One thing Americans do better…

There are acceptable substitutes for just about everything but lawn mowers.
Granted, my grass was very long, but it took me three hours to mow my lawn with the borrowed plastic electric mower in the picture. The blade has a small swing, the bag is small, and it is underpowered. It is a vile color.
When the container came, I blessed the lawn gurus in my native land. Made of metal, the beauty that we shipped has a 4 horsepower gas engine with a big swing, a big bag, and it's painted red. I haven't offered to mow the neighbor's lawns yet, but I'm tempted. It decadent, egotistical, and a great joy to be pushing that much muscle all over the yard.

Keys Again

Lately I'm finding that the absorbing problems of life are not the big things, but the small irritations of trying to learn to live gracefully in another culture.
Chief among these frustrations is the sheer number of things I have to carry in my pockets. I have five remote controls for various doors and gates, three keychains, an electronic ignition key, a wallet, a flash drive, an iPod, and a cell phone. I am always juggling all this jingly stuff (I need this keychain and the black remote to start the car and I need this remote and the silver set of keys to get into the office.)
I am considering getting a man-purse. I have rejected out of hand the idea of a carabiner on the belt buckle with iPod and phone holsters. I am a self-respecting geek. But a man-purse is still a stretch. They have those cute little wrist loops, I could find myself at the mall, say, swinging the wee bag along like Little Red Riding Hood.
Maybe a satchel of some sort- then I could pass for a Canadian, or maybe a hip Swede. Of course, then I would need a moleskine which I know I wouldn't use. I barely even use a blog.

I expected...

Okay, so we're in Africa and there's tons of stuff I didn't expect. I didn't expect Ubuntu Linux to be such a great friend. I didn't expect bananas on pizza (it's not as good as it sounds.) I didn't expect to have to do Information Technology as much as I do. I have to authenticate myself a lot. I counted twelve times that I have to use a key, a security remote, or a password between the time I get up and the time my computer boots at work in the morning. I didn't expect that.

I also didn't expect to love the smell of the red dirt, the goosy sound of the hadida ibis birds at 5:30 in the morning, fresh flaky bread at the Super Spar bakery and butterier butter. I didn't expect to shop in a mall that could house Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto twice over. I expected more iPods, fewer cell phones, cheaper cream cheese, more expensive steak. I didn't expect to get hooked on rugby so fast. And some people tell me cricket is even better. We'll see.

September 10 is our departure date

and I'm not counting down. I have to go to my calendar and count days to see that it’s... 24 days away. I should be counting down. I’m excited, I'm tired of living in other people’s houses, I haven’t had a workstation in six weeks and I haven’t had a computer of my own in a week and a half. I should be counting down.

I feel guilty that I don’t know the countdown at any given moment, as though that means that I am not sure we should be taking off.

Well, I am excited, and I won’t count down.

I remembered one of my most embarrassing moments this morning. I was running a television camera at a large church on Mother’s day. I skipped breakfast and halfway through the service I passed out on the lap of some poor lady.
What’s strange is that I remember when I woke up there was a circle of faces over me and someone was wondering if they should loosen my tie because it was tied so beautifully. I have never thought about how unlikely that comment was until this morning, and now I wonder if someone actually said it, or if I’ve fabricated that part of the story and stored it as an actual memory.
It was a very good knot, though.

Carrying my homelessness on my back

I'm what they call a third culture kid- and as a category, we tend to make home out of wherever we are. I am also finding that I carry a sort of homelessness around too. I don't seep into the earth that I inhabit. I am shallow-rooted.
It is a good thing when it is time to move (now is one of those times), but I long for a place and time when I love where I live and I won't have to worry about needing to move away or having the place change and become something other than what I love.
Home and Homelessness share the same uneasy space in me. This tension, I think, is universal to one degree or another, but I think that we who follow Christ have a hope of resolution in time, or at least beyond it.

Keys

In Orwell's 1984, the government was trying to simplify the English language with the ultimate goal of reducing it to a single word. I don't know about language, but I want to do that with keys. I want one key that will get me into anything I need to get into.
Since my family is moving around right now, I have a fluctuating keyring. A borrowed house key finds its way onto my keychain for a couple of weeks or months, then is returned to its owner. Occasionally I borrow a car and pick up an extra key for a while. I feel my keyring in my pocket when I walk now. It isn't a stable shape any more and it tends to poke and bulge.
Yesterday I handed over a work key I'm not going to need any more. One by one the keys to the cars, the office, my parents' house will get sold or returned and when I get on the plane to Africa I will have an empty keyring with just a flash drive on it.
I don't know how to feel about that. I should feel light and free, but today I just feel like the doors of my life for the last 15 years will be closing and locking behind me and I won't have the keys to open them again. I will have no keys, no means of opening locked doors.