Grace, who is 15, told me about a conversation she had with an old friend. “She asked me how my year had been going,” Grace said. “And I told her about all the new things in my life and the things that have changed.” Suddenly her face crumpled. “And I realized, I’ve been through a lot, haven’t I?”
Yes, my girl, you have been through a lot.
The earth has made its way around the entirety of the sun since last March, which means we are headed towards all the anniversaries. March 13–the last day I was on campus with my students. March 19–the day we were told we had to leave. March 25–the day we left Tanzania. The emotional impact of each of those days left a yawning hole that has yet to be filled.
I don’t like remembering it. I’ve related the story of March 2020 to friends several times; I’ve re-read the account I wrote. It doesn’t take much to pull me back into the grief and bewilderment and shock all over again. I wonder how long it will take before I can think about it without feeling it.
Gil and I had lived in Tanzania for about a year when missionary friends asked us to house-sit (and dog-sit) for a couple of nights. These friends lived in a large, two story house that they often used to host teams, so it felt like a vacation for us.
We spent the day watching movies from their VHS collection (this was 2002!), and went to bed that night in the downstairs corner room that our hosts had set up for us. Their Schnauzer dog, Stanley, was on the second floor landing, sleeping in his crate.
At around 5:00 the next morning, I was awakened by the distinct sound of metal scraping against metal. The kitchen door was adjacent to our bedroom, and very clearly, I could hear the iron security grate screeching open.
My heart stopped. What I had been dreading was actually happening: We were experiencing an invasion robbery.
We knew a number of friends who had experienced this terror. A gang of thieves entered their homes in the middle of the night, tying up the family, sometimes injuring them, while they robbed the house of its valuables. For the whole year we had lived in Tanzania, I had been terrified that this might happen to us. Now it was.
I thought I was doing fine, and then I watched The Office episode in Season 7 when Michael leaves, and found tears leaking out of my eyes all over the place. And Gil looked at me bewildered, and I choked, “I had to say goodbye to an office too!” So I guess I’m not always doing fine.
I didn’t just inhabit Tanzania; it inhabited me. The humidity settled in my hair, frizzing it out, it dwelt in my skin; I never needed lotion. The tropical sun beat down on me most days of the year; I look at my wrists and neck now, places I didn’t regularly wear sunscreen, and I see that my skin has aged more than my 44 years deem appropriate. My legs and feet were accustomed to sandals and skirts almost every day, not jeans and socks like today. The words I spoke were different–not just when I used Swahili, but my English vocabulary too. My muscles were trained in different patterns; the rough ground I walked on, the way I drove, my routine in the grocery store.
I suppose it’s understandable, then, why I have felt disoriented for so long. My body was yanked out of Tanzania, but for a long while, Tanzania still dwelt in me. It’s not just my mind that has needed reorienting, but my body as well.
In Tanzania, I spent many hours at my tiny kitchen sink, washing dishes. I would stare out the screened window into our backyard watching the dogs and the crows and the occasional chicken. There wasn’t much of a view, mostly just the top of the underground water tank and a cement wall that surrounded the yard. But fuchsia bougainvillea grew on that wall, and several coconut trees towered behind it, their papery leaves rustling in the wind.
It was such a very, very familiar sight to me for many years. I looked out that window when Josiah was two years old, whining at my knee, and when he was twelve years old, making a peanut butter sandwich next to me. Last year, I can remember looking out that window and wondering what it would be like to not look out of it anymore. It was hard to imagine.
My life in Tanzania went on for so long that for a long time, I couldn’t visualize the end of it. Life beyond Tanzania seemed like a fuzzy black hole, out of focus.
I wrote this piece for A Life Overseas, with the intended audience of missionaries preparing to serve or just arrived on the field. It might give you a glimpse into what they experience. But you know what? I wrote this based partially on my experiences in re-locating back to the States. These thoughts really can apply to many different good, hard things that God has called us to do. I hope it encourages you today.
You know that country you’ve been dreaming about? The one that you have been praying over and researching? You’ve been talking about it endlessly these days, building a team who will support you when you move there. You are ready to uproot your family, your job, your entire life to pour your soul into the place you love so much.
Call me a party pooper, but today I’m here to tell you something important: Shortly after you finally arrive in that country, you are going to hate it.
It might take a few weeks, or maybe a few months, but at some point it’s going to happen: You will wonder why on earth you thought you would love this country. You will question why you enthusiastically raised support for so many months to go live in a place that you actually despise.
You can’t understand Tanzanians without understanding their view of the spirit world. It permeates every facet of life. Witchdoctors are often present at national soccer games, fending off the curses of the other team. Albino children have been known to have a limb cut off in the middle of the night, the appendage sold by a family member to a wealthy businessman who uses it in magic rituals. A herd of witchdoctor’s goats on our street ran free, tended by a spirit creature.
These beliefs were not just seen as superstitions or old wives tales. They were embedded in the worldview, part of the air the people breathed. Coming from our western, enlightened, scientific worldview, our heads would spin from these stories. But we learned, early on, that this was serious business. We needed to pay attention.
If we had come in scoffing and mocking, critical and judgmental, how well do you think Tanzanians would have listened to us? They would have written us off. Though some stories were speculative, every Tanzanian has experienced situations with the spirit world that defy western imagination. They know what they have seen, or felt, or heard. Blowing it off was not an option. If we wanted to have a voice in Tanzania, we needed to first be learners.
Steven Hawthorne* wrote, “If our impression of another culture is that it ‘makes no sense,’ then we can be sure that we are not making sense to them either. The solution is to become a learner.”
My job these days is to help prepare new missionaries to move overseas. What I am discovering is that the same things they are learning can be just as easily applied to American Christians.
