Yep, I’m in that mood–that giddy, grateful mood for being around friends who just get me, get us.

Friendship is sharing happiness (and food) with people who know all the flaws you have and love you anyway.  And friends?  Companions for the journey.

That’s my definition.

What’s yours?

There’s too much to tell.  From the haunting, piercing call to prayer that rings out through the dusty alleyways, the taxi rides through the crowded streets, the echoes, the shadows, the beauty of the mosques, and all the street food, bloody sides of meet hanging in the shops, pigeons circling, and peddlers rushing through the streets on donkeys that come with that whole crowded city-territory.

Before we touched down, my husband I mused that Cairo may be the biggest city we’ve been in (apart from Shanghai, that is).  With approximately 14.5 million people, Cairo ranks number 15 among the world’s most populated cities, and friends tell me that estimate might be seriously remiss.

From the tops of the minarets in Islamic Cairo the other day, we peeked in upon the way some of those 14.5 million live, raising pigeons on the rooftops, taking advantage of that extra space for social gathering, gathering garbage, or raising one’s goats.

Sampling the tamia and falafal outside the old city gates, we saw a man skillfully cup the mint-colored paste into is hand and plop it into the wok filled with oil.  Within an old mosque and beside a tomb, we heard a caliph sing praises to Allah.  And we sat in a smoky tea house by the road, where robed men watched the crowds rush by, geese clucked and cats meandered, and we took in sweet peach and cantalope-flavoured gulps of shisha.

It’s altogether another world.  So far we’ve been in the ancient churches in Coptic Cairo, the old mosques in Islamic Cairo, and gathered for steaks and scripture with the expat community here at the local Episcopalian Church.  Later this week we’ll try to make it to our second of the seven wonders of the new world–those iconic pyramids.

But for now I’m enjoying a cup of tea and the view of Cairo’s rooftops from my friends’ apartment on a quiet day on which a sandstorm approaches, and the anniversary of their modern day revolution.

You fly with an eclectic bunch of folks from Hong Kong into Qatar, whisked into a white-washed airport with women and men whose flowing robes cascade across the shiny tiles.  You sit with a huge cup of coffee, calculating that it’s early morning here, late morning in China, and catch a glimpse of the red sun rising over the sandy, dusty desert.

And then it’s onto another airport in Abu Dhabi, where you hear the call to prayer and see women filing into a room adjacent to the bathroom, dipping their heads to colorful carpets in the direction of Mecca.  The airport has an air of tradition coupled with modern opulence, sparkling purple and green tiles lining the vaulted ceiling.

And then you touch down in Cairo, the sprawling city a sea of honking horns, and beige landscape where the apartments blend with the endless stretch of flat land, construction inseparable from desert, dust, dusk.

You crowd into the minuscule elevator which slowly creeks to your friends’ seventh floor apartment, and when you enter your covet everything you see–from the wood carvings, to the coffee, to the wine, the hummus, the olives, the cheese–everything China has been denying you, Cairo seemingly has.

And you pour glasses of wine and dig into a meal in the company of friends you have known for years and have been missing for over half the last one.  You gab about the trips you will take, to see Coptic and Islamic Cairo, into the desert, hiking Mount Sinai, and as you slip into bed that evening, your head hits the pillow hard, and the despite the fact that you know you’re high on the possibilities, the company, and the delirious jetlag, you feel wonderfully, strangely, impossibly home.

In between playing in the sand dunes, hiking Mt. Sinai, checking out Cairo’s minarets, hanging out on the beaches in Abu Dhabi, and riding camels (maybe?), I’ll be pouring over these…in no particular order.

Let me know if you’ve read any of these, as there’s quite a couple on my list, and I probably won’t get to them all.  I could use some direction!

Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

My friend, Erin, bought me this one when she saw it on my goodreads list.  She said it might make me cry but it’s worth the read, and overlaps with some of my research interests.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

This one’s also been on my list for awhile, a collection of international stories that have gotten rave reviews.  And I loved the movie, The Namesake, so I’m in!

The Social Animal by David Brooks

Been hearing some good things about this one for awhile, and am fascinated by the mind, so here goes!

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I mentioned before that I enjoy Rubin’s blog, and a friend recently gave the book a good review.  Will let you know how happiness works out!

What are you reading?  And what do you recommend?

I’m not going to do that.  My free reading in 2011 was pitiful- I probably read 5 books.

But I’m also not going to let that get me down.  With a new Kindle in hand, I’m able to get access to English books, and I’m re-discovering the whole free reading, devouring a book experience (check out On my Nighstand for what I’m currently reading).

Despite my pitiful total in 2011, several of that slim count were truly excellent. And if you like to read about food, farming, and family, these three are definitely for you!

So here are my recommendations from 2011…what are yours?

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir by Diana Abu-Jaber

• MY TAKE:  A light, alluring read sprinkled with recipes and family figures who loom larger than life. Abu-Jaber’s complicated relationship with her idiosyncratic father is a captivating and refreshing one, and her reflections on their mutual existential crisis- caught between their Jordanian homeland and their new American life- are powerful and drip with the nostalgia of a fictional, less-complicated time and the promise of an especially complicated, but ever idealized future.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

• MY TAKE:  It seems all too highly-rated to be true, but Kimball’s prose really is vivid, tantalizing, seductive.  She makes dirt under your nails, the rough life of farming, and her whirlwind romance with her farmer husband romantic, yet real.  It’s a light, quick read, but one you’ll want to return to, and one that will make you think twice about the value of simple farmfresh produce.

This Life is in Your Hands: One Family, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone by Melissa Coleman

• MY TAKE:  This is the heavier side to Kimball’s story, and all the more poignant for it.  Hauntingly beautiful depiction of the thrills and costs of farming. You’ll ache for Melissa and her family, yet feel inspired by their passion for this hard life. Part poetry and part prose, Coleman writes with an earnestness that is both heartbreaking and powerful.

And that guess would be right.

However, there are times when I like to think I can whip up something delicious on my own.  My husband is certainly a much more involved cook–this week he made chili from the ancho chilis my sister sent along from the states for Christmas–while I like to keep it simple.

To me, delicious, yet simple is spinach, stir-fried with a little garlic, onion, mushroom, and soy sauce, it  was the star of several of my meals this past week.  On the side one night I added some rice with a pinch of salt, oil, lime juice, cilantro, chives, and cumin seeds, all thrown in the rice cooker.

The other night I ate my spinach with a side of sesame noodles, the recipe for which I found on The Cutting Edge of Ordinary (and which she attributes to Pioneer Woman).

These were lovely and simple, and extra tasty with spinach on the side.  I added ginger to the sauce, because I love the spice of some fresh ginger thrown into the mix.

The best part about both of these meals is they probably cost me under 50 cents in China.  

On a recent trip out of the city into the countryside, I bought this unusual condiment, lemon hot pepper sauce, a local favorite, for my husband to try out.

Chinese friends say you usually put it on noodles (could be a good addition in the sesame noodle sauce), but we’re thinking chicken marinade?

The girls, especially, went crazy buying long yan gan, or dried dragon eye fruit.  The fresh ones remind me of the quenapas we ate from the trees in Puerto Rico, but if you haven’t had those, their fresh texture is a bit like lychee.

I figured it had some medicinal properties, because I don’t find the dried raisin-like fruit all that tasty, but then again, Chinese New Year is coming up, and everyone likes to get something special from the countryside!

Finally, since we’re out of the coffee I brought from the states, I’m back to the Vietnamese weasal coffee.  I know it sounds weird, but it’s pretty good.

What did you eat this week?

First, it was Jesus’s words to the man with leprosy who asks to be made clean that struck me.  He says, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.”  And Jesus stretches out his hands to touch him and says simply, “I do choose.  Be made clean.”

And immediately afterward in the gospel of Luke comes the story of the paralytic, the crowds surrounding Jesus to such an extent that the man has to be lowered down through the ceiling of the building to be seen by Jesus.

This story is so powerfully familiar to me–I can remember sitting in the basement room of my church, with its rainbow-painted walls and hearing one of the matriarchs of my church tell this story with its vivid details, so that I swear even now I can see the rattan mat the man lays upon, hear the grumbling of the crowd and the scribes and the Pharisees as they accuse Jesus of blasphemy (5:21), and smell the sweat of the crush of people in that room.

And I guess I take so many aspects of the gospel, and this life of faith for granted.  Jesus didn’t have to choose to heal the leper, to reach out and touch him.  With all the questions we raise in our hearts, the doubting voices, those who’d begun to whisper about him (5:22), why should he do such a thing?

But he chose to.  He chose each one of us, when we were too weak many times to choose him, to reach out to him as the leper did, to believe to be made clean, to find a way to lower that paralyzed man into the crowd.

And it was those wonderful women in my church who took the time to tell these stories, even when they weren’t sure we were listening.  But I remember them, I remember today the power of the story from the first time it was told, just as profoundly as in this moment in China when I read it again.

Older women and young child in church in Ninglang, China.

And so I praise you, God.  I ask you, humbly, to keep on choosing us, even when we’re too weak, too unwise, too questioning, to choose you.  Because your love is everlasting, your stories true, your power healing, totalizing, life-changing.  Let me never take for granted what you do for me everyday, how you have chosen me.  I thank you, I thank you for that.  Amen.

Really, is there a better motto?

I seem to remember writing a post like this just a few months ago, and yes, I’m aware it’s already January 11th.  It seems I simply have trouble warming up to some months?!

Speaking of warming up, the cold weather has finally descended upon Southwest China, and I remember why there is a nothing enviable about cold rain (and no insulation!), even if the temps do stay relatively mild here during the winter.  That said, I’ve discovered there are plenty of things to be excited about this January.

Here are a few of mine below…what about you?

• Playing with my Christmas presents:  It must be the case that as we get older and those Christmas lists get shorter, we feel even more spoiled, er I mean, satisfied with all the gifts under the tree.  Some of the things I’m geeking out over are a copy of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (from my mother), which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read, a beige, fuzzy, lined professor-sweater my husband got me, new running shoes (from my little sister), pajama pants (from the twin), and of course, the last of my peppermint bark (from my mother-in-law).

The genuine article.

• Checking out the Countryside:  There’s a new foster care project about three hours from here that’s been set up, and it’s been a joy to get a glimpse of Guangxi’s craggy mountains and farmland, as well as smell the sour peppers drying in the sun in the village and see the families learning to love one another.

Photo by Evan Schneider.

• Happy Chinese New Year:  Chinese New Year falls early this year, sometime around the last week of January, so we’ll be taking off for a couple weeks, first traveling to Egypt to see our friends Ben and Emily, and then to Abu Dhabi to visit our friends Beth and Vic (mixing a little business with pleasure as I’l also be giving a talk to the faculty at NYUAD about my research).  I sometimes find it overwhelming to balance these travels with research, but I’m exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to travel.  When my friend Beth mentioned the beaches in Abu Dhabi, my heart skipped a beat!

My friends, Beth and Vic, visiting the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

My friend, Emily, in front of the pyramids. Photo by her husband, Ben Robinson.

Just kidding.

As I’ve been learning about foster care, adoption, and child welfare in China these past few years, I’m continually struck by the cultural differences that make everyday stories nearly unintelligible.

Children playing in Yunnan province. Photo by Evan Schneider.

In the past week, however, there’s been a series of stories in the local media which speak to the complexities of life in China in simple, powerful ways.

The first is a China Daily article from our region, Guangxi, about a poor woman who collects trash for a living who illegally adopted a son in 2005, when she found him, abandoned, and likely to due to his cleft palate, on the side of the road.  Because the child is unregistered, because the woman is poor, and because of many other social and structural barriers, the child is not able to attend school and the adoption is neither legal nor seen as favorable in the eyes of elites.  In the article, the woman admits that she hopes that her son will care for her in old age.

What’s important to remember in China is that carrying for one’s parents is a legal obligation, and with minimal retirement and social security payments, and in a society where traditional values such as filial piety are eroding, it’s a very real and valid concern for elderly people like the 75-year old single mother in the article.  In China, children are raised to be interdependent, to seek out opportunities but to also understand that these opportunities stand in direct correlation to their obligations to older generations.

A second look at children’s lives, particularly disabled children, who make up the majority of children in orphanages and foster care today comes from a video series by Jonah Kessel, entitled, “We are Different, We are the Same.”

Kessel’s short videos follow the lives of five disabled people growing up in the PRC, and they’re honest, vivid accounts of the harsh reality of life as a disabled person in China.  At the same time, they’re inspirational: I was especially touched by the accounts of the young woman with brittle bones syndrome, and the little boy with cerebral palsy as I’ve worked closely with children with both of these conditions.  Again, It’s particularly striking (and heartbreaking), that the mother in the video about the young boy with cerebral palsy details her high hopes for her physically and mentally disabled child to grow up, get a job, get married, and be able to take care of her when she grows old.

A young boy with CP plays at a camp for disabled children and their families in Guangxi.

My husband with a group of young boys with brittle bones syndrome at foster home outside Beijing.

Finally, the China Daily and DJ Clark have launched a series of videos about life and improvements to life in rural China.  The first video, an overview of the five stages of rural development put forth by the government in the last 30 years, is particularly insightful for those hoping to gain a basic understanding for the state of rural life in China today, and the subsequent three videos give detailed accounts of villages DJ Clark has visited across China.

If you have a moment to read the article and view some of the videos, let me know your thoughts, what you learned and what you’re struggling to understand.  China’s a complex place, and I’m constantly learning, too!