Category: Liberia Page 1 of 2

The Mystery of Salvation: My Story of Doubt and Faith

On August 21, 2023

In Book Recommendations, Liberia, My Memoirs

I remember the indignation I felt over the miniature potted plant.

I was eight years old, and it was Sunday School at the big Baptist church on the hill. The fluorescent lights flickered as we squirmed in our metal folding chairs while the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to invite Jesus into our hearts. She reminded us that every head was bowed and every eye was closed because, apparently, this was a secret decision. We peeked behind fingers laced in front of our eyes.

A brown-haired girl was summoned behind the room divider and reappeared a few minutes later, surrounded by the approving gaze of the teachers. She seemed rather flippant for one who had just done something that required the rest of us to sit so solemnly with every-head-bowed-and-every-eye-closed.

I knew what had happened behind the room divider; the drill was familiar, even with only eight years under my belt. The teacher would have recited a prayer; the girl would have repeated it, and presto: Jesus was now in her heart.

When the brown-haired girl emerged, she was holding a fake miniature potted plant: a prize, presumably, for raising her hand. Jealously flamed. I loved anything miniature, and I briefly contemplated raising my hand too. Yet I was caught in a conundrum: I had learned that you could only ask Jesus into your heart once, and I had already done so with my mother when I was five years old, right next to the record player that sat under the dining room window. There was nothing I could do to get myself that prize. I wondered, should this decision even warrant a prize? The unfairness planted itself as a memory.

By 12, my faith had grown with my shoe size. In Liberia, I was incubated in an extraordinary community of multicultural Christians. Why wouldn’t I want to align myself with their God? Every night, I sat on my bed and read five chapters of the Bible, framed by the old-fashioned brown-flowered wallpaper in my bedroom. I went straight through until I got bogged down in Isaiah and skipped to the New Testament. I wrote little notes with goals for myself on how to improve in one fruit of the Spirit each month. I cried when I prayed for my unsaved family members.

I told my Dad I was ready to be baptized. In Liberia, the school gymnasium was also the church, representing the worst of times (P.E.) and the best of times (Psalty musicals). One Sunday, I stood outside that gymnasium while the cover was pulled off of the small concrete baptismal, and I stood in line in the red dust with several others. “Why do you want to be baptized?” the pastor asked me. “So that I can show the world I’m a Christian,” was my confident reply.

But yet, I had doubts. When did I actually become a Christian? I had no dramatic conversion story; I couldn’t remember not believing. So was my faith legitimate? What else did I need to do? Fear of being Left Behind permeated my generation. How could I be sure I was in?

Send Their Letters Back

By Amy Medina

On May 24, 2022

In Liberia, Re-Entry to America, Third Culture Kids

How does a 13-year-old girl process the destruction of the home she loves? In 8th grade, I watched helplessly from a distance as I heard reports of civil war destroying Liberia, the country that defined my childhood.

My expectation of returning to Liberia for my high school years slowly evaporated over the spring of 1990. As our mission organization scrambled to find a new assignment for us, my life skewed off in a direction that felt darker, unsteady, unsure.

I worked through that grief over many years, but recently an unexpected gift from Beth, a long-ago friend, helped me more clearly process it. This missionary-kid friend from my years in Liberia wrote to tell me that she had found the letters I had written her during our 8th grade year. Would I like them back?

Not long after, the packet arrived in the mail, and my girls studied my letters with fascination. What are these? they wondered, as if looking at ancient relics. There was a time before the internet, I told them with exasperation. People used paper.

To be honest, I didn’t expect to find much value in my letters. So I was surprised by how meaningful it was to read them again.

Interspersed in the drivel about vacations and teachers were windows into my inner life. I see the “between two worlds” struggle I was experiencing, common for third-culture kids, but not something I could keenly express until I was much older.

We also get to go to Great America, a huge roller coaster park. Another good thing about this school is we get electives. I am taking handbells and drama. They are really fun. But I would give all this up for the beach, you, Carolyn, Feme, and the rest of our class.

And then there are the parts about the upheaval descending on our lives.

Tell me what happened in the coo! (or however you spell it). I hope it’s over by the time you get this letter. Has it rained a lot this year? How is ELWA? How was your Christmas vacation? We went to Disneyland!

Coups aren’t supposed to be in the experience of 13-year-olds, which explains why I couldn’t spell it, and why it’s in the same paragraph about the weather and Disneyland.

The coup turned into a civil war. It wasn’t over by the time Beth got this letter. In fact, it wasn’t over for another 15 years.

Christmas, 1988

By Amy Medina

On December 16, 2021

In Liberia, Third Culture Kids

The year I was 12, we were robbed on Christmas Eve. Nonetheless, it was my favorite childhood Christmas.

That Christmas Eve in Liberia, as always, was warm; the equator hovering just a few degrees south of us. ELWA compound was a square mile in size, one of the largest mission stations in the world, with over 70 missionary homes surrounding a hospital and radio station. Our house had a large front porch with a hammock and a concrete railing. When you stood on that porch, the swamp was to the right, it’s murky water adorned with lily pads and surrounded by mangrove trees, their spiderly legs creeping around the edges.

The swamp was fed by a lagoon on the other side of the dusty, red dirt road, which was fed by the Atlantic Ocean. Our Christmas music was the rhythmic pulsing of the waves, their white crests glowing in the darkness.

Four or five families set up luminarias that Christmas Eve – paper bags filled with sand and a candle. We lined the dirt road with them, and one neighbor found a large piece of styrofoam and set one bag floating on the lagoon. The magic of that night – the stillness, the waves, the flickering light suspended in the shadows – settled down into my 12-year-old soul.

Later that evening we sat around our spindly plastic tree to open presents. There weren’t a lot of gift options available in Liberia in the 80’s, but I remember being delighted with everything I received. However, the only specific gift I can recall was a small, furry whimsical creature that sat in a hollowed out, heavily varnished coconut shell, a homemade toy sold by a woman who walked the mission station, her wares balanced proudly on her head.

When the tropical sun woke us on Christmas morning, the contents of our stockings engrossed my brother and me. We heard a shriek from our mom in the kitchen. During the night, thieves had sliced through the screen on the window above our kitchen sink, the only window that didn’t have bars. They removed the louvered glass, stepped over the turkey defrosting in the sink, and stole our cassette player, our thermos jug, and my mom’s purse, which had been hanging on a chair.

The December I Was 14

By Amy Medina

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.

Not Just Any Rock

By Amy Medina

On April 21, 2020

In Leaving Tanzania, Liberia, Third Culture Kids

The day before we left Tanzania last month, I found my rock from Liberia in a bathroom drawer. I had forgotten it was there; I had forgotten to look for it, and I came across it by chance. A shock went through me when I saw it, because it was with some things I was going to throw away, and I shuddered to think that I could have accidentally thrown it out in my hasty packing. I quickly put it in a small bag with other important things that went into my carry-on luggage.

This was not just any rock.

I found this rock on the shores of the ELWA beach in Liberia where I grew up. It was smooth, its rough edges worn off by the sand and waves. I kept it on my windowsill with other childhood treasures. One day, it fell off and split into two pieces.

When I was twelve, my family left Liberia for a year. The plan was that I would do 8th grade in the States, and then we would return to Liberia for the rest of high school. I loved Liberia. It was home to me, and I was not looking forward to being away for a year.

I took the broken-off piece of that rock and hid it in a corner of our house. I took the larger piece with me to California. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing this, and looking back, I’m actually pretty shocked that as a twelve-year-old, I thought of something so symbolic. I was leaving part of myself in Liberia. When I returned, I would be complete again.

Half way through that year, my family listened in despair as we heard reports of rebel soldiers closing in on the capital city in Liberia, of a government coup, of panic and evacuation of almost all the missionaries. Then–a civil war, a descent into chaos and devastation.

We never went back. We lost all of our possessions. We never said goodbye. People we knew were killed. Suddenly loss and grief were a part of my story in a way they never had been before. So it was fitting that the two halves of my rock never found their way together again.

Just a few short months later, we were re-stationed on the other side of the continent, this time in Ethiopia. I was in 9th grade, and chose to go to boarding school in Kenya. I had a new school and a new direction. But that year, rebels descended into the capital city in Ethiopia. During school announcements, all of us missionary kids from Ethiopia kept getting pulled aside for grave conversations. Things were bad, they said. Some of our parents were getting evacuated, they said. My mom and my brother were among them. They were on the last flight out, and later my mom told me how they watched the tanks roll into the airport as the plane left the runway.

My dad stayed behind with some other men, and they slept in a windowless hallway at night. I was still at school. For six weeks, my family was on three different countries. When I arrived back in Ethiopia, the city still had curfews and lockdowns. My dad crammed what he could into several suitcases, and he and I left. Once again, I didn’t get to say goodbye.

I look back on the timeline of my childhood, and Liberia and Ethiopia lay there like the jagged end of my broken rock. No opportunity to finish well. No closure. Just loss.

The night that we were told we had to leave Tanzania, that wound re-opened. I can’t believe this is happening to me again, I wailed to Gil. I can’t believe now it’s happening to my own kids. As foreigners living in a land that’s not our own, we like to believe that we belong there. That we can pretend it’s part of us. Then we are unceremoniously yanked away, and given the stark reminder that like it or not, we don’t belong. Yes, that blue passport is a privilege, but sometimes it takes me places I don’t want to go.

The grief sits on my chest every day. It’s hard to separate out its various forms. Which is the grief in leaving Tanzania early? Which is the grief in knowing that it won’t be my home again? Which is the grief for the sorrows my children are facing, or my friends back in Tanzania, or my beloved school? They all just swirl into one complicated mixture of sadness.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” I find myself not particularly eager to move beyond this grief. It is sacred and beautiful. Being wrenched from Tanzania is worth grieving over, because it was worth loving.

Perhaps the fault in my youthful naivete was assuming that something, once broken, could ever be put back together in the same way again. Jesus’ body, when gloriously resurrected, still bore the scars of his suffering. If I could choose, would I want my scars erased? Probably not. They are part of my story, of who I became, of God’s work in my life. That is the mysterious glory of redemption. And redemption is how we see through the tiny keyhole that shows us the beauty on the other side of that giant door of suffering.