Big Mama, little Grace, old shoe, new shoes

The entrance to the clothing market down in Area 2, "across the bridge."


A picture to show a bit of the shoe market.


A picture to show the cleaning touch-up I requested for Scout's almost-steampunk new(ish) mary janes.


Big Mama (occasionally little mama) and little Grace are frequent personalities at our breakfast and lunch tables. Scout sits in my chair beside Finn, uses a big spoon and tall glass cup, decides who says the blessing on the food, speaks in a kind ordering sort of way, serves up the food, puts small pieces of food on Finn's tray.

Grace began as a little blond friend at Kindermusic, but her personality has grown enormously when a little role-reversal is required. She shows up whenever Scout needs to be authorized to be in charge, and it's not a bad trick. (Bailey, Bodean, and Francisca who also began as Kindermusic friends are triplets, sometimes in utero, sometimes as needy tiny babies, sometimes they're learning how to walk, sometimes they're astonishingly matched in accomplishments to Finn.)

Anyway, when the mama-switching began, it was revealing how Scout described her mama self. "No, I'm a big mama. I use a big spoon." or "See? I have big feet!"

In fact, her feet have grown. Outgrown, in fact, all the cute shoes Auntie Brooke has provided us with for the past three years. A friend from Germany was going to pick up some leather shoes for her own kids while she was there for a few days and was ready to choose some for Scout too--traced foot in luggage!--but her 30 Euro price guess nearly (politely) choked me. I decided to give the big secondhand clothing market a try.

I'd only been once or twice--honestly, it's a big deal to get there, and sticking out like a money tree and being offered terrible deals isn't great fun. But I went with a Malawian friend, who lead me down an avenue of detailed used shoes to old shoe heaven. The place where all good shoes (and some really beat up ones) go when you think they've died. Probably two acres of stalls, with shoes of every size, shape, colour. (Not a lot of snow boots, but some!) The best shoes are cleaned, polished, buffed, stuffed hard with plastic bags, and displayed. See those in the picture? Those are all used shoes. Those are literally the shoes we get rid of, because all these are from bales sent out from the rich west.

The shoe market is built up a hill, and in the top-most corner are three guys and a bucket of water and rags and brushes. Each shoe seller has their own cans of black shoe polish (everything close to black gets it). Those not deemed good enough for refurbishment get left in piles you may pick through. There's general calling and excitement when a new bale gets opened--kind of like when they bring out the new rack of unsorted stuff at the DI.

All it takes is to say what size and kind you're looking for, and enterprising young men scamper off to scour the place for you. After two trips and four pairs of shoes, Scout--I mean Big Mama--is now reshod. In little blue leather Puma sneakers, sparkly black leather Mary Janes for fancy, and a pair of flashing LED StrideRite sneakers to grown into. Hot dog! That's what I call a haul!





ps: bonus picture. Just had to show how artfully everything is displayed to sell. Toothbrushes and toothpaste and washclothes for crying out loud! I'm impressed.

Three is a magic number

We prepped for the big day for several weeks.


When I admitted to myself I wouldn't finish making Baby KhaKah a new wardrobe by hand in time, I borrowed a sewing machine from a friend and hired a tailor for the day, who freehanded two dresses, two pants, a skirt, and a matching apron and hat that look suspiciously like an antique uniform. Scout was enraptured.



For little school we made a pinata, one layer every day.


Finally, we picked candy and stuffed it like a turkey.


But oh, disappointment! The morning of the party, Scout crawled into our bed with a fever, then slept the entire day.


Precious, who had been as excited by the preparations and the promise of the candy you get to collect, as I think a seven-year-old can be, had to settle for playing in a bucket of water with the little boys while Scout slept on.


But it did happen the next day, and a couple friends could even make it despite the changes.









Dear Scout, your birthday will also always be my birth day, and I love April 21st for both inseparable reasons. Most of all I love you, my girl, inseparably, beyond reason. ox, Joh

A Trip to the Village

Some of our friends came to visit us from the States, and we took them to visit Matilda's village.

Finn was his usual cool king of the village.

Scout led the other kids in a round of "Do as I'm Doing."

Shutter Fly Scout

The ever lovely Scout has added photog to her list of precocious skills. A sampling below with captions by her parents.

Finn strapped in tight.


Mama in her Sunday best


"Sneakers" A Self Portrait


Finn with 4 days of fever and a big ball of wax.

Little School

This year I’m resolved to making home patterns and schedules. In the afternoons (right after an attempt at Quiet Rest Time—any tips on making this quiet and/or restful appreciated) Scout and I are doing Little School.

It’s a current-generation rip on what my mum did with my older siblings; fun learning stuff at home with toddlers.

It’s taken a bit of ingenuity, as it’s difficult or impossible and expensive to find common art and crafting materials here, but that’s good too. Don’t you always find you come up with some of the best stuff when you have the most limitations? You’re forced to think more creatively.

We started by making books to add to the stash we brought with (and the delightful refill Amy brought at Christmas—thank you!), modeling them on our favourites. (So fun to be making books again!) Since Scout is in love with letters, we started with an alphabet book. She folded and helped cut the papers (scrap, so we wrote around the printing; she didn’t seem to mind) and helped cut a Rice Crispies box into a cover. She helped measure out and cut the string, though I did the two stiches it requires to sew the book together. That was boring for her.

But then we wrote a letter on every page and it was fun again. Next we came up with a word to draw that started with the letter.

Finally, a few weeks later, we went through and hid Waldo on every page.

Inspired by this mention of a book about children’s book illustrators, we also made our own Brown Bear Brown Bear, except it was Black Puppy Black Puppy. And even though it has yet to be bound (this one originated as a sit-still help while eating out—Ethiopian food), she has loved reading it as a bedtime book, maybe more than the original.




Little School starts with a song. It’s all I could think of and not terribly inspired: “Here we are together together together, oh here we are together in our Little School. There’s Scout and mama and mama and Scout”…you get it. But just like our scrap paper and cereal box books, it doesn’t seem to matter much the quality of the material, but that we’re doing something novel and together.

Smudge, Fleck, Dimple

Mum,

Finn turned half a year old today. His eyes resolved into their resting colour a couple months ago. Fast, it seemed. Nondescript dark to a dark blue, kind of like mine. But also kind of like yours and kind of like Dad's because his left eye has a single brown fleck, on the inside towards the bridge of his stubby nose. Sometimes I forget to call him Finn and instead carry Fleck around all day. Do you remember telling me that time about how, to your in-love adolescent mind, it was "a sign" that you and Dad both had the same middle name, and both had a brown fleck in your blue eyes?




I've loved that little fleck because it's a little something permanent in this boy who will be nothing but change for years. And also a sign, a signal to me that I'm just as in love with this kid as I have been with that other one. A sign that even though I've engraved it in permanent ways much less than I did with Scout, the details of Finn's babyhood are important to me. For some reason I need to tell him and me (and you!) I notice them, notice them and love them.



He has started crawling. He has two teeth. He's an expert at juicy mouth noises. He's dimpled on every surface you'd expect a little baby pucker and some you wouldn't. A few patches of his baby hair never fell out, so there are these long whisps that curl out like loose downy feathers. Sometimes I can get freaked out by the way these kids act like hourglasses to my life. I push for them to get to some milestone, and then mope at the end of an era. Case in point: For the first time ever, Scout slept through the night by herself last night. (Can I hear a whoop whoop?) But both Andy and I have already expressed regret that we won't be cuddling her to sleep anymore. (Obviously not enough regret to not teach her to sleep through the night.)



I know he won't remember anything distinct about this time of life, but I wonder in what ways the smell of wet pavement, damp earth, sweat and soured butter; the night music of frogs and crickets and howling dogs; the soft sweetness of fresh ripe banana and mango; the sight of warm, smiling African faces pushed into his; I wonder how these will affect him. At what point, when he's eleven, or nineteen, or thirty-two, will a sight or smell or taste trigger the faded outline of a shadow's shadow of a memory that he can't even remember from these months here in Malawi. He'll be sitting on a bus somewhere and hear a voice that he remembers but can't place. He'll wonder if it's a case of deja vue or the memory of a dream.

And me? What will I remember? That's one reason why I have to write, and why I have to be as honest as I can. I end up believing the words I've written. I end up forgetting everything but the words I've written.

If Finn is ever going to be anything but the person he is at that moment, I have to record it in detail right now. Even then it's no guarantee. I barely remember anything about Scout from this last Spring, as impossible as it seems.

Thanks for calling on Thanksgiving. Sorry I couldn't talk. Tell Dad I hope his green chicken turned out as fabulous as his green turkey last year.

Love Joh

This is like summer camp

-Wood smoke hangs in the damp night air.
-Showers are a luxury even if you never feel completely clean.
-Clothes dried in the sun are either crusty dry or slightly mildewed.
-Bedtime is often by candlelight.
-Exhaustion hits in the midday heat.
-Every moment feels like the makings of a memory.
-And there's horseback riding.

She's something else

Scout may be the most independent two year old in Lilongwe.

Yesterday at the pool, she walked across the deck to the bar and must have asked for a soda pop. By the time I caught up to her, the bartender had leaned across his bar and handed her a Fanta. The waitress then popped off the top, and Scout was off again.

Just slightly more dangerous: We have a fifty foot metal tower in our yard that allows us to connect to the world wide web. It's big and green and dangerous. Today, I found Scout about 10 feet up it without a care in the world.

Welcome to Malawi

Hello, I'm your tour guide, Scout. Welcome to Malawi.


My family moved here in August. We brought my baby brother Finn. My mama calls him a stick of butter.


I hope this blog lets our family and friends back home know that I'm having lots of fun in my new house . . . when I'm not in my new time out chair.

Home is where the Hilux is

Truly, Lilongwe took a step closer to becoming our home when we finally found a car to buy. Bravo to Andy who also learned to drive stick, driving on the left, in Africa traffic!



We live in a large compound surrounded by brick walls and razor wire. The yard is green (because we water like crazy) and filled with fruit trees--mango, papaya, avocado, lemon, orange.



Scout has turned some developmental corner and is now a kid who likes to play with other kids. She spends every moment he's willing with Precious, who lives on our compound too.



We sleep under bed nets so we don't get malaria while we sleep.


Michael, one of our guards, told me tonight that one of the best things about going to church is speaking in tongues. Here he is at our gate.



We live in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Lilongwe, just down the street from the vice president's compound. When the rains start in a few weeks, there will be leaves on these trees.

Our dining room



and the compound within our compound, where Precious lives with his parents, Mohammad and Matilda (known as Potato for pronounciation reasons in our houshold). Mohammad is our housekeeper, and Potato watches Scout a couple hours a week.


Because they cook on an open fire (and for lots of other reasons I'll tell you about at length in future posts) we've made the rule that Scout can't just go and hang out at Precious' house. But if we can't find her, that's where we first look.

Leaving, Going, Landing, Adjusting

It's true that the pace of life is slower here (un-automated everything will do that to you). But time doesn’t seem to pass any slower in Malawi, much to our surprise. Hard to believe it's been close to two months since we moved to Lilongwe, Malawi, and almost three since we left Idaho (our home there has ripened in our memory to near-perfect). So to catch you up, here’s where we’ve been and where we’ve landed as we moved through western America's summer to south east Africa's winter.

We left here,


passed through here,



and here,



reunited with Andy here,



then did a lot of this (and this),



and finally landed here.