Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

A friend recently recommended this book on Facebook, and so I thought I'd give it a try after all.  I'd read reviews of it before on Amazon and hadn't been convinced it was worth buying, and repeatedly passed it over.  Having recently discovered that it is possible to get library books on my Kindle, I decided to go the library route for this one so I wouldn't have to pay for it in case my initial inclinations proved to be right, despite my friend's recommendation.

"Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" turned out to be one of the best books I've read in quite some time!  I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.  I read for the sake of entertainment and relaxation during the few scraps of free time I've got these days, and I generally prefer happy books because who wants to be miserable during their much-anticipated down time in the evenings?  I wasn't sure if this one would prove to fit that description or not, but as the title says, bitter and sweet can intersect.  It was a nice blend of the two - enough bitter to keep it interesting and realistic, and enough sweet to make it a pleasant read.  This book is set in Seattle during WWII and is about a Chinese-American boy and his relationships with his son, his parents, the sax player on the corner, a Japanese girl, and the white kids at his school.  It's a coming-of-age book with great character development and a wonderful array of likable characters.

Try it, you'll like it!

Yard Guard

Mongoose, of the small, brown variety

Ibis, of the large, dark, shiny-sided variety

On Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on our back porch feeding Zarya when an ibis (sorry, don't know the technical name for what kind of ibis it was, but one like the one in the picture above) swooped into our yard. For a little bit of background info, let me point out that we quite dislike ibis.  There is a nest of ibis (ibises?) in a big tree in our yard, much to our chagrin.  They are INCREDIBLY LOUD, particularly early in the morning.  You thought roosters were bad?  Try having an ibis nearby!  We try to yell at them and chase them out of the yard when possible, but being as I was feeding Zarya, I was stuck just watching the thing prance around the yard.

Moments later, I heard a rustling in the lilies and watched as our little friend Ricky, a small, shy, brown mongoose (we have mid-sized striped mongooses, giant gray mongooses, and little brown mongooses around) who comes to get a drink our of our tire swing most every day, popped out from among the lily plants.  We don't have any pictures of Ricky, but it's not for lack of trying.  He's so shy and sensitive to movements and noise that he takes off whenever we tiptoe around with a camera.  But back to Saturday afternoon now.

Recap: Big old ibis lands in the yard.  Little Ricky comes bursting out of the lilies.
Next: Ricky races straight at the ibis, throwing his shy self behind in a valiant display of courage.  When Ricky nears him, the ibis becomes a bit flustered and takes a short flight-hop to the other side of the yard.  Ricky pauses momentarily at the place the ibis had been standing, then wheels around and once again charges toward the ibis.  The irritated ibis takes off, flying up into a tree.  Ricky scuttles over to his favorite spot, our tire swing, where he gets a drink of water from the rainwater that pools in it, then stands on top of it for a little bit to survey the yard.  After being assured that everything is once again okay, he goes back to the lily plant, where he picks up his girlfriend, who has been hiding there, watching her man perform.  The two scurry off as a pair, leaving our yard ibis-free for the afternoon.

Tipping the choir

We went to church yesterday at a place we've visited a couple times before (you might remember a blog post from Easter 2012 about the Kibubwa Mennonite church) and really enjoyed the choir there.  The church is located near an all-boys high school and a good-sized group of twenty-five or so young men attend the church on Sunday and have formed a choir.  The school has only the top two grades of high school so the students are older, and those guys can really sing!  One of them plays a drum and they all sing and dance with great harmonies and rhythm.  Side note: I couldn't help but notice that the 13- and 14-year-old girls in the church seemed pretty into watching the boys' choir, too - their local boy band.

During one of the songs that had a little more avid dancing and an upbeat tempo, several women in the church started doing the Tanzanian equivalent of hooting and hollering, ululating.  Also, a couple of them danced up to the front where the choir was performing and tucked money into the shirt pocket of one of the guys while he was dancing away.  I've seen this before - when the church audience really likes a choir song, some of them will put some small bills of money into the pockets of the front and center choir member right in the middle of a song.  I guess it is like a tip for the choir!

Weaving through the choir (yes, while they are singing and dancing - everyone just adjusts a little bit so nobody gets trampled) while waving handkerchiefs is also a popular way of showing passion for the group's performance.  Once I even saw a woman dancing through a choir while holding an umbrella high above her head and snapping it open and closed!  Everyone loved it - she was as much of a hit as the choir at that point.

Coming from a church which has no choir, just a worship team whose job is to be as unnoticed as possible while leading congregational singing, it's a little shocking to me.  Sometimes I wonder how worshipful it is when everyone is watching a choir dancing and singing.  For many choirs, though, and certainly the boys' choir yesterday, the words of their music are often prayers or Bible verses.  I imagine that when those words are set to catchy tunes and given during memorable performances (not to mention what seems like endless repetition of verses), those words really stick in listeners' minds for days.  And really, how can I be critical if people are going about their daily lives with that in their heads!

Zarya Jill, 3.5 months old

Above are the latest Zarya pictures for those who like keeping up with each new expression.  She's full of personality and is so much fun.  The second picture was taken one evening when she'd had a later-than-usual nap and wasn't tired at bedtime so we let her stay up an extra 15 minutes.  She seemed to know it was a special late-night treat (7:30pm...) and went wild playing with her favorite toy (her stuffed frog) and posing for pictures.

God of the small things... and big things!

The last day of my maternity leave was Friday, February 1.  At that time, Zarya was taking three irregularly-timed naps a day - I never knew when she'd get tired or for how long she'd sleep, but she slept enough during the day that I had some time when I could focus. I found I work for about four or five hours a day from home.

However, being a translation adviser means that I need to meet with translators to advise them.  While I can do the time-consuming part of my job from home (reading through the drafted chapters and making notes on them), I still need some face-to-face time with the Tanzanian translators.  How to do that with a three-month-old baby who refuses to take a bottle and naps unpredictably, often for only 30-40 minutes at a stretch, was a big stress in my life.  For lack of being able to figure out how to leave Zarya and go to the office, I didn't go there at all my first week back at work.  I knew I needed to be there some, starting the following week, though.

Looking back on how things worked out, I figure that God must really want the Ikizu people to have His Word in their language, because He worked out what seems like a miracle!  It began with one of the missionary moms here offering to watch Zarya for me when needed.  I couldn't believe that someone who has only been in Tanzania for a few months (meaning she should still be at the overwhelmed by daily life stage) and has six of her own children was willing to take on another!  And then I found out that she lives less than two minutes away from the office, which is pretty astounding (we live 15 minutes away, ourselves).  In hopes that Zarya might feel like napping in the afternoon that day, I planned to leave here there at 2:00 and go over there to feed her if necessary and just leave the office whenever I had to leave.  I dove into work (I've never been so excited to be at the office!) and tried to get as much done as quickly as possible, knowing that any minute my phone might ring, telling me I had to leave.  Well, leaving time arrived without me receiving a phone call, so I left to pick up Zarya.  I found out she'd slept for two hours straight!  I was shocked!

The next day, Wednesday, I was working from home and tried to get her to follow the same nap schedule as the day before.  It worked!  Once again, she slept the afternoon away.  On Thursday I took her to the same family's house for the afternoon, and this time she took a good nap and then woke up happy and not hungry and played with them for an hour before I got there.  Amazing!

So while a baby taking a long nap is nothing really astounding, the timing of it is what floors me.  That Zarya abruptly was able to go from short, unpredictable naps to long ones at the same time every day on the very day when I started working in the office - if that's not God orchestrating things, I don't know what is.  Her napping well is a small thing, and me being in the office is a small thing, but the Ikizu people having the Bible in Ikizu, well, that is a big thing!  And me having four hours a week with the Ikizu translators working hard to finish the translation of Genesis is pretty important if we're going to achieve that big thing.  God is very good!

Smiley, wiggly girl

The picture is blurry because she rarely pauses  - those arms and legs are always going!

Happy Saturday!

We've got one happy, wriggly, wiggly three-month-old little girl.  She's very chatty and downright noisy sometimes when she's "talking" to her toys or us.  I'm curious what she's thinking about and what she's trying to say.  We get lots of big smiles but no laughs yet.  She's right on the verge of laughing, we think, but no sound comes out yet when she looks like she's trying to laugh.  As of yesterday, she has started batting at her toys and intentionally grabbed one for the first time.  I guess the stage of having to watch what is within her reach has begun!

Zarya seems to really like her new home in Tanzania and is a fun, healthy baby.  We love her so much!

Old and fat

After spending six months in North America, which is obsessed with being young and thin, it's kind of refreshing to be back in Tanzania.  It's easy to feel good about yourself here.  Tanzanians respect elders and think having a bit of a bulging belly and bum is a healthy look.  If you're old and/or fat, Tanzania is a great place to live to boost your self-esteem after American culture wears it down.

On Andrew's first day back in the office, he was enthusiastically greeted by the office cleaning lady with the words, "You've gotten fat!  You look wonderful!"  In her mind, he looked like he'd had a great time visiting friends and family in the States and that the aforementioned friends and family had treated him well.  Which is true, but Americans wouldn't ever say it.  In fact, they might think a bit critically about lack of self-control, or wonder if he's going to manage to lose the weight again.  Tanzanians would be appalled if we went to go see our families and came back skinny, like our own parents were too stingy to feed us decently.

One day I was on a walk with two other white friends.  A man happened to be walking along the road at the same time and struck up a conversation.  He said, "You there, the tall one, where do you come from?"  Being as I'm significantly more heighty than the other two, I knew he meant me, so I answered him.  Then he asked, "And you, the fat one, how about you?"  We all knew which one of the three of us he meant, and the larger one among us took it with good grace and answered him.  Finally he said, "And you, the third one?"  We were curious why he didn't describe her, so asked him why not.  He was a little embarrassed and said, "Well, I didn't want to call her, 'The short one,' because that would be kind of rude."  We all found this interesting, and the one he'd called the fat one thought it was particularly hilarious to discover he was trying to be sensitive.

It's nice to be in a place where people don't particularly care what you look like.  If you're fat, skinny, tall, short, dark, light, it doesn't matter much.  Tanzanians prefer women with lighter brown skin and large bums (proof: when we go running, my "fat friend"'s behind gets a lot of attention from males, much to her annoyance and my amusement), but they don't hold it against those who are dark or have bony bums.  It's just how you are and they'll love you anyway.  They have the mindset that God made you like that and why should anyone get worked up about something they can't really change.  It's something I appreciate.