Author: Amy Medina Page 1 of 231

Five Years In

On March 25, 2025

Today, March 25th, is five years since I left Tanzania. Tomorrow will be five years since I’ve been back in the States.

A few weeks ago, I took our dog Mzungu out for a walk at night because it rained all day and when it is raining, he refuses to go outside to do his business unless he is on a leash on a walk. I didn’t want to bother with both the leash and an umbrella, so I figured we’d be quick and I wouldn’t get too wet.

We had an incredibly dry winter in Southern California. It had been months and months since it really rained here, so my senses soaked in the rain just like the thirsty earth. The dog did what he needed to do, but I found myself still walking.

The dark streets were empty and the windows glowed warm, and the rain dripped off my hair into my eyes and seeped through my jacket, but I kept walking.

And I walked and I remembered. I wasn’t thinking at all about Africa, and then suddenly I was. Rain, in my memories, is synonymous with Africa.

I remembered walking home from school in Liberia when the dusty red roads would turn into muddy red rivers and my flip-flops would splatter red on the backs of my legs. Thunder would roar around me and lightning would crack onto the ocean and I would twirl and dance in the warmth and power engulfing me.

I remembered my children in Tanzania, shoving on their rainboots and charging outside, returning sopping and breathless and pleading for hot chocolate (though it couldn’t possibly have been under 80 degrees).

Some months it rained so often that I told teachers to send their kids out for recess in the rain unless it was pouring, and I remembered their plastered hair and shining faces, piles of shoes outside each classroom.

I rarely bothered with an umbrella in Africa. The rain was either too light and I knew I would dry off quickly, or it was too strong and an umbrella would be useless anyway.

Sleeping to the sound of rain on a tin roof. Wet feet in sandals. Dark skies, temperamental ocean waves. Crystals dripping off hibiscus petals.

And now it’s been five years. It’s strange how for so many years I couldn’t see the end to living in Africa, and now all of a sudden, it’s been five years since I left.

So as I walked and remembered, the wetness from my eyes mingled with the wetness from the sky. I miss Africa. Yet the memories are latent now. They don’t sit on my chest and keep me from breathing. It feels like a long time ago, and that makes me sad. I don’t think of it every day anymore, and that makes me sad.

I was talking to a friend who returned from serving overseas a couple of years after I did. She was fresh in the grief of leaving the place she loved, and I assured her that it would eventually be okay – things would get better. She asked me: Did it really get better, or did you just get used to it?

I’ve thought about that question for a long while. Because those losses I felt so acutely at the beginning – the loss of community, the loss of a life that overflowed with meaning and purpose, curiosity and discovery – those things have not been replaced. I have grown content with dimmer substitutes instead. I’ve just gotten used to it.

Of course, nostalgia has a way of bringing to the surface only the sweetness while the bitter seems fuzzy. Part of the reason that African rain was so sweet was because the heat was so oppressive. Driving and sleeping and cooking and communicating are infinitely easier in America. I love that my house has no bugs in it. I love being able to walk my neighborhood at night and feel safe.

Yet even in these perks, there is a sense of loss. Being challenged daily, realizing I could do more and be more than I originally thought I was capable of, seeing tangible results of sanctification in my heart – those African inconveniences turned out to be quite convenient indeed.

Perhaps this is why, even after five years back in my passport country, I still often feel like I am floating on the outside of things. I hover here – my body planted firmly in one country, my soul forever existing in divided loyalty. Yet it’s worth it. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

One Year Later
Two Years In
Three Years In

The Executive Order That Makes My Blood Run Cold

By Amy Medina

On March 13, 2025

In How Africans Think, How Americans Think

Of all the startling executive orders announced in the last few months, why does halting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act scare me the most?

This is why.

It was a Sunday morning in Tanzania, we were on our way to church, and we needed gas. We pulled our rickety white van into the nearest station (which were always full-service) while Gil and I fished around for cash (which was always the only payment option).

Gil only had 50,000 shillings, which he passed to the gas station attendant. As the attendant filled the tank, I triumphantly rustled up another 30,000 shillings from the depths of my purse. “Aha! We can top up now!” I declared.

I rolled down my window. “Please add another 30,000,” I called in Swahili to the attendant.

Oddly, instead of adding extra gas to our tank, the gas station attendant pulled a large wad of receipts from his pocket. He sifted through them and handed me an old, wrinkled receipt for 80,000 shillings.

I sat there for a moment, totally flummoxed, until it dawned on me. The attendant had misunderstood me. He didn’t realize I was asking for 30,000 shillings of extra gas; he thought I wanted a receipt for 30,000 shillings more than we had paid.

Why would the gas station attendant make that assumption and then nonchalantly comply? Because people in Dar es Salaam who are wealthy enough to own cars often hire drivers. The drivers run their errands and, of course, fill the car up with gas. And if a driver can produce an inflated receipt to his employer, he gets some extra cash on the side.

So when customers left their receipts behind, the gas station attendants collected them, ready to dutifully pass them on to pilfering drivers. If I had wanted a false receipt, all I needed to do was ask. Embezzlement was that easy.

Conversations with Grace: Black History Month

By Amy Medina

On February 26, 2025

In Race and Diversity

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Grace (who is currently 19 and a freshman in college). Like the last time she and I did this, remember that her perspectives are her own and don’t represent all others like her (or even her siblings). But I know you will find her thoughts informative and interesting!

When you were a Tanzanian kid growing up in Tanzania with American parents, what did you know about American Black History? Did you feel any connection with it?

We read books as a family about the black struggle in America, like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Watsons Go to Birmingham. But I didn’t feel a connection to them. I remember thinking that Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas were really cool, but I was not African-American so they weren’t my people.

I knew about the East African slave trade because we visited museums in Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, which were places that were a part of the slave trade. It was flabbergasting to see that it really happened to people, because even now, as a history major, it’s amazing that we as a human race treated other humans like that. But East African slaves did not go to America. [They primarily went to the Middle East or were enslaved within Africa for exports of ivory or other goods.]

How did that change when you moved here?

[We moved to the United States in the spring of 2020, shortly before the George Floyd riots that summer.] When we first moved here, I was in Target walking around without Mom, and this guy who was an older white man in a motorized wheelchair, stopped me. He said, “I just want you to know that Black Lives Matter and I believe that.”

I said, “Thank you.” But I wanted to say, “But I’m African.” Because I didn’t feel a connection with the movement at the time.

People assume that I am African-American. I don’t have an African accent; I sound like my parents. My love for other accents may have gotten me into trouble because I do use African-American vernacular all the time. So I can sound as if I’ve been raised in an African-American home. But I don’t always have the heart to explain the entire story, so I let them go ahead and believe that.

When Kisa joined my school sophomore year, that changed a lot for me. [Kisa was an international exchange student from Tanzania.] She helped me to embrace that part of myself and be proud of my identity as a Tanzanian.

How do you see the distinction between African-American and African?

If you have an ancestry of your family coming here due to slavery, then that’s what I count as African-American. African-Americans have their own culture of music and food. There’s also the impact of GI Bills and other forms of racism that have affected them. Things like gang life have been a part of African-American culture but not African immigrants.

African immigrants (like me) have a different culture. They stay much more African.

Thoughts on Foreign Aid, Immigration, and American Privilege

By Amy Medina

On January 29, 2025

In How Americans Think, Race and Diversity

I’ve been lamenting this week.

I went to church in Tanzania with Americans who worked for USAID. So when I think about foreign aid programs abruptly cut off, I think about those American families who uprooted their children to make a difference in developing countries and suddenly have no job. I think about local people employed by those agencies who suddenly have no way to feed their families. And, of course, I think about the impoverished people who benefit from those programs.

I hear Americans saying that this is justified because we need to help our own people first, that we have people in poverty here, people suffering from natural disasters. But then I consider how America’s foreign aid to other countries last year was only about 70 billion dollars. Which sounds like a lot until you consider that 70 billion dollars is less than 1 percent of the Federal Budget. Which still may sound like a lot until you realize that Americans spent 960 billion dollars on Christmas in 2024.

The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the world’s wealth. So do we have an obligation to help other countries? I think so. Especially when you consider that much of the world’s poverty contributes to our wealth — as in the cobalt industry in Congo.

On the other hand, living overseas has also made me very aware that government aid programs need much reform. I’ve read Dead Aid. I’ve read When Helping Hurts. But is drastically yanking the funding out under their feet the most effective way for reform? That just seems like a good way to create more instability and poverty.

I know hundreds of immigrants by name. I have Tanzanian friends who won the Green Card Lottery and now live in the States. As a school principal in Tanzania, some of my students were “anchor babies”—African or Asian children whose mothers flew to the U.S. to give birth solely to get their children U.S. citizenship. I’ve helped in after-school programs for children whose parents were undocumented. I’ve met refugee families who have built beautiful lives in America.

Even my children are immigrants, for goodness sake. I am intimately acquainted with the I-130, the N600K, the I-600, the I-485, and the B-2 visa applications, and I spent thousands of dollars to get them approved. I’ve scoured the instructions for these visas so carefully that I’ve sometimes known more about them than embassy consular officers or USCIS officers. The gray hairs on my head are named after visa applications.

So when I sense this mood of anti-immigration swirling around me, I take it personally. I see the faces of friends. I see the faces of my own children. And I know people would never say that my children aren’t welcome here. That my children aren’t those kind of immigrants. But that’s my point – all the clampdowns, loss of funding, and careless denigrating comments about immigrants don’t specify that there are many different kinds of immigrants. Refugees are not the same as asylum seekers which are not the same as illegal border crossers which are not the same as anchor babies which are not the same as adopted children.

Yet each has a face, a name, a story. Each is made in the image of God.

I think we all can agree, without a doubt, that we are not in favor of criminals and drug dealers and rapists immigrating to our country and that we need better ways of keeping them out. But when all the bad guys are thrown into the same pot as the vast majority of people who just want freedom and justice and a place to live without bombs and the Taliban and drug lords, I am indignant. On behalf of my friends. On behalf of my children.

As an American, I believe that strength comes from diversity of perspective and culture. With falling birthrates, the U.S. needs immigration to be sustainable. Plus, the U.S. economy is projected to increase by 9 trillion dollars in the next ten years because of the immigration surge.

As a Christian, I’m thrilled by the opportunities to live out the gospel in the lives of millions of people on our soil who might never be introduced to Jesus in their own country.

I can believe these things and still believe that an open border is not wise and that our country desperately needs immigration reform. (Trust me, I’ve experienced the dumpster fire of U.S. immigration up close and personal.)

I realize I may regret sharing these thoughts with the world. Our country has reached a frenzied pitch of political tension and the last thing I want to do is add to the noise. My prayer is to add perspective.

My fellow American Christians, I implore you:

Remember that to whom much has been given, much will be required. We are living in the most powerful, most wealthy country that has ever existed in the history of the earth. Even Americans who are struggling financially are still richer than more than 90% of the world’s population. We are the aristocracy of the world. It is true that we, as a nation and as an American Church, cannot help everyone. But when our country holds 30% of the world’s wealth, we wield an extremely powerful influence.

Let us not be flippant. Let us be sober-minded, recognizing our power and the responsibility that comes with it. Let us consider this responsibility with grave, thoughtful, careful, prayerful mindfulness. Let us not be guided by fear or by anger, by entitlement or selfishness, but let us hold the weight of what we have been given, remembering that one day, every American Christian will be held accountable for how we stewarded or squandered the vast freedom and wealth we have been given.

Let us remember that those of us who were born American and have access to a U.S. passport did nothing to deserve it. We won the DNA lottery. In God’s sovereign grace, He has chosen us to belong to this privileged country and time in history. Let us live as those who recognize the depth of the privilege we possess. And to whom much has been given, much will be required.

We may not have control over government policies or executive orders, but there is much we can control. We can cheer on reform but still speak well of immigrants, welcome and befriend them well. We can give generously and then give some more to international development projects. If we are involved in international business, we can choose justice and integrity over profit. We can advocate for America to welcome refugees – arguably the most deserving, most vetted, and the most vulnerable immigrants out there. And we can live our lives in a way that prioritizes the kingdom of God so much more than a kingdom on earth.

I love this movie about refugees: The Good Lie and look forward to watching this one: Between Borders. I also love these books: Everything Sad is Untrue, After the Last Border, and Nowhere Boy (great for a read aloud with kids).

* Pictures by Gil Medina on Zanzibar Island

It Could Have Been Me

By Amy Medina

On January 11, 2025

In Eternity

My friend Lucy in Tanzania sent me this text this morning: Habari za leo, dada. Nyumbani kwako ni sawa? Ninaomba kwa wewe sana. Upo wapi?

Roughly translated: How are you, sister? Is your house okay? I am praying hard for you. Where are you located?

When a friend from the other side of the world, who gets her news from local Tanzanian radio, knows about the fires in Southern California, that’s when you know you know the events happening around you are a big deal.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to the howling of sirens and the smell of smoke and looked out my second-story window to see a dark plume in the distance.

“It looks close,” I told Gil. “But I know the mountains can play tricks on you.” The mountains surrounding us on three sides had been on fire in September (over 40,000 acres in the end). Those fires had seemed close too, but stayed miles away.

I jumped onto Facebook and saw my local community groups buzzing with chatter. I was right this time – the fire was close. The Moose Lodge, not half a mile from our house, was engulfed in flames.