A Different Kind of Childhood

We went for a little hike recently on the Bezer Home land with some of the orphans in Bezer Home. They had a great time tearing up and down the rugged hills, searching for new places to explore. Pictured above are Tobi, 8, and two HIV+ boys, ages 9 & 11. They all tackle life with great gusto. One would not know that two of them are living with a deadly virus. These two boys have both lost their parents to AIDS, and they are both the youngest children in their families. Their older siblings put a very careful, watchful eye on them, making sure they take their medications every day, and accompanying them to the hospital once a month. One contracted the virus from his mother; the other got the virus from a tainted blood transfusion from his father who didn’t know he had HIV at the time. Mashiah Foundation provides a home, love, care, and support for these children.

Dry Season vs. Rainy Season

I really do miss the four seasons from the Upper Midwestern U.S.--autumn especially! I'll never forget the four delicious autumns I spent in picturesque northeastern Iowa. There's nothing better than a bike ride through the rolling hills between Decorah and Bluffton in October.

Just recently I realized that I have subconsciously decorated my living room and family room in autumn colors. We have nothing that comes close to autumn here--and I miss it!

In Nigeria, we basically have two seasons: dry and rainy. Here's a brief rundown of the pros and cons of both.

Dry Season (October-March)

Pros

• Towels actually dry before you use them again
• Clothes dry on the line within 30 min
• Bread doesn't mold quickly
• Can leave the umbrella at home for months
• Can leave the car window down
• Hair naturally straightens
• Internet rarely goes down (no lightning storms)
• Can buy the best vegetables for the cheapest prices--tomatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, lettuce
• Gorgeous flowering trees

Cons

• Lots of static electricity
• Dust everywhere--I can write my name in the dust on the dining table every morning
• Cracked heels
• Meningitis easily spreads
• Lack of water for many residents of the city
• Electricity becomes more erratic because there's not enough water to go over the dams
• Too cold (Nov/Dec--50-70 degrees) I know my Minn. friends are shaking their heads. :)
• Too hot (Feb/Mar--80-100 degrees)

Rainy Season (April-September)

Pros

• It's beautiful! Easily 20 shades of green vegetation!
• It's refreshing
• Love the sound of a rainstorm on a tin roof
• The sun still comes out every day--it only rains for 20 min to 2 hours usually
• We can collect rainwater
• If you leave a slice of bread out for 1 hour it's still bread and not toast
• Moderate temps--70-80

Cons

• Mud, mud, mud being tracked into the house
• Always have to leave the house with an umbrella--even when the sun is shining
• Dashing to bring the laundry in off the line
• Towels are still damp after 24 hours
• Internet connections occasionally go down during storms
• Sickly vegetables--it's just too wet

Near the end of each season, we eagerly await the change that is coming. A few months later, we are longing for the other season!

Stranger than Fiction

One night at the dinner table, Tobi went off on one of his "What if..." tangents. It went something like this: "What if you're married to someone, and they travel and you just never see them again, are you still married to them?"

At that very moment it suddenly occurred to me that I had two stories for him, one from each side of his family tree.

Back in the late 1940s Bayo's mom had been married with one daughter. Then her husband traveled and simply never came back. After about seven years, the village declared that her husband was dead. They did the mourning ceremony, and shortly thereafter she married Bayo's dad. She gave birth to a daughter with her new husband and later gave birth to Bayo. When Bayo was a newborn, her first husband suddenly reappeared! And he wanted his wife back!

Bayo's mother faced a tough decision. She had had a good life with her first husband. But with her second husband she faced a lot of difficulties, mainly because she was the second wife in a polygamous marriage. She decided to stay in the difficult marriage because of her only son, Bayo. If she left her second husband, she would have to leave her children behind because in African context, the children belong to the man. Bayo's dad already had four sons. It is likely that Bayo would not have been well cared for and probably would have died without his mother's care. So, she stayed. Later she had another daughter and two more sons.

From my side of the family, a relative's sister was married to a man who went out on a submarine mission in the 1960s. The sub did not return as scheduled. After a period of months, he was presumed dead. Sometime later she re-married. Her first husband has never been found.

Years ago I watched the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away which deals with this theme. The Hanks' character ends up on a deserted island after a plane crash. Four years later he makes it back home and discovers that his fiancee is married and has a child.

I think Tobi's question is one that we all stumble across at some point in our lives. These situations would literally be our worst nightmare.

This Is Why I Love Adoption

My friend Jenny Groothius, mother of 13, wrote this piece recently in her yahoogroups posting. (Jennysupdates-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. I am posting it here with her permission. Jenny and her husband have 6 biological children and 7 adopted Liberian children. Their 13 children range in age from 1 to 13-years-old. One of their adopted children just had surgery to replace her esophagus with part of her small intestine due to irreversible damage from accidentally drinking lye in Liberia.

Adoption is dear to our hearts. We have a foster daughter whom we hope to adopt. I have never heard adoption expressed in these terms, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
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"...Just like we don't really care about statistics. This is why I love adoption. Because we really can't care about millions upon millions of suffering humanity. Maybe in a really vague and general sense, but usually we are too tired out by our own lives to take on the trials and tribulations of, say, entire continents. But we care intensely about the people living under our roof, our babies, our families. If I heard that accidental lye ingestion was a big problem in developing nations causing devastating consequences to the health of countless children.... I would probably think, "That's really sad." But when one of those children is my daughter and she is suffering because of it.....well, the intensity of my concern is such that only the love of Christ constrained me from harming someone who I felt was adding to her suffering by not relieving the pain!

Adoption will make people who were once uninformed and perhaps apathetic suddenly care deeply about things like special education, special health needs, mental illness, trauma-related behavior, and the list goes on. Again, the difference is picking up a paper and reading about abuse, orphanages, war, poverty, disease and thinking, "That's really too bad" or deciding to roll up your sleeves and enter the mess with Jesus, finally coming to terms with the fact that life never has been and never will be about our comfort and convenience. Jesus said "least of these" and whether it's a visit to a nursing home, a prison, an orphanage, or a residential treatment center there are plenty of "leasts" to go around.

I love it that God knows us by name and not by number. I love it that we are adopted and we have an Advocate. A Father and a Friend."

Introducing Bayo

Well, Bayo and I have been married for 12 years now, but recently I've been looking up friends from 15-30 years ago on Facebook, and they don't have a clue who my husband is. By the way, his name is pronounced Bio (like the short form of biology).

Bayo and I met in Jos in 1995. I was teaching at Hillcrest School, but I wanted to get more involved in ministry to Nigerians. So I went for Sunday outreach with a group called Urban Frontiers Mission (EST back then). Bayo was leading the ministry team to hotels and brothels that housed prostitutes. Our purpose was to share the love of Christ with them and hope that some of them would choose to leave that lifestyle.

I had never met anyone as bold as Bayo. Wow. He loved God with such passion and he had a heart for the people of the world. I was quite swept away. Somehow he was interested in me as well. We dated for a year and married in Nigeria at the end of 1996.

We are quite opposite--not just in looks--but in personality as well.

• He's a passionate public speaker. While I can hold my own in public, it's not something I would seek to do.
• He has almost no sense of time--especially when referring to events in the past. I've had to piece together his life and now he asks me for dates of events that happened before we met!
• He's a real visionary. In fact, sometimes I have to tell him: "Please, no more new ideas today. I can't keep up with you." I have to say that because he's expecting me to somehow follow up with all the details of his new ideas.
• He's a bit of an inventor. He thinks of things that no one has ever done and then he either does it himself if he knows how or gets someone with expertise to help him carry out his idea. For example, we now have a battery lighting system in our house that is run off a huge deep cycle battery and lights up bicycle headlights in nearly every room. The headlights had to be re-wired to work on the system. I have to stop there because that's as much as I understand. Many missionaries have a battery system here, but I'll bet they don't have bicycle lights in their house!

Regarding being black and white: are we really? I thought we were just different shades of tan. :) Actually we usually forget how different we look until someone asks us about it.

Bayo is an incredible man, and I'm blessed to be his wife.

The Phantom Tollbooth

As we were coming back from Abuja (capital of Nigeria) yesterday, I finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster to my family. It is a thoroughly delightful read-aloud.

Milo is a bored child who doesn't enjoy anything in life. One day a mysterious phantom tollbooth appears in his bedroom, and he takes off on the most imaginative journey I have ever heard of. The whole book is loaded with incredible plays on words and new ways of looking at language. Milo tries to solve a feud between King Azaz of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis. Along the journey he meets about 20 other memorable characters.

Five-year-old David loved the book as well as dad. Of course David didn't understand everything, but many times he chortled with laughter as only a five-year-old can. Here's David's favorite line from an interesting character named Canby: " I'm as smart as can be," he remarked in twelve different languages, "and I'm as stupid as can be," he admitted, putting both feet in one shoe."

Eight-year-old Tobi understood most of the plays on words, but some were so subtle that I had to explain them to him. His favorite character was Officer Shrift who was two feet tall and almost twice as wide. He laughed hilariously at the description of Officer Shrift riding a long, low dachshund.

Here's my favorite passage from yesterday:

"But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.

"Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing..."

The book comes to a satisfying conclusion. When Milo is back home, he discovers that he has only been gone for an hour, even though it seemed like days or even weeks. The next day, he can't wait to take another trip via the phantom tollbooth, but it has disappeared from his room. Only a note that says: "For Milo, who now knows the way" is there in its place. After his initial disappointment, Milo realizes that he now has so many thoughts and ideas of his own that he doesn't need the tollbooth after all.

Fantasy is my least favorite genre of literature, but this book is a real winner.

Fresh Eggs

A couple of months ago, the kids started selling crates of eggs to our compound neighbors. We have a colleague who supplies us with the eggs about once a week for 550 naira/crate of 30 eggs. The kids go around to the neighbors and sell them for 600 naira/crate. So they make a profit of N50 or $0.33 per crate. Of the three kids, 3-year-old Lily is the most eager to sell.

The other day a neighbor came by to see if we had eggs, and I said, "Well, we don't have any fresh eggs, but we still have some from about 6 days ago if you want those." The neighbor said, "I'll wait for the fresh eggs."

After the neighbor left, Bayo said, "What do you mean 'fresh' eggs? I've never heard of that in my life. Eggs are eggs."

The next time a neighbor came around asking about eggs, I avoided using the words 'fresh eggs' and just said, "I still have some from last week if you want those." I didn't want to give Bayo another chance to crack up.

Awhile back when we stayed in a guest house, Tobi opened the fridge and saw a container for holding eggs in the fridge. With amazement he said, "Why on earth would anybody put eggs in the fridge?!"

I guess that's one area where we are completely Nigerian. I usually have about 2 crates of eggs at a time, and I always keep them on top of the fridge. I have never refrigerated eggs in my nearly 14 years of being here. Do they spoil? Rarely. We don't clean the eggs (remove the chicken droppings) until just before we use them. I've heard that they will spoil if they are cleaned and then left out at room temperature for days.

I don't have any idea what a dozen eggs costs in the U.S. right now. Let me do a little calculating and see what a dozen eggs costs in Nigeria...$1.60.

Boys & Facial Scars

Two weeks ago David jumped off the back of a livingroom chair and collided with a concrete window sill. He received a nice gash next to his eye for his efforts. I had to run around looking for a butterfly bandage. There was a little too much blood for Tobi to handle. (I don't think he's going to be a doctor!) Now two weeks later the wound has healed so nicely that he will hardly have anything to show for it. My mom would say that's because I applied Melaleuca oil to the wound! She's probably right.

What is it with boys and facial wounds?

Six months ago David had another gash on the back of his head when he ducked down behind a couch too quickly and the concrete window sill got him. It was 7:30 at night, which is dark here. I was not ready to go out for stitches. So we shaved off a patch of hair and butterflied him together. That scar is still visible. Maybe I should be putting Melaleuca oil on that one too.

Emily, a missionary kid from the Czech Republic, was staying with us at the time. She had been telling me stories about her brothers and all their facial scars. One brother had an eyebrow that wasn't stitched together very well. After that her parents learned the trick of supergluing wounds together. I've got to get some superglue on hand!

When Tobi was about 4, he was playing with a slingshot (everyone has one here) and he accidentally let go of the wrong end. To this day he has a discolored patch of skin under one of his eyes.

Now on to their father...when Bayo was a young boy, he was playing in the midst of a dry bamboo field. Suddenly a stalk of bamboo broke off and jabbed him right through his cheekbone, narrowly missing his eye. He has a substantial scar to prove it.

Six months after we married, Bayo was in a pretty bad single car accident. He has scars across his eyelids, between his eyes, and on his forehead. If you didn't know about the accident, you would just think the scars are part of age wrinkles.

I just thank God that in the midst of all these incidents their eyes have been spared.