woman (who blesses your heart because you’re so sleepy) and an extroverted man (who wears a cowboy hat and defends your luggage from thieves), you’ll find yourself packed into a hot, tight car for the long trip to Yamoussoukro (Yakro for short). Your excitement will return and then grow on that long stretch while the red dirt plains and the towering ant hills streak by in your periphery.

More than anything, you won’t be able to stop thinking about that music box you left behind the first time. You’ll remember picking it out from the Mission Barrel (a place where missionaries drop and swap). It was like digging up gold from a slag heap of old clothes and angry hornets. That music box is perhaps your most valued possession, and years down the road, you still won’t have the slightest clue why. All the while you’ve stayed in America, the fact that you didn’t rescue it earlier has eaten at you. I realize you already know this—of course you do, since your very first thought on learning you were going back to Africa was that you could reclaim that music box (your second thought, of course, centered around how much you’d miss your cousins)—but I had to say something.

So, the music box will consume your mind as you make headway to your old home, that building that still stands safe and sound, filled with all your belongings, untouched by the locals, just waiting for you. Along the way, you’ll remind your sister multiple times that, when you arrive, the music box is yours and yours alone. She can’t have it—in fact, you’ll prefer it if she didn’t even touch it. (The thought of her picking it up first will really bother you.) All you’ll think about is lifting that lid with the little glass window in it and winding the key so you can watch the flimsy plastic dancer with her raised arm and her wisp-of-lace skirt spin while the music tinkles out.

But, horror of horrors, the car you’re riding in will break down, and you’ll be forced to wait ages and ages—itching—no, dying—in anticipation while your driver (the cowboy-hat-wearing, luggage-saving, missionary man) figures out what to do. Fortunately, a flatbed tow truck will happen along and rescue you. Even though it’s probably super dangerous, after they hitch your vehicle onto the back of theirs, you’ll ride inside the car on the last stretch to Ivory Coast’s capitol city.

As an aside, here, Lizzie, it’s going to bug you when you research Côte d’Ivoire later and find that some cartographers are under the illusion that Abidjan is still the capitol of Ivory Coast. Take comfort in knowing that the presidential palace is in Yakro, not Abidjan, which means—no matter what people might say to the contrary—the official capitol is Yamoussoukro. And that’s where you live, where your music box waits for you. So let’s get back to that.

Strange though it may seem, you’ll feel a little sad when you burst through the blue gate that leads from the courtyard to your yard, as you fly down the stone path to the house you remember so well and yet don’t. For one, your faithful German shepherd won’t be there, and you’ll feel a pang at that. You miss her, so you have to remember that it isn’t your fault she’s dead, even though you can’t shake the notion that it is. Seriously, it’s not your fault that the vet gave her cow-sized shots which made her sick and sore. Of course you’d wanted to comfort her—who could blame you?—and it wasn’t your fault you petted her right on the spot where they gave her the medicine (and got chomped for your trouble). Later, after you’d left the continent, when she ran out into the street because she didn’t want to go to the vet, it wasn’t your fault the taxi killed her. So don’t beat yourself up about it.

I’m telling you this because you’ll find Africa to be a surprisingly emotional place this time around. First of all, there’ll be a weird drop from the giddy adrenaline high you’ve been riding on for the past day or so. On top of that, some of your friends from before won’t be coming back, and you’ll have to adjust to a bunch of new faces in your little missionary community. You’ll find that you won’t slide back into the old groove of things the way you expect to. You’ve grown and changed as a person since the last time you were here, so you can’t expect everything to be the same.

Sure, the walls in your house will still be peeling, (and you’ll remember—with fondness—how you would often pull the paint off and then eat the chips to hide the evidence). You’ll have some cleaning to do, since ants have built their nests in papers and under furniture. You’ll find you’re almost too big for your bike. You’ll find the dark shadows around the edges of your yard, where the trees shade the grass and the shed presses close to the wall, will frighten you far more than they did before. Nothing will seem quite so innocent anymore.

You’ll be shocked by how homesick you get. At first, it won’t be all that strong, just the normal stuff. And you’ll tell yourself it will pass. But it won’t, not really. Though you’ll enjoy spending time with your friends, even the bright spots will get lost in the gloom far too often for your taste. You’ll discover just how thick and black that strange, seemingly inexplicable loneliness will become. Unfortunately, you won’t really realize until much later that the new medication you’ll be taking to prevent malaria comes with some nasty psychological side effects. That stuff will give you vivid, vivid nightmares. It will, in fact, forever change the way you dream—even when your sleep is sweet. Though the effects aren’t as permanent, the medicine will also intensify and warp all your waking emotions. Let’s face it, you’ll be tired to begin with, and some of your dreams will feature your worst fears (like coming back to the US after being away for ten years only to find that your cousins are all grown up and singing in rock bonds and they have no clue who you are). So you need to brace yourself for that, and always remember, stuff won’t be as bad as it’s going to seem.

As much as you can, try to focus on the cool stuff, the way the mission community will play capture-the-flag in the dark—the way you’ll have potlucks—the way your best friends will be British and Northern Irish (and those won’t be the only nationalities). You’ll study French, and you’ll love it so much, you’ll try to teach it to your Dad’s African friend even though he already speaks the language fluently (rest assured, he’ll still humor you because he’s sweet like that). Though it would probably break about a thousand American safety regulations, you’ll get to play in a giant, human-sized hamster wheel in the school playground (safety is for wimps). One day, your father will bring home a dead, headless viper, and he’ll take pictures that make it look like it’s attacking him. You’ll get to visit a zoo at a gas station and a restaurant with a deer living indoors, and you’ll get to play at a pizza place that has a tree growing up through the ceiling and a stream cutting off the corner of the yard with a swing set on the other side. Could it really get much better than all that?

Unfortunately, you won’t get to bring that music box home with you, and even when you’re much older than you are now, that loss will bother you far more than it should. (In fact, you’ll probably always get the urge to cry when you see a music box.) But you’ll bring home a collection of memories and pictures instead, vivid and sure, unfading; even though sometimes you’ll wish to just forget it all, because it will hurt—it will hurt so much to let go, to look but not touch.

So please, I know you’ll be homesick and sad, and I know you’ll be scared and a lot of things won’t make sense. You’ll be growing up, and that hurts just by itself. But the clock starts when you set foot on African soil, and you’ll only have three months to reacquaint yourself with this life before you lose it again. You’ll never be able to recreate the comradery that you’ll find there—the way a bunch of different nationalities can band together, and yes, disagree about how to do the dishes and whatnot. But you have it good now, and you won’t even realize that until later, when you find that America is so much colder, in more ways than one.

Don’t be too sad. Please have fun. Take notes and remember everything. You won’t get another chance like this. Soon, all you’ll think about is wanting to leave Africa, but when it comes time to go, you’ll realize too late that you want so badly to stay.

Don’t waste the time you do have.

Love,

Liz

 

Note: The main bombing described in I Am Seven took place on November 6, 2004. We left the country shortly thereafter, and while we originally planned to return to Africa—this time as missionaries to Guinea—we chose to take several years off from missionary work instead. During our break, we learned of political unrest in Guinea and decided to remain permanently stateside.

I am Seven

Note: Some of you have asked me to write a bit about what it was like to live in Africa, and I plan to do several posts on the subject throughout the year. I know this piece probably won’t be what you were expecting, but this is the first set of memories that come to mind when I think about my stay in Côte d’Ivoire, and to me it’s the most important.

 

Seven-year-old me. I promise I don't actually have red eyes.

 

When I hear the bombs begin to drop, I don’t recognize the banging sounds, loud and irritating. Instead, as I rush to finish my shower and figure out what’s going on, I wonder why Dad keeps slamming the door, over and over again, like he’s trying to break it. I’d heard bombs before, of course, earlier in the afternoon beneath the hot sun as we walked home from school, but that had been different. Mom had been tense, worried at the popcorn popping sound in the far, far distance, miles off, so soft and harmless seeming. But I had been much more concerned with the fact that I was going to miss lunch with my friends, the British girls who liked to mock me for my American accent.

I hadn’t known I was going to lose them—them and everyone else.

As the banging continues, my sister and I hurry to where Mom stands in the dining room, and we ask her about the noise. When she says that bombs are dropping near the presidential palace, less than a mile off, I think at first that she’s joking—that she has to be joking. But who slams a door that often and that loudly? Who shoots off fireworks on a no-name day in a city like Yamoussoukro? And why are people shouting and screaming outside our gates?

Why do I hear gunfire?

I ask where Dad is, and she tells me he’s outside, mingling  with the frightened, angry crowd—screwing his eyes up at the night sky so he can see the slices of blood orange light dropping from the dim helicopter hatch above him. So he can try to find the place where flames flower upward from their points of contact with the ground.

Soon he comes inside, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so worried. It must be sinking in now, because I start shaking uncontrollably when he tells us to grab our bags—the ones we always keep packed in case guerillas attack and we need to flee into the bush. Now I know this is serious, because we’ve never actually considered making a break for it before.

Dazed, I run to my room, feet pounding in time with my roaring heart, and I find Mali—my stuffed dog, named after the German shepherd who had protected us from friendly people, had bitten me and had gotten run over by a speeding taxi (she was a great dog). If we’re going to run, I’m not leaving without Mali.

I hug her tightly and huddle in the little pantry off the kitchen, feeling the cool air rising off the cinderblock walls and the cement floors, pressing myself against cans and jars of food, wondering if this is the last time I will sit in this place and breathe this oxygen. I am seven, and I am old. I am seven, and I am too young. I’ve never been more homesick for the States than I am now.

More gunshots. More explosions. The people outside yell more and more loudly. They’re so angry. Why are they so angry? I hear screams.

What’s happening?

We drag our mattresses into the hallway by my room and lie low on the ground so any stray bullets won’t burst through the windows and tear open our beating hearts or our whirling brains. I cling to Mali and to my sweating thermos, pulling tiny sips of water into my mouth to soothe my terror-dry tongue. But all I can think is that I will lose this place, that I will lose everything except what I hold in my hands—the stuffed dog and the thermos that have suddenly become far more precious to me than anything ever should be.

As the night progresses, I try to fall asleep, but my hands keep loosening on my treasures, and I have to grip them tightly. If I let go, I’ll lose them too. I don’t know what I would be with nothing, so I stay awake and listen to the banging and hold on to my stuff.  

The darkness drags on forever, and I sleep in fits and snatches. When the mob shifts around the house, we tell ourselves that the walls protecting our compound are sturdy and that our gates will hold. We move into the kitchen because, for a while, it’s safer—then we move back into the hallway. At some point Mom pulls me and my sister into our room, sits us up on my bed, and reads Psalm 91 to us. I cling to the verse, the one that says, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”

I can’t stop thinking that you could drive to the presidential palace in under a minute—sometimes the high school students run there and back. What if one of the helicopters aims wrong, drops its payload on my head instead of the president’s? What if I die in a brilliant blaze of light and sound?

Will life go on even if I don’t die?

 

Later Dad sits us down in the living room, my sister and my mother and me. I play with a cheap doll whose limbs won’t stay attached. Past the roaring in my ears, Dad says something about the French peacekeepers from the UN, how the Ivoirians bombed them near Bouake because the peacekeepers wouldn’t let them attack the rebels. He tells us that people have died, that more people will die. That the French bombed back—that’s what happened last night—destroyed every helicopter in the president’s arsenal, attacked the country they were supposed to defend, harmed the people they were ordered to protect. He tells us we can’t stay because we’re white and the French are white, and the Ivoirians don’t want us, are angry enough to kill us because we’re white and that makes us French.

I keep thinking he’s going to change his mind—that the people in charge of pulling us out aren’t actually going to make us go through with this. We had evacuated once before—when I was five—and we came back. Why are we leaving forever this time?

I’m not sure I can take it again—I know what to expect. I remember life in America after our first evacuation. The fire alarm at school had rung, and I’d tried to stay behind and collect all my things from my desk and my cubby. When the teacher had pulled me away, I’d started to cry, and people hadn’t understood. I couldn’t lose everything again. I remember sleeping with all my stuffed animals shoved into my pillowcase every night so I could have them with me in case we’d had to leave suddenly.

Dad keeps talking, telling us the details and the logistics. We’re to take a British Hercules military transport to Ghana, where we’ll wait until we can catch a proper flight. When we decide what belongings we want to rescue—twenty kilos per person—it won’t be nearly as much as what we’ll leave behind.

Once the crying stops and the begging ends and the pleading proves futile, we set to work gathering and sorting and saying our long goodbyes. We have two weeks—two weeks to lie low and hope for the best. Two weeks for them to change their minds, I tell myself. Two weeks for them to realize we can’t go home.

They say we’re safe in the compound, but some of my friends are in the city where the unrest is worse, and I can’t shake the thought that they might not make it here alive.

When we’re not eating together with friends, we sort through our stuff. I shelf my plastic horse that I got in American kindergarten and that everyone had been (rightfully) jealous about. I decide not to bring my favorite quilt because I want to bring my bathrobe and my navy-blue blanket. I choose the stuffed dog I got for my first grade graduation over the stuffed bear I got for some other achievement. I forget to rifle through the mountain of ant-infested papers on my messy desk—I forget to save my first ever writings, the stories that taught me how to love words. I forget so many things. My plastic, squeaky alligator. The action figures that my sister and I fought over, tooth and nail. The massive dollhouse I loved to death. Our collection of books. And we will not be coming back—once we’ve left it here, it’s gone for good. So choose, choose, choose—choose what you keep and what you can’t.

I pack the thermos and the stuffed dog. I cry and then I don’t and I have fun with my friends and pretend we aren’t throwing a party just because we’re all going away. Every time I get the chance, I play with the puppy I always used to hate—I let her nibble my fingers and I pet her while her tail wags and I fall in love with her. So when I turn my back on her for the last time and lug my baggage out into the compound where everyone stands around waiting for the bus to take us elsewhere, I feel this snapping pain in my chest.

 

And I leave home.

Strawberry Sadness for Breakfast

Disclaimer:  I know it’s April Fool’s Day, and I considered trying something clever. Then I remembered I’m not very good at fooling people, so I decided to stick with my normal fare. If you had your hopes up, please accept this video by way of apology.

 

Every week day, I get up at 4:30 in the morning—at least an hour before anyone else in my home is awake. With the pre-dawn darkness pressing in on me, it is lonely. But the loneliness is peaceful. When the world seems so much bigger yet so much closer at the same time, my mind processes more deeply and more quickly. Come pitch black and empty, with no other voices to distract me, I can hear my own thoughts again.

After my shower, where I have at least a couple ideas for current and future books (but no waterproof paper on which to record them), I head to the ground floor and plunk myself down by the picture window to read as the sun drags itself above the horizon. From my vantage point, I can see the first pink glow—almost red, maybe fuchsia, somewhat purple as well. Today the chipmunk who frequents our yard (my sister and I named him Squibbles) also watches this dazzling spectacle with me. Furtive and tiny, he pokes his head out of the snow and rests on his haunches with his little paws tucked closely to his chest. I wonder if he, too, likes the loneliness of morning, with only the fishermen and the clam diggers to destroy the gentle silence with their distant conversation and their speeding vehicles.

As I begin to cool off from my nice, warm shower, I check email and then Facebook. Often I get distracted and start researching random tidbits that may or may not have any bearing on my writing. Eventually I shake the stiffness from my joints and amble over to the island in the middle of the kitchen where I make breakfast. By this time my mother is usually stirring upstairs, and her creaking footsteps across the bathroom floor are lonely too. Truth be told, the peculiar melancholy of loneliness fascinates me—I hear it everywhere.

This morning, I pour strawberry yogurt over my granola, and when I take my first bite, I remember what I always forget, that strawberry yogurt tastes like sadness. I think it’s been this way for me ever since I ate strawberry ice cream during the week my family stayed as refugees in Ghana after escaping civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, the country that had twice been my home.

Often mornings have this effect on me—like time travel. The chilly air, the darkness, the tentative bird song, the sound of tires on slick road, the echo of voices through the valley—they bring to mind loved ones and loved places. Those feelings resurface—the confusion of adjusting to American schools and American customs and American thoughts. In Africa, I had been surrounded by so many other nationalities; coming home was like eating cardboard after living in a gourmet restaurant. Too normal. Painfully so.

Strawberry yogurt triggers that old notion in me—that old question. What other courses might my life have taken if the bombs had not driven us from our home, if our white skin had not turned us French in the eyes of the angry Ivoirians, if I had not lost my house and my friends and my possessions? Until I started writing in earnest—and analyzing that writing—I never truly realized how displaced my soul was, floating around in emptiness, bouncing off walls of nothingness, freefalling through a starless void.

I started writing in Africa; that’s something beautiful I remember frequently. I had the best teacher—Northern Irish and soft-spoken and oh, so polite. There was also a British Science instructor who encouraged me, who taught that editing and creating took time and patience. For my first Work of Genius, I wrote a trilogy of horse stories (which turned into a quartet), and I wish I still had them. When we evacuated, I left them on my desk, buried among my other school papers. I wish I could remember how they went so I could write them down. There were other things I would have taken with me too—the mango tree, the music box, the puppy I only learned to love when I was saying goodbye. The friends I never saw again.

But I think if I had stayed, I would not be the same person today. Sure, I would still love to read and write, but we have so much more in America. In Ivory Coast, we had one laptop, and we lived with the knowledge that technology does not last long in the tropics. We had books, but not many, and they cost money to ship overseas. Ants built impressive nests wherever possessions sat in one place for too long; geckos hung out behind the shelves; cockroaches hid in the shadows. Africa plays by a different set of rules.

Because we didn’t have a TV, my sister and I frolicked outside like yard apes, always with this knowledge in the backs of our minds:  watch the grass where you run, watch the trees when you climb, watch the darkness while you walk, and don’t go behind the shed. Mambas are green like grass, sometimes, and green like poison. Those are some of the deadliest ones. But also watch for the black cobras, the snakes that dance and spit and aim for the eyes. Without milk to wash the venom away, you’ll go blind. Watch the worms that flee their flooded tunnels when it rains, the worms that aren’t worms, the worms that kill. Once we had a tea party on a friend’s porch, only to find a writhing nest of green mambas the next day under the self-same spot—perhaps the closest I have ever come to dying. It was glorious.

We had walls around our yard—thick concrete blocks with shards of glass on top and a spiked gate onto the street—a smaller wooden one into the compound. It made me feel safe to have my whole world encompassed by my peripheral vision, to know that no thieves would climb over in the night—not like the time before we came when a man got shot in one of the neighboring houses. America is too open; I miss those walls. We had a watchdog too, prowling the grounds; first the one that bit me and got hit by a reckless taxi—later the other one, the puppy who cried all night after we bought it, crawling as it was with lice and fleas.

Africa was beautiful, but it was brutal. Would I be the writer I am now if I had stayed?

In the mornings, I retrace my existence, pondering the different turnings and twistings and windings that brought me to this point. At any spot, I consider, one alteration could have changed the entire course of events. When I advance in life, I leave a thousand discarded possibilities behind me.

Every story is like that. Every book begins with a catalyst, but that catalyst is nothing without the choice that follows. How will the character respond to what has happened? The answer to that question decides the book in the same way that it decides our lives. Stories come when we ask ourselves what would have happened if we had made another choice, become another person. Regret and longing and wishful thinking find themselves at the top of many a writer’s toolkit. Writing is freedom—is escape—is the chance to fix the course of events. Again and again and again we try, though sorrow never fully fades. So I keep working—I keep spinning tales until the day strawberry yogurt tastes of something deeper than sadness.