Category: Re-Entry to America Page 2 of 6

On Transracial Adoption

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On January 16, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Re-Entry to America

There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.

Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it. 

Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.

For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates. 

I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.

I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into. 

Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.

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Metamorphosis

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On August 22, 2022

In Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

I’m standing in a dusty marketplace in Dar es Salaam, surrounded by shanties selling piles of mangos, bicycle parts, and bright plastic tubs, buses interweaving. The sky turns dark, ominous. Foreboding hangs in the air, yet I am thrilled by the storm. Then, a crushing, permeating sense of loss. The rain falls and mixes with my tears. I wake up, and my face is wet. Loss lingers, dredged up from my subconscious.

Memories fall on me at the oddest times. I hear the phrase That’s why come out of my mouth and my mind flicks to Lucy. Ndiyo maana, she says, followed by That’s why in her thickly accented English. We’re studying Swahili at my beautiful mninga wood kitchen table, which Gil and I commissioned from the Lebanese guy downtown, the one who copies his furniture from Ikea catalogs. Behind me on the wall is the large world map, and on the opposite wall is the little cabinet holding the dishes gifted to me by the 6th-grade class I taught in 2006. I can hear the buzzing of the saws from the carpenter shop next door and the occasional crowing of a rooster. Lucy laughs her big laugh (Lucy is always laughing) and asks me to repeat after her: Ndiyo maana.

Lucy writes to me occasionally on WhatsApp, and I feel my Swahili slipping out of my brain. Sometimes I think I should start learning Spanish since it would be useful in Southern California, but I fear it would take up the spaces that Swahili fills. What if I forget Ndiyo maana? 

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Send Their Letters Back

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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. 

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Two Years In

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On March 29, 2022

In Re-Entry to America, Third Culture Kids

I’ve been thinking that I would welcome a lock-down about now. It sounds lovely to imagine no soccer practice, no activities taking my teens in all different directions, and plenty of time for meandering family walks around the neighborhood. I wonder how different things would have been for us if the pandemic had hit in 2022 instead of 2020.

Of course, when I daydream, I only imagine the good parts. And I often fail to remember how the real-life bad parts have contributed to the real-life good parts I have today.  

The pandemic, as awful as it was for us, is what brought us to Redlands. If we hadn’t left Tanzania early, Gil wouldn’t have been available to take the substitute job that led to his current job. I’m happy in 2022, but we wouldn’t have gotten here without 2020, even though I wish I could erase it.

Two years in, I can genuinely say that I love where God has planted me. 

Walk beyond my neighborhood, and I find acres of orange groves. In the winter the brilliant oranges stand out against lush green leaves like California Christmas ornaments. Now that it’s spring, I open my windows, and in wafts the heady scent of orange blossoms. 

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Homesick

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On December 7, 2021

In Eternity, Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

I volunteer weekly at an after-school program for disadvantaged kids, and I went to the banquet that celebrated this ministry’s 20 year anniversary. 

We watched a video montage of how the ministry has expanded over the years. We listened to young people, now grown up, whose lives were changed because of the investment in them. 

It was a lovely evening. But when I got to my car afterwards, I wept. I enjoy being a part of this ministry, but the banquet reminded me that I am a newcomer; I know nothing of the history of two decades. And all I could think about was how I had left behind 20 years of history in Tanzania.

I did not anticipate the lostness that comes with starting life over again.

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