Category: Third Culture Kids Page 3 of 4

The December I Was 14

On December 15, 2020

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.

How We Are Adjusting

By Amy Medina

On December 5, 2020

In Re-Entry to America, Third Culture Kids

People ask me quite often, “How are you all adjusting?” and I kind of want to say, “As best as can be expected. How are you adjusting?” Because really, we all are adjusting right now, aren’t we?

An article at A Life Overseas talked about how adjusting to this pandemic feels a lot like culture shock, because we all are trying to learn new ways of living. So I guess you could say that our family is experiencing a double whammy of regular culture shock on top of pandemic culture shock, and it’s hard to separate the two. But all things considered, we are doing okay.

My two younger kids have been able to attend school in person since the beginning of the school year, and the two older kids started entirely online. However, they have had the option of being on campus (socially distanced in the gym or library) to do their distance learning, and we jumped at that opportunity. This was partly for sanity’s sake, since August was not a pretty month in our house and we seriously needed some space from each other, but mainly because it would be the only way for our kids to start making friends.

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.

She is a TCK.

By Amy Medina

On July 20, 2019

In Third Culture Kids

Johnny, at the park: MONGOOSE!
Me: Nope, that’s a squirrel. Wrong country, Buddy.

Josiah, staring with interest at the stove: What kind of stove is that?
Me: It’s electric. It runs on electricity.
Josiah: Oh, so if the power goes out, it stops working?
Me: Yep.
Josiah: That doesn’t sound very good. You could be in the middle of cooking and then have to stop.
Me: Yeah, but the power doesn’t go off in America.
Josiah: Not EVER?
Me: Well, sometimes in big storms, but yeah, not really ever.
Josiah (very impressed): Whoa.

Amusing quotes aside, the truth is that my kids are somewhat of an enigma. They don’t fit into any particular category. They are Tanzanian by blood, but their parents are American. They are similar to other internationally adopted kids, except that they aren’t being raised in their adoptive parents’ home country, but their own birth country.

A Tanzanian friend once asked me if my kids identified more with being American or Tanzanian. I told him that I’m not really sure (and I don’t think they are really sure), but that I would guess that they feel more American when they are in Tanzania, and more Tanzanian when they are America. Because they don’t fit in perfectly in either place.

They can greet their elders with Shikamoo without an accent, but they would never yell Wazungu! when they see a white person walking on the road, like other Tanzanian kids their age. They love chips mayai and macaroni and cheese and wali na maharage and Pizza Hut. They have been taught to eat with a knife and fork but know not to use their left hand if there aren’t any utensils available.

This would be true of any missionary kid who had lived in Tanzania, but my kids are different from even them. They know all about hair salon culture, but, of course, they go there with their white mom so they always get odd looks. They can go to the market and not stand out–that is, until someone assumes their Swahili is better than it actually is.

Haven of Peace Academy is a perfect place for my children, and so they’ve stayed insulated from a great deal of this struggle. Josiah has one friend who is ethnically Indian but has a passport and culture from Australia. Another friend is half Tanzanian and half Zimbabwean, but was born in South Africa. Another is half African-American and half Kiwi, but born in America. All are being raised in Tanzania. Josiah, with his complex identity, fits right in.

HOPAC is a middle life, a life in between worlds. Yet the life that HOPAC gives them is not sustainable.

It’s like an airplane: Passengers from all over the world, all walks of life, a hundred different backgrounds–all crammed into a tiny tube hovering over the earth. Not belonging to any one place; suspended, for a short period of time, above all the world’s nations. My kids live there, in that plane, at HOPAC. Yet at some point, that airplane has to land. And the older my kids get, the more I wonder and worry about how that landing will go for them.

I grew up in Liberia, so to some degree, I understand what it’s like to grow up between worlds. But I was not adopted, I was not Liberian, and my parents always had a house in California for us to come back to. Yes, losing Liberia was traumatic for me. But it also was not my country. How do I help my children to navigate an identity that I can never fully understand?

My eldest daughter is a sketcher, and as we have been traveling in California these last three weeks (six cities so far), I’ve caught her sketching in fancy lettering–on Best Western Hotel notepads, in the sketchbook she bought in Istanbul, on any scrap of paper–I am a TCK. I am a Third Culture Kid. She is processing that identity–that life hovering above the nations, that life in between worlds.

I see this, and my eyes mist over. I am so proud to be her mom. It takes courage to be her. There is much she will teach me.

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.