(So did Gil, who took all these wonderful pictures.)
Going to Amani in fifth grade is the highlight of the year, and since that tradition started way back when I taught fifth grade at HOPAC, it’s especially fun to see my own kids go. In fact, one of my first posts on this blog was from an Amani trip!
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| African violets are native to the Amani Rainforest. |
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| So are chameleons of all shapes and sizes. |
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| These guys are much more interesting in the forest than in my bathroom. |
My family’s front porch in Liberia faced the ocean. A dirt road and a lagoon separated our house from where the sand began and the waves crashed, but it was enough of a beach house that the fridge rusted and my mom had to mop the salt off the floors every day.
Many hours would find me on the hammock on that front porch, one of the few places where my introverted tween awkwardness felt at home. It was a rough rope hammock, and I would sit sideways on it like a swing, my legs pushing against the cement railing on the porch. Liberian sunsets on that ocean, complete with silhouetted coconut palms, were as post-cardish as any honeymooner could ask for, but my clearest memories are of the rain.
Liberian rain was never some mamsy-pamsy sprinkling; it was a waterfall from the sky. The smell of that rain would engulf me, full of sea salt and warmth and growing things. And I would swing on my hammock, dreaming my young-girl dreams, and watch the lightning crack out of a dark sky and strike the expanse of my ocean.
We often miss the beauty of our childhoods while we are in the midst of it, much too focused on interpreting those best-friend-comments and science-project-scores to pay much attention, but the rain and the lightning and the swinging hammock was such a large, enveloping beauty that even in my twelve-year-old self-centeredness, I was able to feel something like awe.
Across that dirt road, in a house that was even closer to the ocean, lived friends. Their kids were around the same ages as my brother and I, and we spent many an afternoon canoeing on the swamp or trying to make a clubhouse in their attic, but it was so hot we could only each spend a few minutes in there at a time before we climbed down, gasping for breath. I practiced piano in their house every day, since they had a piano and we didn’t, and one at a time, we borrowed all of their Asterix and Tin Tin comics. “Bock, Bock!” I would holler at their screen door, because that’s what you said in Liberia when you came to someone’s door. They would always let me in.
We made a teepee out of palm branches and their daughter and me created fantasy lands for our Barbie dolls in the sand and the swamp and the forest around our homes. They were from Arizona, so at Christmas they introduced us to the tradition of paper bag lanterns–luminarias–which filled the humid night air with magic.
My third-culture-kid childhood was filled with so much beauty–both in the land itself, and in so many people who loved me and became like family, because that’s what happens when you find yourself thrust into a land with other foreigners who, like you, have no idea what they are doing.
I always wanted my own children to have a childhood like that.
Remarkably, they have. They already have more stamps in their passports than most people get in a lifetime. They’ve stood in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro and visited the Apartheid Museum in South Africa. They’ve fed giraffes in Kenya and watched baby sea turtles hatch and spent hundreds of hours in warm tropical oceans. And they have been deeply loved by Zimbabweans and Brits and Americans and Tanzanians who have enriched their lives with accents and cultures and family-bonds.
But as I dreamed that life for my kids, I failed to remember the grief.
It is easy to remember all the great stuff but naively think I would be able to protect my kids from all the hard stuff. Changing schools and relationships and countries and cultures several times in the course of a childhood–as extraordinary as it all sounds–is also excruciating.
Grace came home with a large drawing board in a plastic artist’s folder last week.
“It’s from my art teacher,” she said proudly. “He’s starting me on advanced art. He says that he’s going to give me a head’s start for IGCSE Art in 9th grade. I mean, if I’m here in 9th grade.”
If I’m here. Because we don’t know.
We had lunch with friends the other day, the ones who have felt like family for ten years. But they are leaving Tanzania this summer, and their daughter and Grace are an unbeatable duo–truly a sight to behold–on their basketball team. “You’ve got to come move near us and go to my school, and we can play basketball together!” she pleaded with Grace. Because it’s unthinkable to imagine living apart.
That same day we got more news: Another family we know and love will be leaving even sooner. I told the kids in the car; I didn’t want to look them in the eyes. Everyone was silent.
They are getting used to this.
And I wonder, What have I done to my children?
I remember how I wept when I found out that we wouldn’t be able to return to Liberia; wept for the loss of my home, wept for the country that was being destroyed by war. That family who lived on the other side of the road–after two years of water balloon fights and piano practices and luminarias and sharing every part of life–we separated into different worlds and we never saw them again.
I look into my children’s stony faces, steeling themselves against another loss; I hear the if I’m here in their voices and I remember my own childhood–the part I don’t like to remember. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” I’ll say without a moment’s hesitation. But is it fair to impose on them the pain that goes with it? Do I have the right to say to them, “This is going to hurt a whole lot, but it will be worth it?”
I guess that’s the thing about parenting–we make all these choices for these small people under our care, and they don’t get any say in it. We choose where they will live, how they will be educated, how many siblings they will have, who they will be friends with. None of this seems like a big deal when they are little and an extension of us, but then they get bigger and smarter and they start to realize that some of the choices we made for them have difficult repercussions. Our enthusiastic, It will be worth it! starts to sound more hollow, to them and to us, because the truth is, we really don’t know if it will be.
I’m realizing that as much as I want (and try) to write my kids’ stories for them, I really only get to make the basic outline. I can create the setting and even write in a bunch of the characters, but they control the perspective, which is really what makes or breaks a story. And ultimately, I must trust that there’s an Author who’s a whole lot bigger than I am, and who loves them a whole lot more than I do, who is doing most of the writing behind the scenes.
Four-year-olds don’t walk, they twirl and prance. They think everything about the world is fascinating, even writing their names or matching shapes or learning to sit criss-cross applesauce.
On Saturday, I met dozens of them. They visited our kindergarten room while some teachers and I asked them to count and say their letters and watched them play and dance while we took notes. Some were shy, some were cheerful, some, we could tell, would be a handful, but that just made them all the more charming.
I was enchanted. But I was also depressed. There were just too many. Three times too many, to be exact. All of them had come to be assessed for next year’s kindergarten class, and all of them were wonderful. But there were just too many. I will only be able to offer places to about a third of them.
Their parents sat outside drinking coffee under the trees. Their eyes were hopeful, expectant, a little nervous. I tried not to make much eye contact. It is just too hard, knowing that I will have to turn down most of them. I don’t want to get their hopes up.
Their emails turn my stomach into knots. We’ve never wanted any other school for our child since she was born! HOPAC is our first and only choice. My child loved his visit with you! He is so excited to attend HOPAC now.
I know my response will break their hearts. Your child was wonderful; we just don’t have room. He can join the 40 other children on our waiting list for that class.
We never advertise, but we never fail to have at least sixty applicants for kindergarten. For some families, it’s because of the Christian environment at HOPAC. For some, it’s our reputation of sending students to the world’s top universities. For others, it’s the price. Among similar schools in Tanzania, we offer the best quality for the lowest fees.
Mystified, parents will ask, Why don’t you just expand?
And the answer is always the same: We can’t get enough teachers.
Though over half of our students are Tanzanian, we are a missionary school, relying on volunteers from westernized countries to raise support to teach here. Of course, we hire Tanzanians whenever we can, but finding Tanzanian Christians who are qualified to teach in an international school is not easy. Which means we are dependent on the Church (mainly from the US and Europe) to send us teachers.
But for some reason, recruiting and sending missionary teachers is not a priority for the Church, or even for most mission agencies. Maybe because teachers fall into the category of second-class missionaries. Sometimes it feels like church planters or aid workers seem more exciting or important.
I don’t understand why teachers are often on the back-burner of missions. Parents of all kinds of religious faiths are pounding down the door of our Christian school, desperate for their kids to attend. We get the privilege of influencing those kids for seven hours a day for thirteen years. We teach with a biblical worldview. We train our students in poverty alleviation. The gospel permeates everything we do. How is this ministry not a priority?
Please, Church, prioritize missionary teachers. Find them. Encourage them. Support them. It’s one of the most strategic avenues of missions that I’ve witnessed in my twenty years overseas.
And if you’re a Christian teacher, why not you?
Nicole Chung’s birth parents didn’t want her, so they put her up for adoption. She writes about her journey to find her birth family and process her identity in the poignant memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
Nicole found out that her birth parents told her siblings and their family that the baby was born dead. They wanted her erased from memory, as if the pregnancy never happened. But life doesn’t work that way. Nicole writes, “Words I’d once heard from a birth mother flashed in my mind: If there’s something that everyone should know
about adoption, it’s that there is no end to this. There’s no closure.”
As an adoptive parent, I’ve learned this tragic truth from experience as I help my own children work through their grief and loss of their first families–a loss that will continue to haunt them as they grow up and start their own families. We can celebrate the redemption and beauty of adoption till we’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t take away the heartbreak.
How ironic that it’s the same for the birth mother. She may even tell everyone the baby died, but she knows, niggling around in her mind, refusing to be ignored, that her baby is out there, growing up somewhere. I think about that often as I look into the faces of my children who spent nine months growing in the body of another woman, their blood flowing alongside hers, listening to her voice, feeling her joy and sadness and fear. My children wish for one glimpse of her face; I wish for one chance to tell her that her baby is okay.
It’s easy for us to judge the woman who wants that baby dead and hands over her money to make it all go away. Perhaps she does it because she knows, by instinct, that adoption won’t grant her closure. Perhaps it scares her to death knowing that one day she may pass a person on the street that mirrors her face. Perhaps it’s easier to just know that the baby is dead, and hope that a dead baby brings more closure than a baby raised by someone else who will someday inevitably want to find the woman who gave her away.
I spent years longing to be pregnant, so I don’t know what it feels like. But I remember talking to a friend who kept getting pregnant despite her and her husband’s efforts to hold it off. She is an amazing mother and adores all of her children, but her pregnancies were unusually harsh, and she noted the irony of hers and my situations. Despite my longing, I couldn’t help but feel empathy towards her. Pregnancy starts with such a seemingly insignificant act but holds incredibly significant consequences.
Pro-lifers keep using the “But it’s life” argument against abortion, without realizing that for many pro-choice women, that’s not a consequential discussion any more. Everyone knows it’s life. Pro-choice advocates are fighting for the right for a woman to choose not to reproduce. Sure, a third trimester baby could just be delivered and whisked off to an adoption agency, but that’s not the point. Because that live baby means that somewhere out there will be a person living and breathing and thinking that has an eternal, inexplicable connection to that mother. Which could be terrifying. Terrifying enough that it’s easier just to destroy it and hope that it brings closure.
It doesn’t, of course. But I’m writing this today because I think it’s important that instead of just loudly protesting (though that’s important too), we need to take a moment to try to get into the heads of these women. Yes, laws need to change because laws shape the worldview of a nation. And laws that destroy personhood and denigrate motherhood are a worthy fight. But changing hearts is equally as important, and that’s got to start by listening, understanding, empathizing, befriending. I pray for those opportunities.
“What do baby hedgehogs eat?” I hear Grace ask.
“I have no idea,” I say.
She gives me a 13-year-old look. “I wasn’t asking you, Mom. I was asking Siri.”
Well, excuuuuuse me.
Contrary to what many may believe about our life in Tanzania, we don’t live in the Serengeti; we live in a city of six million people. But we do have a rather enormous backyard, and it has brought us an interesting variety of wildlife: Chickens (not really wildlife, but certainly wild), tortoises, kingfishers, monitor lizards, bats, snakes, and hedgehogs. I got over the novelty of hedgehogs a long time ago….those things are loud when they want to be–like when a dog is trying to kill it. After many, many evenings of frantic barking and wailing hedgehogs, we got used to finding the poor prickly creatures and chucking them over the fence, just to get everybody to shut up.
But then my children found a baby hedgehog, which, according to my children, is apparently an entirely different category of hedgehog which shouldn’t be thrown over the fence but needs to be brought into the house and fed and named and snuggled (as much as a creature with spines can be snuggled). The children’s father immediately went along with this idea as soon as Google told him that this type of hedgehog will cost you about $200 in the States. He’s always up for a good deal. The children’s mother was not consulted, because she is the family’s stick-in-the-mud.
So there you have it: We now have added Hamilton Willow Leo Medina into our family, which is a very long name for something that weighs about five ounces. Hammie now has his own, homemade, elaborate cage complete with a hamster wheel, even though he is not a hamster and may not like wheels. In fact, he showed very little appreciation for the cage, because while we were eating dinner he got out of it and got lost in my bedroom, which meant that there were four children crawling around the floor with flashlights while Mom was hollering, “I don’t want a hedgehog to die in my bedroom so no one gets to watch AFV until you find it!”
And of course, this is all very confusing to Snoopy, who as a Jack Russell was bred to search and destroy small moving creatures and has, until this point, been encouraged to do so. But no one seems to listen to me when I bring this up. Siri is smarter than me anyway, so what do I know?
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