Ain’t that the truth

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It’s official. I’m pregnant.

No, “we” are not pregnant. Bless my husband’s heart, he’s wonderful and supportive and putting up with my oddball cravings (thank goodness for a MEDEVAC to London where I was able to eat all of the strawberries and cheese and peppermint tea I wanted).

But he’s not 13 weeks in and already showing (and already up a cup size! ARGH!). He doesn’t have pregnancy acne (yeah, all of you women whose skin clears up? I HATE YOU RIGHT NOW). And he certainly isn’t getting up to pee eight gazillion times a night (it’s hormones, not the baby pressing on my bladder … yet).

And Jasmine’s going to be a big sister, which is going to be awesome and funny and horrifying all at the same time. I hope she treats the baby with more respect than the cat, although watching Baby J Toddler J chase a crawling baby around the house is going to be be riotous.

Anyway.

We are terribly excited. As wonderful as it was to raise Jasmine in Freetown, I think it’ll be that much easier to raise the new rugrat in DC. We’ll move back to the States for training when Jasmine’s just over 2. The newborn will be 3-4 months old, depending on the exact time of my departure from Freetown.

Changes are a-foot. And it is awesome.

On being disconnected.

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Oh, Internet. We canceled our Internet subscription, but haven’t yet been cut off. Bertrand and I could live with the piss-poor quality as long as the Internet provider actually picked up the phone when we called to complain. When they started ignoring our calls, we decided to pull the plug.

We can both think of a lot of things we can do with $240/ month that don’t involve throwing money down a whole for a service we really don’t use. We can access Facebook and Amazon on our iDevices, and the bandwidth was too restricted to access YouTube anyway.

I’m back to operating like I did in Benin … writing long emails out ahead of time, then sending them when I have a brief connection to the Internet. I blog in gedit (Ubuntu’s notepad.exe), then copy-paste when I can get online. And I don’t upload pictures anymore at all. It makes me sad, but as I get older, I’m discovering that my desire to put Every Little Thing online is lessening.

It’s strange to think that once our ISP finally gets around to cutting us off, I’ll actually have the same Internet access I had in Benin as a PCV. It’s even stranger to think that I’m kind of looking forward to being disconnected for a while.

Plus ca change …

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack (I hope)!

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I haven’t been writing because life has been completely overwhelming lately. Well, not just life. Life in the Foreign Service, which ties so closely to work as to make it impossible to write about life without also writing about work. I didn’t realize until I logged in today that I hadn’t actually published a post since November. Whoops.

There’s a great deal of discussion in the FS blogging community about “free speech” and what can and can’t be posted, and what officers say to their EFMs who write blog psots that may poke at sensitive spots in the FS community. There’s a bit less discussion about officers themselves who write. Self-censorship has made writing about what I do here in Freetown harder than I expected.

In any case, I miss writing. For a short while, scrapbooking largely filled my relentless need to record and describe what was going on around me. I’ve found that while I value that creative endeavor for and of itself, it’s no substitute for blogging. I’ve managed to get my work schedule back under control, and I no longer need to be at the office at 6:45 every morning to make sure that the wheels won’t fly off the track every day. I’m still an early riser, so I hope to use this extra time in the mornings to write, write, and write some more.

On bidding as an ELO

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Mmmmm … bidding. The ELO Winter Generalist bidlist is out, and it’s just about all Latin America (with a bit of China thrown in for good measure). Bertrand and I hashed out my bidding strategy in advance, which has made putting the list together much simpler than I expected. Sweet love.

It’s really been fun to imagine our small family living all over the world. It’s really shaken up my ideas about my career, and our ideas of where we’d like our family to go. We could go anywhere! What a liberating experience. Bidding as an ELO is awesome!*

Everyone in Freetown is super excited for me and thrilled to share their knowledge. Thanks to eveyone who’s answered my weirdly detailed questions about EFM employment. ;)

* I reserve the right to change my mind if my CDO sends me to Siberia, which isn’t even on the list, so I don’t know what I’m worrying.

On election night parties.

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Election night indeed. When informed that the Ambassador would be throwing an election night party at his house from 10:30 at night to 3:00 in the morning, I cheerfully told the CLO exactly what I thought of that idea.

Boy was I wrong.

My “job” during the party was to explain the electoral college. I had a blast explaining to Sierra Leoneans, Brits, Kiwis, and yes, even Americans, exactly how the votes for president were counted.

All this to say, the party was a lot of fun, and exactly what I needed to keep my spirits up while my husband was traveling. The Hatch act forbids government employees partisan activities while on duty, which meant that no matter how I felt about the outcome (and you all know I felt strongly), I had to stay netural at the party.

I had a great time schmoozing, chatting about the candidates, and explaining that yes, it’s a ridiculous confusing system that occasionaly results in counterintuitive results. But it’s our ridiculous confusing system.

And somehow, it works.

On elections

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Bertrand lost his mother a few weeks ago. She could have been saved had she had access to Western health care. Benin is a perfect example of a market driven health care system. Not enough patients have the money to pay for expensive treatments, so expensive treatments don’t exist.

The more time I spend in the developing world, the more I’m convinced of three things:

  1. Citizens and business should pay taxes.
  2. Governments exist to correct market failures.
  3. Governments accomplish #2 through #1.

Elections, indeed.

On loss. Again.

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Last night, Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi.

Several years ago, Kate Puzey, a Peace Corps Volunteer, was brutally murdered in Benin. I had long since finished my Peace Corps service, and was busily running a business with my husband in the capital. I didn’t know the volunteer, I was in a different part of the country, and there was no expectation of further violence in Cotonou. The murder had nothing to do with me.

Except, when was the last time an American was murdered in Benin? I went to sleep that night a little sadder, a little lonelier, and a lot less secure in my safety as an American abroad. I was surprised by how personal it felt.

That’s how I feel today too.

Those who were lost, their colleagues, and their families will be in our thoughts here in Freetown tonight.

On loss and grieving.

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Bertrand and I lost a good friend this week. It’s hit me pretty hard. I’m happy to far from the newspapers and the gossip and the speculation surrounding his passing, but not being able to fly back to Benin to be with family and friends has been more difficult than I expected.

I knew when we left for Freetown that flying home for funerals would be difficult. When my grandmother passed, I decided not to go. By the time I would have been able to get out of Freetown, I may or may not have been able to get to Virginia in time for the service. Coming so close and missing the ceremoney would have been more heartbreaking for me than mourning from here. So I didn’t go.

This time, we don’t know what the funeral plans are. Beninese Christian funeral customs are … well, for this outsider, they’re complicated at best, byzantine at worst. We don’t know all of the details, and perhaps we never will.

And of course, life goes on, even when you wish you could step back for a few minutes to appreciate the silence.

Rants and raves about raising a baby in Freetown

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Every eight weeks or so, I get a barrage of emails about raising small children in Freetown. I suspect that it’s closely linked to how often Freetown shows up on A-100 bid lists. In any case, I brought Freetown’s youngest baby since kids were allowed to come back in 2010. Jasmine came over at 10 weeks, and we haven’t regretted it for a moment.

Just remember that I write this from the perspective of a baby wearing, cloth diapering, make my own baby food hippy. Bertrand and I are pretty crunchy, from an American perspective.

5 rants about bringing a baby to Freetown

We are at least 24 hours from real medical care. Of course, we were planning on raising Jasmine in Cotonou anyway, so moving here wasn’t the end of the world for us. She’s healthy, doesn’t have any serious allergies, and hasn’t yet been mobile enough to be accident prone. But there’s only one flight to Europe a day from Freetown, and it takes hours to get to the airport.

Getting to the airport with a car seat and a stroller is a real hassle. The airport is on the other side of a 9-mile wide estuary. To get there from Freetown, you have to cross the water in a speedboat. It’s actually a lot of fun, except for having to carry all of Jasmine’s stuff onto the pier and then onto the taxi. I usually end up just wearing Jasmine on my chest, handing all my stuff to the taxi staff, and tipping like mad.

No baby food. No diapers. Which is fine for us, because I make Jasmine’s food, and we cloth diaper. Otherwise, we’d have to have put all of her food in the UAB/HHE and good lord, we’d be pouching in two years worth of diapers. Babies are a real ecological disaster. For my recent R&R, Bertrand and I spent an entire day scouring grocery stores looking for baby food and disposable diapers to take on the plane with me. We finally found some, but it was gone from the shelves by the time I returned.

Low bandwidth means it’s really hard to share pictures with family. My husband uploads low resolution photos to Facebook several times a week, but I can’t upload anything nice enough for my family in the States to print. We’ve been shuttling 4GB SD cards back and forth. Ugh.

There aren’t a ton of other accessible-to-us babies around. There are a few, and there are now two (two!) playgroups that Jasmine’s part of, which helps. There are also a couple of daycares with good reputations that accept babies who aren’t potty trained yet, but it occasionally bothers me that she’s not socializing as much as she could be.

5 raves about bringing a baby to Freetown

Household help is dirt cheap. OMG. It’s summer transfer season, the end of the fiscal year, and time to move folks into new houses, all at once. I’m working long hours. My husband is working long hours. And we can do it because we have two wonderful ladies who spend all day at home with our baby. And cleaning. And taking care of the little things in our house so that when we get home, we can do what’s important—hang out with Jasmine.

It takes a village. We desperately wanted to come back to West Africa for the first few years of our daughter’s life. One of the things I missed about Benin while we were in the States was the sense of community. My child is everyone’s child, and everyone’s children are mine. If someone else’s kid is misbehaving, it’s everyone’s job to let him or her know. And if my child is being bratty (or sweet!), it’s also the responsibility of many people besides just Bertrand and I. I like that. I miss it.

The Mission community is awesome about babies. I get it. Not everyone likes babies. Wants babies. Wants to be around babies. But the community here has been incredibly welcoming and understanding of the fact that I’m a baby wearing hippy, and where I go, Jasmine goes. Folks welcome her to evening and weekend social events, and she’s often explicitly included on the invitation.

Everyone’s a baby wearing hippy. It love that it’s not weird that Jasmine spends a lot of time on my back. It’s not weird that we feed her regular food off our plates. It’s not weird that we expect her to behave in public (yes, at 8 months!). It’s not weird that we coslept. The Americans think we’re nuts, of course, but as our parenting style is heavily influenced by my husband’s culture and my time in Cotonou, the Sierra Leoneans think we’re pretty normal.

There’s really nothing to consume here. Jasmine gets the clothes and toys she came with. And that’s pretty much it. I’m a big enough snob that I’m not going to buy cheap Chinese plastics in the market, which means that we either pouch stuff in for her, or she doesn’t get it at all. She’s going to spend the first few years of her life happy with what she’s got.

Bottom line

Freetown is awesome. Jasmine is awesome. I don’t regret for a moment our decision to bring our newborn with us. Freetown could be a nightmare for infants, and it’s not, largely because the Mission has made it a real priority to make Post friendlier to families. There are things we could do better, but change only comes with time. I’m sure that as Freetown gets more and more accustomed to having young children around, it will only get easier.

Oh, Ferber, I love you so much!

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Oh, Ferber sleep training, I am so sorry I thought I was too good for you. I am so sorry that I thought letting Jasmine cry was cruel. I am SO SO SORRY.

We should have done this month s ago.

Before anyone gets their hackles up about TERRIBLE MOTHER and CRUELTY and HOW COULD YOU JUST LET HER CRY, let me explain that we have tried everything. EVERYTHING. Amazon is chortling with glee becuase I have paid a fortune for utterly useless books that promised to show us how to get our baby to sleep. No tears? HAHAHAHAHA.

Obviously, you have not met my daughter.

She is adorable. She is cute. She loves people. She is a ham. And she is manipulative. OH BOY DOES SHE KNOW HER MAMA AND PAPA WELL.

We were so fucked.

All this to say, 20 minutes of tears was well worth 7 hours straight of sleep. Even if I was clutching my husband’s hand and sobbing into a pillow because it was pretty damn unbearable.

Is there anything more beautiful than a full night’s sleep?