Third Culture Kids | Amy Medina

Christmas, 1988

On December 16, 2021

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.

Mothering African Hair

By Amy Medina

On September 8, 2021

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Third Culture Kids

Of all the things a new mother stresses about, her kids’ hair is usually not one of them. But for me, it was.

I felt an invisible weight upon me that if I was to be a good mom to my girls, I must get their hair right. This was not a completely imagined pressure. I learned early on that in both African and African-American cultures, well-maintained hair is important. I already knew my competence as a white mother to two black daughters would be questioned in many ways. So I was determined to prove myself capable of at least caring for their hair.

I read Black hair blogs. I watched YouTube videos. I even bought and read a book on the subject. I tried a ridiculous number of hair products. Yet still, I was anxious. It was harder than I thought, and despite my best efforts, I could not turn myself into a Black hair artist.

Raising Up a Child in an Age of Deconstruction

By Amy Medina

On April 28, 2021

In Parenting, Third Culture Kids

“I never knew it would be so hard to win my children’s hearts,” recently lamented a friend with adult children.

In my younger parenting days, I idolized those parents who were five or ten years ahead of me in parenting. You know the ones–their kids were polite, respectful, happy, Christian kids. I longed for my little ones to grow up like them. But now I have teenagers, and those older friends have young adults. It’s been with increasing dread that I’ve watched these further-along families crushed under a mountain of sorrow over their young-adult children who are walking into destruction.

Not all of them, of course. But also not just an occasional prodigal; there are far too many to count. These are families who did all the “right things”: gave their kids boundaries, were actively involved in church, ate family dinners, limited media consumption, guarded against porn, played games together, were intentional about their kids’ education, taught family devotions. They trained up their children in the way they should go, but when they were old, they still departed from it.

Boarding School

By Amy Medina

On January 4, 2021

In Third Culture Kids

Thirty years ago this month, I left my family for boarding school. According to American assumptions, that must mean I was a juvenile delinquent. Or maybe a wizard.

But no, Hogwarts didn’t exist in January 1991 when I was 14, but Rift Valley Academy did. My family had recently moved to Ethiopia, and there was no international high school for me. All the missionary teenagers were sent off to RVA in Kenya, so after a semester of lonely correspondence school, I asked my parents if I could join them.

I wanted to go, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified. I was painfully shy and very much a homebody, and though I had already traveled the world in my short life, I had never been away from my family for more than a couple of days.

I can remember seeing my mother’s tear-stained face through the glass at the airport, trying valiantly to hold it together myself. Though I was traveling with a number of older missionary kids, I didn’t know any of them. It was my first time going through immigration on my own, getting on an airplane, and landing in a country I had never been to before.

A bus picked us up at the airport, and we arrived at the school at dusk. A crowd of kids were there waiting for us, and I saw my suitcase cheerfully carted away by two of the girls from my dorm. There were scads of teenagers, enthusiastically greeting each other after their Christmas “vake,” as they called it, a new vocabulary I knew nothing of. Somehow I managed to be swept along a path, down a set of stairs and into my dorm, where I met the three girls who would be my roommates.

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.

Category: Third Culture Kids Page 2 of 4

Christmas, 1988

Mothering African Hair

Raising Up a Child in an Age of Deconstruction

Boarding School

The December I Was 14