I live in Southern California, and if you’ve been watching the news, you know that it’s been on fire. Our city is surrounded by the San Bernardino mountains on three sides, and 10 days ago, an arsonist set fire to those mountains just a few miles away from us. We haven’t had rain in months, and last week the temperatures soared above 110, so we were the perfect tinder box.
During the day, the air was so thick that the mountains disappeared. At night, ribbons of bright red slashed through the darkness in the distance. Folks pulled their cars over to the side of the road, watching, entranced as the ribbons danced through the mountains, terrifying yet mesmerizing.
A week ago, the whole world smelled like when you get too close to a campfire and you can’t breathe. Our church’s annual baptism ceremony in the mountains was canceled, many schools closed, and friends were evacuated from their homes.
I watched the FireMappers app obsessively as the evacuation zone crept closer to our house until it was just 1.7 miles away.
My Grace is now 18, has started college, and is studying to become a middle-school history teacher. I think she’s pretty fascinating, and want more people to get to know her. So she agreed to let me interview her for my blog. Just remember that she represents only herself, not all adopted kids, or even her siblings. And as she continues to process her childhood, her answers to these questions will continue to evolve. But she gives a great snapshot of her unique life, and I know you’ll enjoy it!
What was it like to grow up Tanzanian in Tanzania by American parents?
I’m sure that when I was younger, it didn’t feel as weird as it does looking back on it now. I knew other kids that were being raised like that, so I was like, “That’s normal.” Uh, no. No, it’s not!
As I grew up, like the last few years we were in Tanzania, I started realizing that I was treated differently by my Tanzanian classmates because I was from Tanzania, but that was the only thing that we had in common. I wasn’t fluent in Swahili; I had an accent from 10,000 miles away; I knew a lot about American culture and not Tanzanian culture. Sometimes I was subject to minor bullying. It wasn’t like I felt attacked; it was more like insults….. but that’s also because middle schoolers are awful. [And yet she wants to teach middle school!]
But also, being at Haven of Peace Academy really helped. Just because, even if they weren’t adopted, there were so many other kids like me there. There were kids who were from a different culture coming to live in Tanzania, which is kind of like my experience since I grew up in a culturally American home. Of course, I had great Tanzanian food and we listened to Tanzanian music but other than that, it was very American. So having missionary and international kids at the school made me feel that there were way many other people like me around me.
In moving to the U.S. I realized, Whoa, there are more Black people here than I realized. So many ethnicities are counted as “Black” but there are so many different experiences represented. A Nigerian who moved to America as a college student will be living a crazy life of cultural shock. But other kids who are Nigerian and grew up here are completely different. It helped me to realize that there are so many different Black experiences in the U.S. Yes, my story is weird but that’s true of so many people in America.
I knew that The Poisonwood Bible was a best-selling novel about a missionary family to Africa, so why did it take me 25 years to finally read it? Honestly, I think I was scared of it. I knew that it painted an ugly picture of missionaries, and I feared it would make me question my calling.
Well, that’s a stupid reason to avoid reading a book, so when I read it this summer, I regretted waiting so long. I was instantly captivated. Barbara Kingsolver weaves a riveting story of the fictional Nathan Price and his family into the horrifying history of Congo in the 1960’s. Like many other reviewers, I loved the first two-thirds of the book and was bored by the last third (which is essentially an extended epilogue) – but the point is, I still loved it. I would argue that it should be required reading for any cross-cultural worker.
Yes, Nathan Price is a terrible missionary. On his first night in the village, when his hosts welcome him with a feast and dancing, the first words out of his mouth are raging criticism for their lack of clothing. It all goes downhill from there. For example, he can’t understand why no one wants to be baptized in the river until someone reveals that the villagers assume he wants to feed them to the crocodiles.
Nathan speaks very little of the local language, and even his feeble attempts are misinterpreted:
“TATA JESUS IS BÄNGALA!” declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business.”
He asks no questions. He makes no attempts to understand. He is never willing to admit he is wrong. He is never willing to acknowledge that the villagers could be right. He thinks he is defending God’s reputation. He refuses to see that his pride and foolishness are actually doing the opposite.
I’ve never met a missionary this bad, though certainly, any honest, self-reflecting missionary winces to realize that they see a little of themselves in Nathan Price.
But is this just about missionaries?
Isn’t every Christian living in a culture that is, in a sense, foreign?
How an innovative internship changed a missionary’s trajectory—and a church’s heart for missions.
It was a shot in the dark, but that was all Angela had left.
In May 2022, Angela showed up at First Free in St. Louis, Missouri, on a Sunday morning straight from the airport, luggage in tow. She wasn’t expecting much to come from it. Visiting a church cold turkey usually doesn’t.
But desperation makes you willing to try anything.
In 2019, Angela had returned home to Ohio after spending two fruitful, energizing years with ReachGlobal in Athens, Greece. Less than half a percent of Greece’s population is evangelical Christian, and God gave Angela a deep love for Greek people and culture. She knew God was calling her to return for long-term ministry, helping to revitalize and strengthen the local church. So, she went through the long-term application process with ReachGlobal and made the transition to become a career missionary. With it, the budget she needed to raise nearly doubled.
Angela was just starting to raise additional support when the pandemic hit. Months of lockdowns, personal illness, and turmoil in her home church brought her support-raising process to a grinding halt. And she just couldn’t get it going again. After almost three years, she was defeated and demoralized and questioned whether she would ever get back to Greece.
During that time, Angela tried just about everything. She had contacted everyone she knew. She had offered to speak at any possible venue that would host her. Once, she even set up a table outside of a car show! She reached out to hundreds of EFCA churches. Yet she’d hardly received any response at all.
I had the joy of walking with Angela on this journey. Go here on the EFCA blog to read the rest of the story!
I had forgotten many things in four years: the feel of my bare feet on smooth tile floors. The sounds of critters in the ceiling above my head when trying to sleep. A fancy wooden chair leaking sawdust from termites.
We arrived at the Dar es Salaam airport at 3 a.m., an hour later than scheduled, which meant that four flights arrived at the same time, overwhelming the baggage workers. It took two hours to get our luggage, and we blearily exited the airport at 5. There were 11 of us total: six Medinas and five Snyders, them with a decade of living in Tanzania, us with 16 years. You probably think we should have known what we were doing.
Almost instantly, we all realized that we had also forgotten how hard it is to live in Dar es Salaam – especially arriving at the airport all on our own, with no car, no home, no SIM card. We felt like brand-new foreigners all over again.
Our AirBnb host had offered to send a car to the airport to meet us, but the driver missed the memo that his job was to lead the two vans that followed him with our luggage and the rest of us. Most houses do not have addresses, and the pin on AirBnb was incorrect, which meant that we spent a good portion of our first morning directing our van drivers in circles as we tried to find the house—with no address and no local cell service.
When we finally arrived at the AirBnb we discovered there were no towels and no top sheets and no drinkable water and a pre-paid electricity allotment of only eight units a day, which was barely enough to keep the lights on. So we dug into our jetlagged brains and remembered again how to buy more electricity and how to find bottled water and breakfast for our cranky children and cranky selves.
After the first few days, we planned to move to a bigger AirBnb because the Dunkers were flying in from Kenya to join us. But the day before, I discovered this second house did not exist.
Sometimes, all you can do is laugh. We resurrected this dormant skill.
Still, I asked myself, How did I love this place? Everything is hard. Everything is frustrating.
But then I remembered.
Soon after we discovered that we had nowhere to go, well, we suddenly had a place to go. Carley, who has been our friend since 2005, heard about our plight and invited us all to stay at the Young Life ministry center. We found ourselves staying at a place that was way better than any AirBnb. Our kids hung out with her amazing quadruplets while Gil and the Dunkers held the Reach Tanzania Bible School reunion and Ben and Lauren and I made plans for our team, who would be arriving soon.
I was reminded of how we navigated the hardness and frustrations of living in Dar for so many years: we had an extraordinary community. Oh, right. This is why nobody new was ever allowed to arrive without a host. Shame on me for assuming we could handle going back to Tanzania on our own without leaning on our community. In four years, I have become so American. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. We can handle this independently. No, we couldn’t.
