Category: Liberia

Letting Go of All the Things

On March 8, 2020

When I was seven, my family left Liberia after our first two years of service. At the time, my parents had no intention of returning, so we didn’t leave anything in storage. All of our possessions that couldn’t fit into several suitcases had to be sold or given away.

I had a set of beautiful Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. But I didn’t play with them much, so I reluctantly agreed with my mom that we could give them away to my friends Maria and Elisabeth. One day during our last week in Liberia, she sent me off to walk the half-mile to my friends’ house with the dolls in my arms, a knot in my stomach, and a lump in my throat.

I clearly remember that walk on the red dusty ELWA compound road, the ocean breeze whistling alongside me. I got about halfway there and my feet stopped moving. I burst into tears, turned around, and ran all the way back home.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share, but I couldn’t bear to part with anything that held memories for me. As a child I carefully saved and filed schoolwork, notes from friends, programs from drama performances. Just about any physical item that ended up in my bedroom held emotional significance for me.

Living an overseas life as an adult got a lot of this tendency out of my system. When you live a life where every few years, you must pack up all of your possessions into 12 boxes, you learn to not get too attached to stuff. In fact, now I would say that I am what they call a minimalist–clutter and excess stuff drives me crazy. My children know that if you don’t put your stuff away where it belongs, Mom might just come along and throw it away. So be careful.

But still, there’s that part of me from my youth that attaches memories to objects. And now that I am preparing to move continents once again, I am feeling like that little seven-year-old who didn’t want to give away Raggedy Ann and Andy. Anything that doesn’t fit into a suitcase can’t come to America with us. And since we moved here first in 2001, we have a lot of things that we’ve owned for a very long time.

My children played on that rug as toddlers. Those throw pillows have been mended from the days when dozens of teenagers used them in pillow fights. Those dishes, as simple and plain as they are, have fed hundreds of beloved guests. That table–the one that bears the scars of baby Josiah’s spoon-banging–that table has seen our children raised.

The vultures are already circling around our stuff. I use the term “vulture” affectionately, because I’ve been one myself. I know how this works. When you visit a friend, and you like their furniture, just make a mental note of it. One day they’ll leave and you’ll want to be the first one to call dibs. Missionaries are great at recycling. And not just missionaries, of course. Back in September, I told a local friend we will be leaving in July. She wept. But the very next day, she told me the list of our furniture she wants to buy.

We’ve started selling stuff, but right now it’s just things we aren’t currently using. Everyone is waiting for “The Spreadsheet”–the one we will send out to all of our contacts in Tanzania with a list of everything we’re selling. People keep asking for it, but I can’t bring myself to do it yet. I know when I see all of our household items disappearing, it will feel like chunks of memories go with them.

It’s silly, actually. I mean, I’ve never even really liked our living room set; it’s not very comfortable. I could really use some new towels. All the elastic is gone from our sheets. I can buy back the exact same dishes in America. Maybe it’s just that losing these physical objects is tangible evidence of the loss of a much less tangible, but far more important life.

In the end, if I think rationally about it, I’m thankful that this overseas life has forced me to love possessions less. Loosening my grip on earthly things–things that will one day be destroyed anyway–has pressed me to set my mind on things above.

That day when I was seven, my mom wisely didn’t force me to walk the dolls back to my friends’ house. Yet, later on, they still quietly disappeared. Lo and behold, I didn’t miss them. Sometimes we just need that grip loosened in order to discover that we really don’t need the things we cling to. Not as much as we thought we did.

Our home for the past 10 years.

What Have I Done to My Children?

By Amy Medina

On March 1, 2019

In Leaving Tanzania, Liberia, Third Culture Kids

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.

Dear Mom and Dad, If I Suffered, It Was Worth It

By Amy Medina

On December 28, 2015

In Liberia, Third Culture Kids

ELWA Mission Station in Liberia, source unknown

Dear Mom and Dad,

Last week I read an article called “Should the Children Suffer?” It’s about a missionary father’s struggle to trust God with the suffering his children are experiencing on the mission field.

In 1982, you took my younger brother and me to west Africa. In the months preceding that move, I remember listening to you and my Gram–your mother–weeping loudly as you tried to get her to understand that decision. Gram was not only devastated, she was angry. And she even threatened to hire a lawyer to try to get custody of Paul and me. Another grandparent fretted out loud over our deprived childhoods.

Some people would probably say that Paul and I suffered.

Paul got Hepatitis in Liberia. I got amoebic dysentery in Kenya. Once we found a green mamba in our garage. Twice, we lost almost all of our possessions due to war and evacuation. In Ethiopia in 1991, there wasn’t much to eat. We never went hungry, but we all got skinnier. I went to boarding school at age 13. Before college, I attended six different schools in four different countries. I made friends and lost them more times than I could count. I grew up never really knowing my cousins. When we finally moved back to the States, Paul was bullied. I was weird. We were completely oblivious to styles and trends and TV shows. I struggled deeply to figure out where I belonged.

Rift Valley Academy in Kenya, 9th grade, Swala Dorm

Was it a mistake to take us to Africa?

But then I think of those times in Liberia, Dad, when you would put me barefoot on the back of your motorcycle, and the ocean breeze would whip my hair as the sun set over the Atlantic. We would pick up the mail and then stop by our favorite beach spot and collect shells.

I think of the times my friends and I would take the canoe out into the swamp, the fear of leeches and crocodiles keeping us out of the water, but we would prance across the spidery roots of the mangrove trees. There are the memories of that time that the millions of baby crabs hatched, or the bright blue jellyfish that would wash ashore every July, or sitting in the hammock on our front porch and watching the lightning hit the ocean.

The swamp. Our house in Liberia was directly to the right of this picture.

Photo credit: Robin Shea McGee

Denmark, Australia, and Lebanon became real to me because my school friends came from those places. Leprosy and malaria were real, because I saw them too. I witnessed the devastation of war. I played with a little boy whose family ate frogs from the swamp when they ran out of food. I encountered a little girl with a huge abscessed eye, begging outside of the supermarket. I may have been sheltered from Michael Jackson, but I was not sheltered from the reality of life.

The path we walked to school. Photo credit: Robin Shea McGee

By nature, I was cautious, timid, and not at all adventurous. But this life you chose forced me to become brave. Airplanes, head scarves, foreign accents, large bugs….all lost their strangeness and scariness. International travel became routine. The world would no longer intimidate me.

Scores of missionaries and Africans poured their love and their lives into mine. I experienced the joy that comes from sacrifice. Together our family learned what it meant to trust God. I tasted and saw that Jesus was not just for America.

So yes, Mom and Dad. There was stress, and there was fear, and there was so much loss. You could call that suffering. But the formation of my heart, the richness of that life, and the indestructible joy….make the suffering feel small.

I know you didn’t make the choice to move to Africa because of Paul and me. In fact, you made it despite us. Like the author of that article, you chose to trust our safety and well-being to a Father who knows all about sacrificing his Son. But in the end, it was the very best choice you could have made for your children. I’m so glad you did.

Love,

Your Amy

Memories of Home

By Amy Medina

On May 25, 2009

In Liberia

Liberia, 1983

We’ve had a visitor staying with us for a few days. Not unusual for us, but this time it wasn’t a student or a short-term team.

This time it was a school administrator from Liberia. Our mission has connections with her church in Liberia, and when her pastor was visiting Tanzania in February, he visited HOPAC and wanted to send this lady so that she could learn and be mentored by teachers at HOPAC. Hence her visit.

But for me, this was pretty significant.

Because I grew up in Liberia. I spent five years there between the ages of 6 and 12. When I was 13, my family was on home assignment in the States. We had planned to return for all of my high school years. But while we were in the States, war broke out in Liberia and all the missionaries were evacuated.

The war lasted 15 years.

It took me a long time to mourn the loss of the country that I called home for most of my childhood. For the last 20 years, I have had no face-to-face contact with any Liberians, except for the pastor whom I briefly met in February.

So having this lady in our home for 5 days was surreal to me. I heard Liberian English spoken again, a sound I had not heard since I was a little girl. (It’s more like a dialect than an accent). She cooked me greens and rice. And she told me about the war.

We hear about wars all the time, on the news. Somalia and Congo and Sudan….all are experiencing war. And I have read much about what happened in Liberia. But it’s different when you hear about someone telling you about things that happened in the country where you spent your childhood. This lady lives just a couple miles away from where I grew up. She is very familiar with my childhood mission compound. She even attended the same mission school in the 70’s that I attended in the 80’s.

So when she told me about the fighting near her house, I knew the places she was talking about. When she talked about how many people in her family died, I saw faces of other Liberians I knew. When she talked about how there was one week when the fighting was so bad, that no one could find food anywhere, in the entire city, I cried.

Can you imagine telling your children that you have no food for them? Not, “No, we can’t have tuna today; mama needs to go to the store.” But looking at your hungry child in the eyes and having to tell her, “Sweetheart, we can’t find any food.”

People ate leaves and dirt to survive.

No schools. No hospitals. Fighting for the lives of your children, for 15 years.

For almost 20 years now, the entire country has been without electricity or running water.

Such a strange thought, to imagine someone coming to Tanzania and seeing it as progressive! But Tanzania is indeed blessed among African countries to have peace for so many years.

She spent three weeks at HOPAC and said she learned a lot. Her school is growing in leaps and bounds, of course. The country is trying to get back on its feet and people are eager to try. But perhaps most exciting, is that God’s church is growing in leaps and bounds. Churches by the dozen being planted, every year. And for that, I weep as well.