Homesick

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.

I went into a World Market store last weekend, and I stopped short in the cookie aisle. McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits caught my eye–the very same cookies that were imported from England to our grocery store in Tanzania. 

I wasn’t interested in buying them–they are not that awesome, actually. But I stared and couldn’t look away, my memory transported to a thousand shopping trips at Shopper’s Plaza. To our makeshift s’mores at the beach house, where we used the chocolate covered digestive biscuits instead of graham crackers, and the weird pink marshmallows that shriveled in the flames.

It occurred to me that there are very few things in America that remind me of Tanzania. 

I sat in the clinic waiting room, waiting for Josiah’s broken collar bone to get x-rayed, mindlessly deleting old numbers from my phone.

Abruptly, it wasn’t mindless. Each phone number held a memory: Charles, who ran the sound system during school assemblies. Fatima, who brought us Indian food every Thursday. Asha, who did my girls’ hair. Paulina, HOPAC’s Dutch art teacher. Ibrahim, my favorite tailor. John “the van man,” who always took us to the airport–including the day we left Tanzania.

I deleted a few but found that there were many others I couldn’t bring myself to remove. Each of them represents a piece of my history. 

For many years, alumni from HOPAC would come home and visit us on their summer breaks, and routinely they told us that they didn’t realize how unique HOPAC was until they left. They took for granted the teachers who genuinely loved them, the family-community, the classroom that emphasized character and service as much as academics. 

The other day Gil said to me, “We always said that our students didn’t realize how good they had it until they left. But the same is true for the teachers.” He finds himself longing for the days when he didn’t just teach students, he discipled them. Our lives were holistic–the same students in his classroom were the ones that baby-sat our kids, played soccer in our yard during youth group, and attended our summer camps. In America, our lives feel compartmentalized, cut into tiny pieces that never overlap: work, school, church, sports, recreation. Relationships take much longer to form. Ministry is designated into tight bundles of time, not spread out over all of life. 

So when we feel like something is missing, it is.  

The past 20 months could be divided into 4 phases: The first three months after our evacuation, I ran on adrenaline — couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t focus on anything except what was directly in front of me. The following six months, I was in the throes of culture shock, and I was miserable. I hated life. I could objectively acknowledge good things around me, but I found no joy. The third phase started around a year ago, when I finally began to feel more settled, but also had the mental space to process the trauma of how we left. I ached for a different ending, which thankfully I got in June. That open wound began to heal over. 

But since returning from that visit six months ago, now I’m just homesick. I regularly find joy, but every time my mind rests on Tanzania, there’s a throb of longing. 

Yet, the same throb is there when I see pictures of my kids when they were little. The perfect moments never last; time roars on. What I long for doesn’t exist anymore. 

Or perhaps, maybe it never has existed. The longing feels like it’s for the past, but maybe really it’s for what is still coming.

My friend Marilyn Gardner recently posted this quote by CS Lewis and I keep thinking about it: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with old friends, a bath or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

No, may I not mistake Tanzania for home. Or California. They are just inns; Home is yet to come.  

Refreshment on the journey, from the last few months: