Paul and Rebecca Mosley in Ethiopia: Emptying out and filling up on home leave

Extended family gathered on my 50th birthday

Five weeks have passed since we started our Home Leave in mid-June. It’s a lot to write about -- I was almost afraid to start!! I will definitely forget to mention something important. And yet it feels important to me to try to keep some record of this remarkable summer. In many ways, I feel like this time is helping somehow integrate all the many disruptions and transitions that have come our way since 2020.

Airport arrival

Let me start by saying that it was honestly very difficult for me to settle down to rest, to break out of our very rigorous work routine of keeping our heads down, doing all we can to keep up with professional demands. Then there is the added element of being on home leave: so much self-imposed pressure to see and catch up with everyone, to take care of a lot of necessary business, to remember to buy things (for our kids, ourselves, our colleagues), to spend quality time with family members, to make every moment count. Many of the first days back in the US, I was dealing with some of the most severe anxiety I’ve had in a long time.

Alone in the forest

Finally, at the end of the week, I determined that I needed to take a whole morning for a solitary walk in the woods at one of my favorite Sabbath spots, Cromwell Valley Park. After walking in the woods alone, I realized that I had not truly been alone for at least six months. In Addis, we are always just a few steps away from a guard, a neighbor, and always in earshot of traffic sounds, prayer calls and other city sounds. The solitary silence of the forest was like medicine – I remembered again something I had learned about resilience – that emotional energy is like a combustion engine: you take in fuel, you burn it up in productivity, but then you need to release the exhaust of the expired fumes before you can take in any more fuel. I tried to get into the forest as many times as possible that week and the next – and by God’s grace, my parents live very close to some great county parks.

Catching up with loved ones

Visit with Dereb family

On the other hand, we woke up early and well-rested the morning after we landed in Baltimore, and were all ready to attend our home church, North Baltimore Mennonite the next morning. It has been such a sweet opportunity to attend our church for a number of weeks in a row. We were even able to attend the re-naming ceremony of a friend from our Baltimore Bible Study and then see lots of friends all at one time at a picnic celebration on the Bay.

We were very happy and thankful to meet up with Melkamu and Genet, Ethiopian friends from our Burundi Bible study, and current renters of our house. They have been through major health challenges and lots of other hard times this year. It was wonderful to be back in their (our) home, to enjoy Genet’s delicious Ethiopian cooking, and to share thanksgivings for how God has seen them through. It is even more special that we know so much more about their home country and language, and have new things in common.

Getting refreshed at the Gunpowder

One afternoon, my friend Ashley came to visit with her oldest son Liam. Both our boys really love the outdoors and played for a long time in the Gunpowder Falls River, fishing and swimming, and tubing. Ashley and I also enjoyed cooling off in the river and then had a good long chance to share what has been going on this year. Lots of challenges, again, and so I was glad to talk with her more personally.

We were able to also spend some time with my brother’s family on a few different occasions. It’s always great to hang out with them in their newly remodeled house in our old neighborhood, play games and talk. One afternoon my parents took all of us and cousins Miriam and Gabriel to the Aquarium for an evening of fish-watching. They are cool kids and we have a lot to hear from Miriam about how the first year of college has been.

On top of those unique visits, we have enjoyed quite a few low-key meals with each set of our parents, and some with our parents together. We've visited Paul's parents at their beautiful retirement community and even got to attend a choral presentation and hear our old family friend, Louise Carlson, play the piano.

Father's Day lunch after church at our old meeting spot, Kathmandu Kitchen

Driver’s Education

Learner's permit in hand

One of our goals for this extended home leave has been to help Oren through a few of the teenage rites of passage that are harder to pull off when you live overseas. He was finally able to attend the 30-hour, 2-week Driver’s Ed course required by the state of Maryland. And just before he turned 17, he passed the legal test and finally got his official learners’ permit. It was pretty painless!

Now he needs 60 hours of practice on the road before he can apply for his provisional license. We probably won’t finish all those hours during this vacation, but we are gradually working with him to get more experience behind the wheel. It will be nearly impossible to do very much on this when we are back in Ethiopia, so there is some amount of pressure to help him keep practicing as much as possible here.

Oren with Grammy and our appetizers

Turning 17

And yes, Oren turned 17 on June 29. We happened to be traveling on that day (a college visit and visit to MCC headquarters) and just had a low-key dinner out with him on our way home. His birthday celebration had to be postponed to the weekend after so that family members could celebrate with us. Oren had a very clear plan that he wanted to have a feast of many different kinds of meats. Accordingly, we went together to the grocery store and he picked out a selection of chicken, steak, pork sausage, pork loin, and lamp chops. He himself took a lot of responsibility to grill the meats and serve them up to all his grandparents and my brother’s family. We had a very funny evening together, with a highly competitive game of croquet on the front lawn – something that has become a major summer tradition. My dad is usually the croquet pro, but this time Gabriel came from behind to beat us all. As we enjoyed our ice cream birthday cake, Oren offered a pretty hilarious speech. It was a great way to celebrate his growth in maturity.

Oren and Papa Dave visited Hopkins

College visits vs. Camp

So, yes, college visits. It’s hard to believe that we will be sending our oldest out on his own for higher education in just one year. How did we all get so old? That’s another rite of passage we are trying to squeeze in this summer – helping Oren think through some of the directions he could choose, not just a particular school, but what career path to follow. He’s quite gifted in chemistry and math, and yet also has a real interest in foreign service, maybe working with the UN or going into politics. It’s hard to know how to advise him!

While he had his solo week in Baltimore before we arrived, my Dad took him to tour Johns Hopkins University and my mom took him to another local school, Goucher College. We will be on another continent, so it seems wise for him to go to a university where he could get to relatives within an hour or two, using public transportation.

Planet Word in DC

These kinds of college visits would be hard to take David on, so we had to be creative and find other options for him. He had one overnight with Paul’s parents at their retirement community – and David really loves playing bocce ball and hanging out in their comfortable apartment. The next week, we arranged for David to attend a week of Christian summer camp at Camp Hebron. He ended up in a cabin with 3 other kids from our home church, including his friend Liam.

So, with time alone with our oldest, Paul and I took Oren to see Messiah University – a small Christian college in rural Pennsylvania. Honestly, they were really recruiting him as a potential student, set up a meeting with the Chemistry Professor, gave us a campus tour and gave us a meeting with an admissions counselor, and then a free dinner in the dining hall.

Messiah College library

It was very exciting to think about the possibilities of pursuing a chemistry degree in a small, supportive college environment, with a department head who is a big Tolkein geek, hosts weekly board game nights for the students, and has a very strong but discerning sense of how Christian faith and rigorous science complement each other. We then continued on to stay the night in Akron, MCC’s headquarters, where we had a long day of very fruitful in-person meetings with colleagues. Akron – and the Welcoming Place in particular – hold a lot of great memories for our family, but especially Oren. He still remembers starting out his career as an MCC kid there in 2008 at just 3 years old. We love to have the opportunity to go back there for work but also to just stay in their simple, calm, and gracious guest rooms.

Giant sloth

The next week, the three of us did a real college tour and visited three big name schools a bit further away. It was a very different experience, sharing admissions briefings with groups of 100 or more people, rather than the individual visit we had at Messiah. Our first stop was American University in Washington, D.C. – a place where Oren would probably want to focus more on government and politics. He really appreciated the visit and it’s high on his list of places to apply, with so many opportunities for internships and experience. In the afternoon, we had time to go down to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History – Oren has always dreamed of going to DC and actually staying the night so that we could visit more than one museum at a time, and so we gave him that gift, staying in the cheapest hotel I could find! Pretty close to American University, too. I was really happy to see the newly refurbished Fossil Hall for the first time – so much to see and so much more interactive detail in the exhibits now, even though some of the bones are the same. We had a delicious Thai dinner at a restaurant across from our hotel – another advantage of DC.

Georgetown Univeristy

In the morning, we made our way to Georgetown University (half of it by a vigorous walk!). What an imposing campus! Oren was definitely impressed there, too, but not sure if he would want to apply or not – it is also highly competitive. After lunch, we tried out Planet Word, a totally new museum to us. It was a highly imaginative series of exhibits on language – its development and use, from jokes to curses, through conquest and adaptation. There was a beautiful library exhibit, a secret room where you could just sit and listen to poetry being read, a place to practice and record speeches, and much more. We left DC around 5 pm and got in the car to drive on south to Williamsburg for a visit to William and Mary, my own Alma Mater.

We got there at night, to a very humble motel (the cheapest I could find) – but it had beds, so what else do you need? I woke up early and took the opportunity to indulge my nostalgia and take a morning jog into Historical Williamsburg. As a student, I used to go for runs beside those old colonial buildings, favoring the back lanes, and often cutting through the various herb and flower gardens. So many good memories came back to me as I had time alone there, enjoying the quiet and the history.

The historic Christopher Wren building

There were so many changes to the William and Mary Campus that sometimes I didn’t even know where I was during our campus tour. The remodeled library was unrecognizable inside and the science building was totally new. Even Lake Matoaka has a fairly new, beautiful amphitheater facing the water and new sculptures acknowledge the problematic history of the college’s involvement in slavery, racism and sexism. To be honest, Oren seemed a little overwhelmed with the choices he is going to have to make and so after the tour, he was pretty much done with exploring. We headed back to Fallston to get a little more rest that night.

The next day, Paul and I were scheduled to pick up David from camp. We left a few hours early because we really wanted to do a longer hike together on one of the trails leading up from Camp Hebron. We’d stayed there a few times as a couple for some pretty critical retreats, considering life changes. Again, it was very meaningful to return to another place that had been part of turning points in our lives. We hiked up Peter’s Mountain, enjoyed the overlook, hiked for a few hours on the Appalachian trail, and then came back down.

On Peter's Mountain

With Hummingbird Cabin group at Hebron

Even before we were officially allowed to pick up the kids, we saw David’s cabin group approaching. David flopped down under a tree while all the other kids played gaga ball. What was up? Was he having such a bad time that he didn’t even want to play anymore? We were quite alarmed until we got to talk with him and learned he just had a bad headache. With a little ibuprofen, he made it through the closing program and then got in the car with Liam for the ride back to Baltimore. It was a gift to have them both together to reflect back on a very fun week and to hear both their perspectives. Liam seems to be a lot more verbal, so we got more detail than we otherwise might have. For instance, we learned that they all spoke in Russian accents for the entire week, paddled on the Susquehanna river, took a long hike on the Appalachian trail also, swam almost every day, and finished off the week by sleeping in hammocks around the campfire. We were so glad that David was able to experience a summer camp for once, like so many of his friends in the States.

Charter Hall Church Center

Place and Memory

And now I need to say a little bit about turning 50 this year. Some days I feel like I can’t remember my own life – I meet up with old friends who have vivid memories of shared experiences. I feel like I am scrabbling around in the back filing cabinet of my mind, struggling to pull out the drawer, open the file and get that time back into the front of my mind. For the present moment, I have a memory like a trap, but for things further back, it’s a struggle. But I just have to accept that I am very finite and there is a limit to how much any human brain can retain. For example, how can I keep mental maps of all these places (where I have lived for a year or more) frontloaded at the same time? Dhaka, Baltimore, Almaty, Williamsburg, Harford County, all of Botswana, Vancouver, Poughkeepsie, Bujumbura, Kigali, Arusha and now Addis Ababa? Each place holds precious memories of dear friends, my cup of memory literally overflows and I can’t contain it. (One good reason to keep up on this blog, regardless of who else reads it)

Canoeing with my mom

But one place has been something of a constant in my life since 1980 when I turned 8 years old. My parents joined a group of other people from their Church of the Brethren and bought a big old hunting lodge at the end of a peninsula on the north end of the Chesapeake. They saved the land from being turned into a massive Condo development and converted the place into a church retreat center. Family groups and church groups have been meeting regularly there for the same week each year for more than three decades. Buildings have been renovated, trees have come down, and bamboo has grown thick. The Bay gets full of weeds some years and isn’t so nice to swim in. It has always been crawling with spiders, but these days it’s also full of bald eagles and osprey. But it’s the same place I have spent time at least once (usually more) every single year since I was a child. I first learned something about bird-watching there. Every year, we take canoes and paddle up past the marsh and into the Principio creek to the old railroad bridge – this year I think we made 4 trips up to the bridge, for fishing, and collecting the shiny slag from an iron furnace that stopped working almost 3 centuries ago. A deep connection with the natural environment of this place is part of what makes it feel so much like home.

Firepit by the front dock with Jenn

We have had regular reunions with friends in different periods of life. Great friends from Bangladesh days gathered every Labor Day weekend for at least 10 years. My 16^th birthday was celebrated there with high school friends. We had my bridal shower there with friends from college and seminary. When I turned 40, Paul planned a big surprise party for me during our home leave from Burundi. We had dear friends turn up at Charter Hall from Toronto, Florida, and New York, along with family from the Baltimore area. For the years we lived in New York or Baltimore, we joined my brother for his big friends’ get-togethers around New Years’ Eve. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we took refuge at Charter Hall for two whole months and daily watched the intricate transformation of winter into spring. It was a quiet place, near our parents, where we could meet with them outdoors and not risk exposing them. Neutral eyes might see Charter Hall as kind of run-down, hot, and buggy. For me, it is a place of peace and home, where my memories finally have physical ground to play over.

Don & Rosaura's family, with Jenn

Turning 50 at Charter Hall

So, this year, in the week before my birthday, we were able to rent the Charter Hall Lodge and sent out invitations to at least some of the many good friends we’ve made along the way. On Sunday evening, we welcomed Don & Rosaura from Poughkeepsie, NY with their three kids. Everyone is so much older, and we really had not seen each other since they made a quick surprise appearance at my ordination in 2017. We had shared many close moments as newlyweds in the same small group bible study back in Poughkeepsie, and they even visited us for 3 weeks in Burundi. They are definitely friends with whom we could pick up where we left off, hear of each other’s struggles and pray for each other.

David and Raphael paddling

Jennifer Price, our MCC colleague and neighbor from Burundi days came on Monday afternoon to stay for the whole rest of the week. We got to know her really well as we did life together in Burundi, and sort of consider her to be our honorary niece/cousin, who is always welcome to crash. She was transitioning between a challenging end of her assignment in DR Congo and a new assignment coordinating humanitarian relief in Ukraine. She needed a few days to rest by the water and contemplate life and we were so glad ot have her. My parents also stayed two nights with us, enjoying catching up with our old friends whom they also knew. And Paul’s parents came for the afternoon of their 67^th (!!!) anniversary.

Altogether we played games, paddled, cooled off in the pool, took a walk along the beach. Rosaura made amazing Puerto Rican beans and bacon rice one night. David and their son Raphael built a fire and we roasted marshmallows and told stories. It was all you could want of a summer visit together. They had to leave on Tuesday afternoon, but we really enjoyed our time together.

Funnel cloud coming towards Charter Hall

After a few hours of quiet, a friend from college, Margaret Walsh, drove out to see me after work. We sat in the gazebo by the dock on a hot afternoon with the wind cooling us, and did our best to catch up on parenting, teaching our kids faith, work, and our thoughts on the recent death of a good mutual friend. At a certain point, Paul headed out to the store, just as the wind really started to pick up. A little later Margaret (who was facing south), inidicated that it would really be time to go in the house – the storm was almost upon us. We gathered up a few loose swimsuits on our way in, and were just about to settle in at a window to watch the storm roll in. I turned to look out the most exposed window of the lodge and was shocked to see an opaque white curtain of violent wind and water sweeping across the Bay, nearly upon us. A metal lawn chair suddenly cartwheeled across the front yard, and I yelled for everyone to get downstairs into the bathroom. Upstairs, Jenn had been watching a movie on her computer by an open window, and suddenly her laptop scooted across the bed with the force of wind and would have fallen on the floor. We reached the bathroom in time to look out the back window and see huge limbs crashing down around the gazebo where we had just been peacefully sitting 5 minutes before. We lost power almost immediately. Paul was apparently caught right under the edge of the front on his way to town, but he was pretty sure he saw a funnel cloud. A photo from a neighbor the next day showed a huge white funnel cloud touching down and forming a waterspout.

Gazebo surrounded by wreckage

It was quite an adventure for Margaret to get involved in on such a short visit – soon the wind got down to just mildly severe so we went out to try to rescue things that had been blown about. All the lawn furniture had been parted with cushions and dumped in the Bay in either direction. Later we found the pool also full of all the sun beds and metal chairs. Paul’s inflatable stand-up paddle board landed 100 feet away under the dock. Most shocking, a solid wood picnic table, weighing at least 300 pounds was lifted off the dock and flung upside down into the water. But miraculously, no actual buildings were damaged. Even the gazebo was completely surrounded by huge fallen limbs but not hit. Margaret stayed a little longer but then decided it was better to see how her family had done through the same storm further south.

Eli, Carolyn and dog Gordon

At Charter Hall, when you lose power, the pump stops working also, so then there’s no running water. Luckily we anticipated that and stored up 10 gallons of drinking water before the tank ran out. Jennifer figured out how to make us a delicious dinner while we still tried to sort out problems around the property. Also luckily, we are all seasoned international workers, so we are not devastated by loss of power – it’s just that normally in our contexts we are better prepared with solar lamps and stored water. Anyway, we did get power back by the next afternoon—much sooner than many people.

We received our next visiting friends on Wednesday evening – Eli and Carolyn Gingerich, who drove down from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario with their three kids. We shared a very wonderful six months with them in our Bible study group in Arusha, when they took a year off from teaching to do something really different and special with their family. Our boys are quite similar in age and so it was great for them to get together and find that they still have lots in common. It was quite humbling to us that they were willing to make the long drive to come down and see us. They are really into canoe trips and board games, so we fit in both of those early in the day.

Eli and kids with Oren

Eli is also an expert pool cleaner and helped get the Charter Hall pool pump working again. We manually cleared a huge quantity of leaves and branches out of the bottom of the pool (the kids and I had fished out the furniture the day before, which was a pretty creepy experience, but one way to get cleaned up without showers). The Hoard family from our Baltimore church joined us later in the afternoon for time in the pool, and even helped with preparing taco salad for dinner. And our good friend Heidi Mills (also from our Poughkeepsie bible study) also drove down for just one night. It was really amazing to see people get along well, from four very different parts of our lives, and in a sense helping me to hold together so many separate parts of my life. These good friends are my sense of home, and the place is like home. It was a really sweet way to have an early birthday party.

with the Gingerich family

On Friday morning, we had to see the Gingerich’s off on their long drive home. I had a little more time with Heidi to paddle in kayaks and talk, while distantly keeping an eye on Jenn while she did a two hour open swim across the Bay. She’s made of strong stuff, dealing with all those weeds tickling her tummy!

Cake with friends

Gingerich and Mosley boys

One of many croquet games
Celebrating with family

Just after lunch, we had to seriously clear out of Charter Hall and make our way a half mile down the road to the Rittenhouse place, where we had spent an additional 2 months from May to July 2020. It’s a really fun and well-appointed home with owners who almost never use it. We’ve sort of worked out a deal where we do stuff to keep up the house and yard once a year, and they let us use the house for free for a week. Not sure how long that will last, but it has been a real blessing!

Paul’s brother Jonathan arrived with Emma and Fletcher (their son) that evening and we got right into playing games and enjoying each other’s company. Paul’s best image of summer vacation is grilling salmon while sharing an IPA with his brother Jon and watching the kids play croquet on the back lawn with the superb Brookstone croquet set at the Rittenhouse place. He was immediately able to enjoy several days in a row of these delightful activities. It was also too hot and windy to canoe for a few days, so we did a lot more indoor game playing. David has also gotten into an incredible rhythm where he can do a 1000-piece puzzle in a day, while listening to an audiobook. He’s done at least 5 puzzles in the past week and listened to several Artemis Fowl books repeatedly! We had to get him some new listening material from the library.

Relaxing Sack family

On Sunday afternoon, we were joined by all four of our parents as well as the family of my brother Paul. It’s such a treat to have parents and family members who get along so well. And we remain deeply grateful that our parents are all relatively healthy for their age, loving and interested in supporting us, and ready to be involved in games and cooking and things – this is nothing to be taken for granted. We had such a wonderful grilled salmon dinner with fresh Maryland sweet corn – after that corn, no one hardly needed any cake! But we had it anyway because it was officially my actual 50^th birthday. I really love my family and am thankful for them and any times we can spend with them.

The rest of the week was mostly low-key. Everyone still needed to get some work done, and wifi was only available at the incredibly beautiful Perryville Public library. So we would make a morning trip, answer emails, come back for lunch and then do some afternoon adventures. Fletcher was eager to take canoes up to the bridge, and so we made an expedition at high tide on Tuesday. It was windy and tough paddle on the way back, but all the boys made it. It’s great to see him get into being in the outdoors. He and David also had a great time challenging each other in rock-skipping along the shore a few times. We had Bunny and Henry out for a visit on Tuesday afternoon, and then my parents came out for our last afternoon on Friday.

Bonfire, guitar and corn hole by the Bay

In between, we took a day at Hershey Park together with Miriam and Gabriel. The cousins actually came out Tuesday evening for dinner. The house owner had piled up an enormous bonfire from the storm fallen sticks and branches, so we burned that – maybe it was a little on the scary side at first! But as it burned down, we relaxed, got out the corn hole and Jon’s guitar and had a sing-along for a while. Of course there had to be s’mores and a game later on.

And Hershey Park was just great! We made a buddy system, depending on people’s keenness to ride on roller coasters. David is not keen, so he was my buddy! There are more coasters in that park than one can actually ride in a single day, physically or depending on time. David and I did one right in the beginning of the day, and then we chose some of the smaller rides, visited the zoo, and got a very late lunch at 5 pm.

Starting at Hershy Park

He was more enamored by the arcades and playing some of the games where you lose all your money and never win a prize – except he actually did win a basketball at one point. Paul and Jon rode a bunch of coasters together. Miriam and Gabe were amusement park pros and managed to do more rides than I thought possible. Fletcher got Oren to finally try out a few coasters, and this year, he decided that he wasn’t so freaked out by them. In fact, he found a kind of inner peace, saying, you just get on the ride and the ride does all the rest! Fletcher joined M&G for a while and Oren was with us. It was a very fun mix and match kind of day.

At one point, M & G met up with me and David and got me to join them on one of the newest rides – the highest roller coaster in the park. David decided at the last minute that he couldn’t do it – and that was the right decision for him! It was unbelievably terrifying, going up that high, and then basically falling right back into the valley below. Still, there were no loops, and it was really smooth, so in some weird way, I would have gone on it again if there had been time. We drove back at 9 pm and overheard some really interesting conversations between the teens in the car. It was a very fun day of bonding together and I’m so glad that we could enjoy a park like that after 3 years of staying away.

cousins fishing by the bridge

Thursday was a workday back at the Rittenhouse place. We borrowed a power washer and cleaned up the greenish mold on the back of the house, continued with the endless raking of fallen sticks and cleaned some windows. Still, that kind of work is satisfying in a sense. And we are glad to keep up the place, for it’s own sake, but also to honor the generosity of the owners in letting us stay there. Oren even mowed before we left.

As the week came to a close, I found myself thinking about how to savor the days. For most of the year, I cannot wake up at sunrise and sit and pray, contemplating this beautiful view of the Bay, hearing the Great Blue Heron’s heavy wingbeats as the startle and pass by low. But for this week, I could take my time of prayer in a kayak, and not write or say or listen to much but just be in this place. One of my sisters-in-law agreed to get a tattoo with her daughter, saying "Be where your feet are." That's a pretty good saying to take to heart, since none of us knows how long we will be on our feet anyway. It has been a very wonderful five weeks so far, and I feel like I’ve been able to empty out what was burned and fill my heart with time in these places that will give energy for the months to come.