so much to tell...

It feels good. Two weeks under my belt. There’s so much to tell...

• how much my dukul feels like home from the moment I stepped foot inside
• how the heat has not been quite as oppressive as I anticipated just yet (although I’m sure there is a cumulative effect to it’s toll)
• how strange it is to not have “muzungu muzungu!” called after me every time I’m out and about (even though “kawacha” or “omoje” are there, they’re mostly not as common)
• how much I dislike linia at first- the staple food here (a mound of a playdoh like starch) and how daunted I am by the thought of having to eat it gracefully whenever visiting friends and being graciously fed...45 minutes later I managed to finish the entire plate - quite a feat, let me tell you - Africans know how to pile a plate. Each time since it has gotten progressively easier, but let me tell you the key: communal eating. There’s no plate full over the brim that you yourself and you have to finish in order to be polite - you have a communal tray that everybody works on so there’s teamwork in the process. I knew I was a fan of team ministry :)
• how encouraging it was to sit next door around Bishop’s fire under the stars on saturday night a week ago with the new deacons and priests and their wives and visitors in town for the ordination service at the Cathedral on Sunday morning...the introductions were lengthy but fascinating with the usual likening of the situation to various pictorial images from entirely unrelated facets of life in metaphors that work beautifully, the food was fabulous (although I just come from my gut filling linia experience - so every bite was effortful), and the strangest moment of the night was after all of the symbolic sharing under the stars when Bishop announced that the movie playing on the little tv screen during dinner was about the Taliban and their oppression of women under Sharia law...hm...ok. random.
• how OUTSIDE of my comfort zone I spend most of my days. I wish I had a head-cam so that you could walk with me through my day. Pursuing absolute strangers - totally completely entirely OUTSIDE my comfort zone.
• how God is teaching me in that feeling so totally completely and entirely helpless, that it’s really up to Him. This is His gig. I’m just along for the ride :)
• how many flashcards I’ve made already in both Moru and Juba Arabic
• how I prayed that God would make it clear to me in the first few weeks which language to pursue and how I’m wondering if I may have found an open door...wondering if it’s really an open door or just an easy door...wondering if that’s ok or if He’s calling me to find the heavy door that’s harder and takes longer to push open. In fact, a week or so before I left St. Louis, my dear cousin told me (in reference to this subject exactly) “don’t just pick the harder one because it’s harder. us Lutjens’, we do that, you know?” We most certainly do, and I had no idea this was an extended family trait... “the more obscure, the more difficult, the more underdog, the more we are drawn to it” she elaborated...oh so true. she so hit the nail on the head and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Good call, cuz
• how interesting it is to me that when you ask a S. Sudanese person how far a new place is away from your current location, they answer in an estimated *distance* (in km of course) when all I really care about is an estimation of how much TIME it will take to reach there. Oh how differently we see the world.
• how interesting it is that the Juba Arabic that I’ve been working on this week has random similarities to the Hebrew I studied 12 years ago, now...maybe a little gift from God?...part of that open door, perchance?
• how much fun we had in the mud on Sunday celebrating Caleb (the 6 mo. intern hopefully extending now to 10 months?) in honor of his birthday on tuesday...a man made mud pit of course, but mud nonetheless. relay races, chicken wrestling, piles of people in the mud, however we could get as muddy as possible and laugh a lot in the process - this was the goal :)
• how fascinating and heartbreaking the conversation we had with Larissa’s homestay family about epileptics and the community’s understanding of how best to handle them in community and family life and the totally unnecessary but totally culturally normative exclusion this leads to..tears literally running down my face as we talked...trying to play it off like they were watering from the smoke from the fire...wait, there was no fire...hm, well...maybe they didn’t notice?...
• how wonderful it is to manage to get a few phrases of one of these two totally different languages out in a way that is understood and appreciated by the native speaker listening and how much joy, my little bit of progress seems to bring them...
• how deflating it is to have people not make eye contact and seem totally disengaged or disappointed or disapproving of me or how little I know as I pursue conversation with them
• how warm the water is coming out of the tap/shower due to the high temperatures day to day...yesterday I went to rinse off my flip flops and I could barely touch the water with my hands as it flowed from the tap...crazy. But it means less breath-taking showers at night (although it might be better if it were a little colder...who woulda thunk I'd ever say that...)
• how refreshingly possible it is to sleep at night after a “room temp” shower...to nice to be clean.
• how remarkably dirty my body is for most of every day...even when I get up in the morning the grit around/under my finger/toe nails, heels, etc that I managed to miss during my shower the night before...unbelievable.
• how much I love mangoes...demonstrated in my perseverance in cutting them despite the nasty poison ivy like rashes I get on my hands and face as a result...
• how tired I am of acne - in combination with my mango rash, I look like a freak show.
• how much I need alone time, with lights low, maybe some music and maybe some writing...crucial to my survival and general sanity

the list could go on, but I'll stop there.

until next time....