I love gardening, and a friend asked me what kinds of things she should plant at her new house.
“It depends on how much time you want to devote to a garden,” I told her. “I love my flowers, but they are a lot of work. If you don’t enjoy the process, it won’t happen.”
And I listened to myself say these words and contemplated how that’s true about a lot of things.
I’ve been asked several times for advice about starting a blog. “Don’t bother if you don’t love writing,” I tell them. This doesn’t mean that writing isn’t a discipline. There are plenty of times that I have to pick myself up by the scruff of the neck and force my fingers to start moving. But I want to write. I am motivated to do it. So I find the time.
We can complain that there’s never enough time, but the truth is that we find time for what is most important to us.
As a mom, do I have a control problem? Maybe. Do I have a responsibility problem? Definitely.
I’ve taken the StrengthsFinders assessment twice in the past twenty years; both times, responsibility was way up near the top. If I agree to do something, I will do it, and I will do it well, so help me God – or lose my sanity, my sleep, or my good sense in the attempt.
Raising teenagers makes me lose all of the above.
I tried so hard to do All the Good Parenting Things. I made them drink Kiefer, read countless books with them, prayed and played, showed and shared. I taught them to come when I called; I re-learned pre-algebra twice; I put limits on their screen time. I take my job so seriously. I am the Responsiblest Mom of them all.
And now I have four teenagers, with adulthood lurking around every corner, and I feel the desperate urgency looming over me that my time left with them is short. So Gil and I made an Adulting List that they must check off, and we are teaching them to drive, interview, clean, and budget. As they begin to make their own choices, I warn and cajole, nudge and prod.
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.
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.
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.]
[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.
