Author: Amy Medina Page 22 of 230

Boarding School

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On January 4, 2021

In Third Culture Kids

Thirty years ago this month, I left my family for boarding school. According to American assumptions, that must mean I was a juvenile delinquent. Or maybe a wizard.

But no, Hogwarts didn’t exist in January 1991 when I was 14, but Rift Valley Academy did. My family had recently moved to Ethiopia, and there was no international high school for me. All the missionary teenagers were sent off to RVA in Kenya, so after a semester of lonely correspondence school, I asked my parents if I could join them.

I wanted to go, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified. I was painfully shy and very much a homebody, and though I had already traveled the world in my short life, I had never been away from my family for more than a couple of days.

I can remember seeing my mother’s tear-stained face through the glass at the airport, trying valiantly to hold it together myself. Though I was traveling with a number of older missionary kids, I didn’t know any of them. It was my first time going through immigration on my own, getting on an airplane, and landing in a country I had never been to before. 

A bus picked us up at the airport, and we arrived at the school at dusk. A crowd of kids were there waiting for us, and I saw my suitcase cheerfully carted away by two of the girls from my dorm. There were scads of teenagers, enthusiastically greeting each other after their Christmas “vake,” as they called it, a new vocabulary I knew nothing of. Somehow I managed to be swept along a path, down a set of stairs and into my dorm, where I met the three girls who would be my roommates. 

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The December I Was 14

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On December 15, 2020

In Liberia, Third Culture Kids

It was December 1990, exactly 30 years ago. I had just turned 14.

It was cold that December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A cold Christmas in Africa was new to me, after spending my childhood in the west African tropics. But Addis is almost 8000 feet above sea level, and the temperatures go down into the 40’s at night.

Our house was drafty, if you could call it a house. It was actually an apartment that had been created from a school dormitory, so it wasn’t exactly homey. The hallway was long and wide and sterile, tiled floor and high ceilings, and the hallway seemed to make up the bulk of the house. Huge rolling barn doors separated us from the apartments on either side. The living room was attached to that hallway, and the one source of heat came from the fireplace. Everything else was cold–the floor, the concrete walls, my bedroom, my heart.  

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You Are Not Allowed to Think We Are Poor

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On December 11, 2020

In Poverty

I can hear that edge in your voices, my children. What is it? Self-pity? Envy? You mention the kid at school who gets picked up in a Lamborghini. Or the friend who has a vacation house in Mexico. 

You spend the night at a friend’s beautiful, large house and tell me in shocked amazement how decorations are changed for every season. “Even the soaps in the bathroom!” you exclaim. Your camera roll syncs with mine, so I see how you took pictures of your friend’s walk-in closet, rows of shoes and clothes. 

I overhear another one of you talking to your friend in the backseat about the cars passing by. You like cool cars. Fancy cars. You know they are expensive, so you tell your friend that we can’t buy one. 

“We’re kinda poor, aren’t we, Mom?” you ask.

This did not happen in Tanzania. 

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This Pandemic Can Help Us to Identify With the World’s Poor

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On December 10, 2020

In A Life Overseas, Poverty

I was always blown away by the number of funerals. During the years our househelper in Tanzania worked for us, I lost count of how many times she asked for time off to attend a funeral for a family member. She was my age, but during those years she lost her mother. Her mother-in-law. A sister. More than one uncle. Several cousins. What was the cause? I would always ask. Malaria, typhoid, or many times, no one knew why. Disease and death were far too common. 

Experts will probably be asking it for years: Why are some developing countries seemingly less impacted from COVID-19 than more developed countries? Is it because they just are testing less? Have a younger population, get more sunlight, have more built up immunity? I’m certain some of those factors are true, but I also wonder if a central reason is because the effects of this pandemic haven’t changed much about regular life for the poor in developing countries. What feels shocking and abnormal to us is simply the way they have always lived. 

I’m listing some of these ways below, and I want to be clear that this is not about inducing guilt in those of us from affluent nations. I’m not trying to minimize the grief and loss so many of us have experienced this year. Instead, my purpose is to help us have greater compassion and empathy with the world’s poor. This pandemic can help us to identify with them in ways we had never been able to before. 

What’s new for us is normal for them. Here’s how:

Normalcy of deadly diseases

Yes, COVID-19 is a new virus, but for many in the world, they are already dealing with much worse. Statistics tell us that one and a half million people worldwide have died from COVID. Yet that same number of people die every year from tuberculosis, most of them from India, other parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Like COVID, tuberculosis is also an airborne virus. It may not be a pandemic, but it is most certainly an epidemic.  

In addition, malaria kills over 400,000 people each year, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa (and some in South East Asia). Most of them are young children. There’s also HIV, dengue, typhoid, and rotavirus. For many people in the world, having deadly viruses lurk around every corner, in every cough, in households and churches, is normal life. 

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Imagine You Had to Write a Christmas Letter Like a Missionary

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On December 9, 2020

In Living Like a Missionary, Thoughts on Missions

Imagine you got this December newsletter from a missionary:

Hey friends!

It’s been a great year! We’re really thankful for the amazing vacation we took in Thailand. We also got to attend a really fantastic conference for the whole family in South Korea. We got to go skiing!

Our eldest daughter is excelling in soccer and hoping for a college scholarship, while our youngest continues to spend most of her time playing the violin. She even was invited to play in an elite quartet this year.

Please enjoy the attached pictures of our favorite furry friends, Max and Buddy, who bring our family so much joy!

Love,

Your missionaries

If we would feel uneasy reading this newsletter, we need to ask ourselves a few questions: Are we upset that these missionaries took nice vacations, bragged about their kids, or showed us pictures of something as mundane as their dogs? If so, why should missionaries be on such a higher spiritual plane that they aren’t allowed to write about these things? 

But that’s not my point today. I’ve written about that elsewhere.

The bigger concern with this newsletter–and rightly so–is that we expect missionaries to not just talk about vacations and kids and dogs, but to give some kind of report on their ministry. For people who have been called, sent, and supported, you expect to hear about how they are reaching people with the gospel. 

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