Lockdown Story

Where were you in the spring of 2020? 

The Medina family arrived at San Francisco airport on March 26, 2020. It was evening, and as we got to the baggage area and met my parents, I burst into tears as I hugged my mom. I’ve written in detail about the previous week’s events that got us to the States, but I haven’t yet told much of the story of what happened next. I didn’t want to think about those months. It’s not a time I want to go back to. 

Because we had been traveling internationally, we weren’t supposed to leave the house for two weeks. At that moment, quarantine was one of the biggest blessings to me. My soul was so overwhelmed with tension and confusion and loss that I hadn’t even begun to process –  I was just surviving. Seeing only my husband, children, and parents was all I could handle. 

We moved into my parents’ house – Gil and me in my old bedroom, the boys in the office, the girls in the living room. Vevette brought us over homemade pizza the next night. Gracey brought us homemade masks. I waved from the doorway, put on a pretend smile, and yelled out my thank-yous. I was grateful, of course. Just too bottled up with sorrow to really smile.

The kids got stir crazy quickly so my ever-creative husband got to work. He ordered a used XBox and Kinect (like a Wii) on eBay, and the kids, especially Johnny, spent many hours jumping and running in place through imaginary obstacle courses. We printed out a note: We’re wanting to buy a basketball hoop. It looks like you have one that hasn’t been used in a while. Interested in selling it? And left it on several neighborhood front porches. The very next day, a woman down the block called us. You can have mine for free, she said. And we wheeled it down the street.

Not wanting to unpack all of our stuff, we wore the same clothes over and over. Gil’s mom shipped us all new slippers. In the evenings, we watched the BBC miniseries of Les Miserables.

A week after we arrived, Gil got a call from a Christian school in Redlands that he had applied to teach at for the following school year. They had a teacher suddenly resign. Was he interested in doing a long-term sub position? Over Zoom? In the midst of all we were going through, he wasn’t interested. But he said yes anyway because he was hoping it would lead to a long-term position. 

My dad’s friend gave us an additional laptop. Gil joined me and the four kids seated in front of computers for several hours every day. He started teaching curriculum he had never taught before to kids he had never met and were 400 miles away. But that was no big deal, comparatively. Grace was staying up until midnight to meet with her class 10,000 miles away, and I was communicating with teachers on three different continents and kids in countless time zones. But at least I already knew them.  

After three weeks, we packed up in a borrowed van and drove south to Gil’s brother’s family. His parents were there too, which meant there were six adults and six kids living in a four-bedroom house. Five of the kids were doing online school and four of the adults were trying to work. I often sat in the stairwell to do calls with HOPAC teachers, searching in vain for quiet corners of the house. 

The family watched The Last Dance documentary after dinner and I spent hours locking Lily’s hair. My sister-in-law and I went shopping and dutifully wiped down our groceries when we got home. (Only once, I think. That got old really fast.)

And I still couldn’t process my own grief. Because it just kept coming.

Haven of Peace Academy was in crisis. The other principals and I felt suffocating pressure to keep academic standards high and plentiful online activities going, attempting to cajole parents to continue to pay school fees. HOPAC’s server was hacked and the school lost months of financial records as well as the entire library database. The government continued to deny work permits for teachers who were planning to join the school for the next school year. A serious allegation was made (which turned out to be false) but needed a thorough investigation. One of my teachers resigned the last week of school and I needed to figure out how to hire a new teacher from 10,000 miles away. And the worst of all – our beloved chaplain and pastor, and dad to Josiah’s best friend – was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

Daily, I paced my brother-in-law’s neighborhood. People had put out signs that read “Everything is going to be okay,” and I sneered back at those signs. Nothing was okay. Nothing.

Three more weeks went by, and we moved back up to my parents’ house. We were now well into May, and we still didn’t know where we would work or where we would live. In vain, Gil and I reached out again to schools that had told us they would be hiring in April. But schools were not hiring in April. Schools were paralyzed in April. 

Finally, by the end of May, Gil had an interview for the school in Redlands, and I had an interview for one in Phoenix. We both got job offers the same week. Gil took the job in Redlands, and I took the remote position with ReachGlobal. We drove south a couple of days later to find a place to live in Southern California.

By this point, we had been soundly rejected by mortgage lenders, so we looked for the quickest, cheapest three-bedroom apartment closest to the school. We signed a contract that would start at the end of June, and moved in with Gil’s folks until the apartment was ready. It was our fourth move in three months. 

The week we moved in with Gil’s parents, Los Angeles was under curfew because of the riots. We had to have impossible conversations with our kids about what was going on, and I wondered what on earth I was thinking, bringing my children to my country. But by that point, it had become a habit, this moving forward robotically, doing the next thing. I didn’t have any other choice. 

I sat in my in-laws’ backyard on the last day of HOPAC’s school year and tried valiantly to hold back tears as I helped to run a final online assembly. That was supposed to have been the day that gave me closure to 16 years of my life. I cried because my staff showed me so much love that day – giving me a tribute at the online assembly and having flowers delivered to the house. But that made me long to be with them all the more because there wasn’t supposed to be this distance between us. None of this was supposed to be this way.

We bought a van at a crazy amazing price when the rental companies were dumping vehicles. We moved into our apartment on June 25th with our 12 boxes from Tanzania and six sleeping bags and six air mattresses. That was all we owned, and the next day we began filling up our apartment and filing up our life. Finding a semblance of normal took a long, long time. Looking back, I would say it took three years. 

Today, March 13, is the anniversary of my last day at HOPAC with my students. It’s also the anniversary of the day, a year later, when we moved into this house. Both memories are mixed with happiness and sadness, longing and loss. But I suppose that’s how life is, isn’t it? 

I look back on that dreadful spring and I don’t like to re-enter those memories. I don’t think I even began processing them until months later, when finally the build-up led to a break down, and I finally started to move on. But time brings perspective and I can see how God didn’t just bring beauty from ashes, but created beauty that needed the ashes. Paul Miller says, “We see resurrection only in the rear-view mirror.” And the resurrection couldn’t have happened without the death first. 

 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
    and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
    How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
    Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
    and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love;
    my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing the Lord’s praise,
    for he has been good to me. (Psalm 13)