I lived as a foreigner through several election cycles in Tanzania. As a foreigner, that meant I had an opinion about elections, but I didn’t expect it to matter very much. I listened to Tanzanian friends give me their view on the candidates, but I stayed relatively objective. My goal was to understand their thoughts because I wanted to understand their hearts. I was there to reach people with the gospel, not get mired down in political arguments. My purpose there was to love all Tanzanians, not take sides.
I’m white, educated, and American. Some say I therefore must be racist.
I say my problem is much worse.
I might give a good impression on the outside, but you can’t see the number of times I’ve truly believed that I am better than you. Sometimes that might be because you are a different race or ethnicity than me, and I think my race or culture is more effective than yours. Or maybe you’re white too, and I still think I’m better because you made a life choice that makes me feel more moral than you. Maybe I assume I have a better perspective than yours.
A favorite memory was the night I heard Victoria tell me her story of growing up in Soviet Ukraine.
Victoria was a wonderful co-worker at Haven of Peace Academy. So when she sat across from me at a staff dinner at an outdoor restaurant, in the dimming evening light, I asked her to tell me about her childhood under Communism.
What was it like growing up in the Soviet Union? I asked. And I sat spellbound as she talked about a carefree childhood where the children could roam freely, because there was very little crime. However, she said, there were also times when neighbors would disappear in the night, never to be seen or heard from again.
She talked about her Christian grandmother, who secretly told her about God and gave her a cross pendant to wear under her school uniform. One day a teacher found it, and forced the seven-year-old Victoria to stand in front of the entire school and stomp on that cross.
My youngest has been fascinated with finding places on Google Earth. He recently brought me the iPad and said, “Mommy, help me find HOPAC.”
My son is in third grade, and Haven of Peace Academy is where he went to school for kindergarten through second grade. But even before that, HOPAC was always a part of his life. It’s where my husband and I ministered for sixteen years. The last three years, it was where I was the elementary school principal.
I showed him how to type in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. “Here’s downtown, right?” I pointed out. I traced the main road that led to the north of the city. “This is Shoppers Plaza; that’s where we would buy chicken on Saturday nights; this is the White Sands roundabout. Then you turn right here, and see? There’s HOPAC!”
Together we then traced the road down a little further until we could pick out the house where we had lived for ten years. We zoomed in on it, and a hundred memories rushed out. My eyes grew misty. My finger stopped, hovering there, suspended above our home. Ten thousand miles away, yet so close I could almost touch it.
“I like my new school,” Johnny tells me. “But I like Tanzania better.” Me too, Buddy.
***
I knew there would be grief in leaving. We had planned our departure a year in advance; we knew it was coming. We knew it would be hard. Tanzania had been our home for sixteen years.
But what I can’t figure out is what part of my grief is because we left, and what part of my grief is because we left the way we did.
These past three months, my life has felt very small, and very quiet. It has been good, but strange. In many ways, it’s been an about-face of the life we left behind.
My recent years in Tanzania were extremely busy and crowded and turbulent. I was working over 50 hours a week in a job where I interacted with hundreds of people every day. I had lived in Dar so long that it was unusual to go anywhere without seeing someone I knew. The city of Dar es Salaam is chaotic and noisy and full of buses and animals and honking and heat.
Then came the spring of 2020 when we were evacuated, and we lived for months in a haze of stress and sadness and uncertainty. We moved to a different house every few weeks, each time living in someone else’s space, blessed by the generosity of our families but with an undergirding of restlessness, rootlessness, and tension.
So moving into our Southern California apartment in late June brought with it a huge sigh of relief. And after all of the bustle of filling up our home with the things we needed, we were able to take a deep breath. Because we were new and didn’t know anyone in our city other than the Snyders, and because almost everything in the city was closed, our summer became very, very small.
After the bigness and busyness of Dar es Salaam, it is strange, suddenly finding ourselves in a place where we know no one and no one knows us, and the things we needed to do could be done on a computer. Everyone was supposed to keep their distance from one other and no one had quite yet worked out the rules of what kind of interaction we’re allowed to have. Our lives have felt very quiet and inconspicuous.
Mostly, this has been a good thing. Our souls needed restoring. We needed time as just the six of us. We walked to the grocery store on Wednesday nights all summer long and argued in front of the ice cream freezer over what kind to buy. We watched Hamilton and The Mandalorian. We read The Hate U Give (heavily edited), and struggled through hard conversations on race and rioting and America and the war zone we have just brought our children into. The kids checked daily to see if our complex’s pools were open, but they never were. They fought over who would get to check the mail, because what else was there to do? There was way too much Fortnite, but for Josiah, that was his only connection to friends. We helped Gil get his classroom ready. And we waited, and waited, as the start of school kept getting pushed back. Some days we went stir crazy. There was yelling.
There were a few moments of excitement. Grace decided to break up the monotony by getting appendicitis in August and spending 24 hours in the emergency room. Another child (who shall remain nameless) left the water running in a bathroom sink, which flooded the bathroom and the floor, which then rained onto the car in the garage below it. There might have been some yelling then too.
We really needed school to open. Finally it did, though with the dates and protocols changing daily, it was the most anti-climactic start of school ever. But hey, these days we take what we can get, right? I have two kids doing in person learning and two kids doing distance learning (but on campus–yes, it’s weird) and a husband who is teaching remotely from an empty classroom. But some sports have started, and we go to church on a lawn, and I have some new Facebook friends. I am telling myself to be grateful for what we do have, and patient for what we don’t.
For three months, I’ve written very little. That hasn’t happened for twelve years.
But it has been good to be quiet for a while. My soul has needed settling. My thoughts have needed to untangle themselves. And somehow it was easier for me to give a commentary on American life when I was standing outside of it. Now that I’m living it, I have been feeling a bit shy. Like I needed to stand back a while, and just listen in. I wondered for a while if it was time to stop writing completely. Publicly, at least.
But since you are reading this, you know that I decided that I still need to keep writing–mostly for myself. But as I apply my 22 years of life as a missionary into my life on American soil, I pray that together our perspectives may be transformed.
We all worked hard to create Gil’s awesome classroom. Unfortunately not many students have been able to see it yet.Another set of braces have entered our family.Welcome to California. Want some smoke?
Grace decided getting your appendix out isn’t so bad when grandparents send you goodies.
