Category: Leaving Tanzania Page 3 of 5

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 Never Thought I Would Miss the Spiders

By Amy Medina

On November 16, 2020

In A Life Overseas, Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

Earlier this year, my kids and I were still in Tanzania, and while driving home, we stopped at a roadside fruit stand.

I asked for a huge bunch of bananas, handed the seller my money, and she passed the bananas through the window to my pre-teen son, sitting in the passenger seat. This was routine; we did it several times a week.

I pulled back onto the street and had driven just a few yards when I heard my son give a horrified yell. Alarmed, I looked over and saw an enormous spider, about the size of a silver dollar, crawling on top of the bananas in his lap. The yell turned into a guttural yelping, as my son stood up, dropped the bananas on the seat and proceeded to clamber over all of the seats and into the trunk of our minivan.

Meanwhile, I was still driving, and meanwhile, the spider was also running for his life in my direction, so I joined in with the cacophony of noise in the car. The spider then decided that hiding underneath my seat was a safe place to get away from all the screaming.

I Don’t Want to Waste This Emptiness

By Amy Medina

On November 7, 2020

In Book Recommendations, Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

Every morning I would step out under the East African sun onto the piece of heaven called Haven of Peace Academy. I could look out past the palm trees onto the expanse of the Indian Ocean, enveloped in that beauty. Everywhere I walked I was surrounded by children; everywhere I turned there was someone to talk to, a parent, a teacher, a bouncing, dancing first grader. I ate lunch with a Brit and a Dane and a Zimbabwean; every conversation was alive with culture and rich diversity and perspective. My days were full of problems to solve and noise and laughter and light.

Now every day I wake up in my small apartment and take the kids to school. I sit on my couch and am bombarded by the silence. I face the computer all day and my only interactions with other people are through that screen. I fix myself lunch and eat with a magazine. I go to the grocery store and never recognize anyone. I go to church and few know my name. I am alone, and I am unknown. And inside is a yawning emptiness.

The deaths in my life this year line up like tombstones. The death of my self-respect; being forced to leave Tanzania early engulfed my head in shame. The death of feeling competent, knowledgeable, relevant; starting a new job is like becoming a toddler again. The death of being known; the wealth of my relationships in Tanzania took twenty years to build. I lift my weary eyes to climbing that mountain over again and it feels insurmountable.

Leaving Early Has Complicated All the Complicated Emotions of Re-Entry

By Amy Medina

On October 10, 2020

In Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

My youngest has been fascinated with finding places on Google Earth. He recently brought me the iPad and said, “Mommy, help me find HOPAC.”

My son is in third grade, and Haven of Peace Academy is where he went to school for kindergarten through second grade. But even before that, HOPAC was always a part of his life. It’s where my husband and I ministered for sixteen years. The last three years, it was where I was the elementary school principal.

I showed him how to type in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. “Here’s downtown, right?” I pointed out. I traced the main road that led to the north of the city. “This is Shoppers Plaza; that’s where we would buy chicken on Saturday nights; this is the White Sands roundabout. Then you turn right here, and see? There’s HOPAC!”

Together we then traced the road down a little further until we could pick out the house where we had lived for ten years. We zoomed in on it, and a hundred memories rushed out. My eyes grew misty. My finger stopped, hovering there, suspended above our home. Ten thousand miles away, yet so close I could almost touch it.

“I like my new school,” Johnny tells me. “But I like Tanzania better.” Me too, Buddy.

***

I knew there would be grief in leaving. We had planned our departure a year in advance; we knew it was coming. We knew it would be hard. Tanzania had been our home for sixteen years.

But what I can’t figure out is what part of my grief is because we left, and what part of my grief is because we left the way we did.

***

The End of Part One

By Amy Medina

On July 1, 2020

In Leaving Tanzania

I remember my first night in Africa.

I had just turned six years old about a week earlier, so it was that time of life when memories are short bursts–seconds, really–like someone cut a few frames out of an old-time movie reel.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to my grandmother; I don’t remember the plane ride or who picked us up from the airport. But I remember my first night in Liberia.

Those few seconds of memory consist of a mental image of my room–the bed up against the wall and under the window. A window screen separated me from the jungle just a few feet outside. It was almost dark. The air felt different, I remember. Warmer, heavier, richer. I don’t think I felt afraid, just interest, and curiosity, in all the strange newness that enveloped me.

Such lack of fear is the blessing of childhood. There was a hole in that screen about a the size of a quarter, and it made my mother very worried that a snake would come through that hole and devour her only daughter on her first night in Africa. Thankfully, no snake came in and ate me. Only mosquitoes did.

I am 43 years old, and I have spent 22 of them on the African continent. This year tipped the scale, just over half of my life spent there versus here. Other than those first six years before Liberia, all the other years in America were defined by my time in Africa. Ask anyone who knew me during the longest stretch I lived in the States–10th grade through college–and they’ll agree that I was single-minded in my desire to return to the continent of my upbringing. A guy told me in college, “No one will want to date you if your goal is to live in Africa.” I didn’t care. And he was wrong.

It won’t be long before the scale is tipped back to the American side. The difference this time is that I look into the foreseeable future and all I see is a life here. Of course, I know that might not be true; life in its twists and turns leads us all kinds of places. My children are international and will probably want to live international lives, so who knows where Gil and I will end up? But that is still a long way away. For now, I am here.

We moved into our apartment, so this week I’ve been finally unpacking all of the things I brought from Tanzania. The emotion of leaving so suddenly swept over me again, as I visualized the panicked hours spent stuffing those things into those boxes. I had to wipe dust off of the picture frames. I packed so hastily that I didn’t even have time to clean them first.

This is Tanzanian dust I’m wiping off, I thought. This is the earth of the continent I called home for 22 years. I wrung out the rag in the sink and watched the brown water seep away from me, into the Californian earth.

For the past three months, I have stubbornly refused to let go. I still had a job, and it was in Tanzania, so that gave me good reason to keep my mind and heart there. The bookmark in my planner is still stuck on the week of March 16, even though I kept using the rest of the pages. I unpacked my watch, and it was still running on East African time.

But now the time has come that would have been the end, even in that alternate universe. This day, or one of the next few days, would have been my last in Tanzania. I must now plant my feet firmly in this American soil, like it or not.

I don’t really know who I am in America. I don’t know what kind of American I’ll be, what with the 22 years of Africa stuffed into me. I never really belonged in Africa, of course, no matter what I told myself. It wasn’t mine to call my own. But still, the continent gave me so much: Unparalleled experiences. Courage to stretch beyond my naturally cautious instincts. Recognition of my incredibly privileged life. Faith that was battered and questioned and strengthened. Extraordinary perspective. Four remarkable children. It is impossible to imagine who I would be without Africa.

Somehow, I must figure out how not to just live as an American, but as an American who has spent 22 years in Africa. If my life were a book, Part Two would be just beginning.

Gil Medina, Mikumi National Park, Tanzania

Category: Leaving Tanzania Page 3 of 5

Writing In Past Tense About My Missionary Life

I Never Thought I Would Miss the Spiders

I Don’t Want to Waste This Emptiness

Leaving Early Has Complicated All the Complicated Emotions of Re-Entry

The End of Part One