My Little African

Miriam is continuing to adapt so well to her new family and home.  As she does this, pieces of her way of life in the DRC are beginning to fade away.  I love it that she is learning English so quickly, but when she can't remember words in Lingala I am saddened.  Miriam now speaks mostly in English.  When she plays by herself with her dolls it is in English.  She sings and prays in English, too.  A few Lingala words are still hanging around but only a few.  Here are some of them:
Motolo-belly button
Na Yebi Te-I don't know
Ndako-house...her English for this is still mouse which may be why she uses ndako
Te-no
None of us are fluent in Lingala, so we just say these few phrases with her in hopes that some of it will stick around for a while.

Miriam has grown used to a running water and a daily bath.  She loves electricity and all the wonders it brings to her...a little tv watching whenever Mama agrees.  Chik-fil-a is a big plus to living in America...their sweet tea is like nectar to Miriam.  There are things that she misses still from life in Congo.  I think first and foremost is that she misses someone sleeping with her.  We were looking at pictures the other day of our time at St. Anne's Compound when we were with Miriam in DRC.  She said that was her favorite ndako. She calls it the Hello Kitty ndako because we had Hello Kitty stickers on the door of our hotel room.

  Through a little probing, I discovered that the reason she liked it so much was that we all slept together in a big green bed.

She says now she has to "sleep by myself" which she pronounces myshelf.  Most kids want their own room...not Miriam. Unfortunately for her she has a mama who needs/loves/craves sleep and doesn't do a family bed.  She does get to come in and get some good snuggle time in the mornings.

Another thing Miriam misses is the hot Congo sun. We have had some cold rainy days lately and these seem to put her in a funk. She can handle the cold weather when the sun is shining but a cloudy cold day is not her favorite..really it is not my favorite either.Here is a beautiful day we spent by the lake when we were in DRC:

So, all of that is to say...I love it when I see glimpses of Africa still in her.  I never want those to leave my girl.  They are her heritage...her place of birth...something I always want to be a part of her.  As she plays, I see pieces of the DRC coming out.

Lately, one of her favorite things to play is washing her dolls clothes.  She ties her baby to her back and puts the clothes in a bucket.  Then she gets in the bathtub and washes her clothes.  Miriam has either had to wash clothes when she lived in the DRC or she carefully watched someone else wash clothes, because this girl can  wring out some dirt.  Once the clothes are washed, then she pulls up a chair and hangs them on the clothes line.  She would do this every day if she had enough doll clothes to cycle through.

M

Miriam also likes to make clothes for her dolls which mostly consist of wraps in brightly colored clothes which remind me of all the beautiful African fabrics we saw in Congo.

When we picked up Miriam from the orphanage, someone had lovingly put her hair in lots of little tufts. When I had to take her hair down in the great lice adventure, I discovered that it had been done with string instead of rubber bands.  This is how Miriam likes to do her dolls' hair.  She gets some of my sewing thread and sits and works on their hair with it.

Another favorite activity is cooking. These days Miriam's favorite thing to make is homemade peanut butter.  She takes her peanuts and puts them in my Liberian mortar and mashes them up with the pestle.  I am sure she saw this type of cooking many times.  Once she gets them all ground up, we add some oil and she mixes some more.  Then we all get to taste her creation...some of us are less eager to eat this mixture than others.

When we were in DRC, we went to a fabric market...which was an interesting experience in itself. We let Miriam pick out a fabric that she loved.  The girl loves some color and she picked out this one...yellow, pink, black and gold.  Our translator took us to the house of a seamstress who made these outfits for Miriam, Helen, and Caleb.  They all wore them to church on Sunday.  Caleb must love Miriam a lot to be willing to wear this shirt to church.  Luckily, she asked Caleb to wear it, so I did not have to ask him.

I hope in a few months there are still things Miriam does that remind me of Congo.  We will continue to encourage her to remember her life before she came into our family and to treasure her heritage.