Rewriting the Ending

There’s an old-fashioned bell on the wall in Haven of Peace Academy’s office building. We would ring it on special occasions, like when we recruited a new teacher or got a batch of approved work permits, or when Zawadi was finally adopted.

The moment I walked into that building on Monday afternoon, June 7th, after fourteen months of being away, my friend Trudie saw me and ran over and rang that bell. The faces of old friends appeared out of office doors and some clapped and some cheered and all of them surrounded me at once. They engulfed me with love and I held onto them for dear life, and I broke down with joy and sorrow and relief and a whole lot of jetlag. For fourteen months I had longed for this moment and not known if it would ever come. But it did.

What was it like to go back? It felt like Lucy going through the wardrobe, like Harry passing through Platform 9 ¾. I got off the plane and was in a different universe, one that instantly felt very familiar, like no time at all had passed. 

June in Dar es Salaam is technically winter, but my face was abruptly shiny again from the humidity. My ankles were perpetually itchy from mosquito bites. Monkeys danced on the roof in the mornings, I ate rice and beans for lunch, I haggled over taxi prices, and I hollered for the house guard when the water pump stopped working. My duffle bag arrived with a large rip, and I fretted over finding a needle and thread until it dawned on me, Duh, I’m in Dar. I can walk out the gate and find a tailor who will fix it up good as new, licketly split. And so I did.  

I have spent the last fourteen months trying to force my soul into ill-fitting clothes, so being back felt ordinary and effortless and right. 

Our best friends, Mark and Alyssa, were visiting at the same time and we stayed together in the same house. Alyssa and I still talk often but we hadn’t been in the same room for over a year, so our conversations were like a frenzied kid in a toy store, jumping around from politics to theology to our kids to our newly discovered mutual love of Popcorners. I had asked Grace and Lily what they wanted to do during our two weeks in Tanzania–I suggested places we could visit or experiences we could have, but mainly all they wanted was to be with the people that they loved most at the place they loved most–Haven of Peace Academy. 

So that’s mostly what we did. My soul filled up with long conversations with so, so many friends. We visited favorite restaurants and as we drove through town, I reminded the girls of memories embedded on every street corner. Make a picture in your mind of this place, I would tell them. Make it a part of you. This is your country. Don’t let yourself forget. We stopped by the house we lived in for ten years; we visited the house cleaner who worked for us for the girls’ entire lives. We attended four graduations–5th grade, 8th grade, and high school graduation at HOPAC, and the Reach Tanzania Bible School graduation–which was bittersweet without Gil there. It was all bittersweet, actually, without my boys there. 

It was all so familiar, yet, of course, so much was different. Every corner of the earth changed irrevocably this year. The girls and I were required to be COVID tested three times during the course of our journey. A dozen new sinks had popped up around HOPAC’s campus. During high school graduation, so much hand sanitizer was squirted between each handshake that the smell lingered in the air, even for the audience, even outside. 

I hugged each and every one of my 150 kids that had been my heart for three years, and I exclaimed over new front teeth and new glasses and inches gained. “Mrs. Medina gives tight hugs,” I overheard one warn another. But the tightest hugs of them all were reserved for the children of the three fathers who succumbed to COVID this year.

I was Mrs. Medina again. I was Mrs. Medina during my entire time at HOPAC, ever since 2001. I haven’t been Mrs. Medina at all during these fourteen months, I’ve just been Amy. Even at the after-school program where I am volunteering, I’m still just Miss Amy. Apparently Mrs. Medina got left behind in Tanzania, so I savored the ring of that name, that identity, in my ear. 

Tanzania’s president died in March, so a new president’s face solemnly stared down at me from her framed photograph in every office, every shop. Almost every conversation with every friend included their story of how this event affected them. My country, my school, went through tumultuous changes this year, yet I wasn’t there to go through it with them. And then–a new shock, a new sorrow–as over the weekend, we got the news that Daniella, her sister, and her mother had been murdered in their home. Daniella was Grace’s classmate since the second grade. Grace saw her at school the first two days of our visit, then she disappeared. 

We spent an evening with the Kaniki family–with Trudie, my friend and co-worker from HOPAC, Sheshi, the chaplain at HOPAC and the pastor of our church, and Tim, their son who was Josiah’s closest friend. Sheshi has been battling brain cancer since last May. We found out about the cancer while we were all in lockdown last year, so though we’ve been in touch regularly (I send out their prayer updates on their behalf), I hadn’t seen them since the diagnosis. Even while witnessing for myself the family’s supernatural, joyful strength, seeing them in person brought up that grief, all over again. 

So the sorrow and the joy was intermixed, as it has a tendency to do. 

As familiar as it all was, as wonderful as it all was, there was evidence everywhere that this was not my world anymore. We stayed in the home of a good friend who is out of the country, and the girls immediately noticed their old toys on the children’s shelves. I went to the linen closet to find more towels, and was startled to see my towels in there. This is how the missionary community works–we are great at recycling. My house used to be filled with items that once belonged to missionaries long-gone. Now it’s my things that are spread out in friends’ homes around Dar es Salaam. 

HOPAC hired a new security company this year, which meant that none of the guards at the gate recognized me. Many days I had to patiently try to explain to a new guard why he should let me in, why I belonged there. I wanted to shout, This school has run through my blood for twenty years! But I figured that would get lost in translation. Everyday I wore a yellow visitor’s badge instead of the blue staff badge, and it felt so foreign around my neck, a constant reminder that actually, I didn’t belong. Not anymore. 

It was very strange to not have my name on a door, not have a cubbyhole in the staff room. Stranger still was not having a role. The end-of-school craziness whirled around me, but I stood on the outside, an observer only. 

It is not my life any longer. I knew this, of course, but there was something valuable about seeing it for myself. It hurt, it did, to face the reality of life going on without me. Especially because that place, that role, those people, have stayed so preeminent in my soul for the last fourteen months. Yet I identified that hurt, and was grateful for it. I needed it, in a way, in order to give myself permission to move on. There’s been a part of me that’s been stuck this year. Knowing HOPAC has moved on helps me move on too. 

You see, that was the best part of this trip. For months and months and months I imagined a different ending to our life in Tanzania. I hated my ending, despised it, desperately wished and wished that it didn’t end the way it did. I can’t go back and change it, of course. What happened last March is firmly written in history now. But this trip allowed me the gift of a postscript to that ending, a sweetness to counter that which was only bitter before. To be sure, it still wasn’t the ending I wanted, but it is a whole lot better than the one I had. 

There’s a Swahili song that is often sung at farewells, so it was sung on several occasions during this trip, during graduations and last-day-assemblies. It says, Mahali tumefika tumeona mkono yako, na sasa tunasema, Wewe ni Ebeneza. 

Which roughly translates, We have come this far, and we have seen Your hand, and so we now say, You are our Ebenezer. 

Ebenezer–the name of the memorial stone set up by God’s People after a particularly harrowing deliverance. Ebenezer means Thus far has the Lord helped me. 

I can say with confidence, Wewe ni Ebeneza. You are my Ebenezer. When the curtain closes, that will always, always be the end of the story.

I made a few Facebook live videos during this trip. Here are the links:

Tour of HOPAC

HOPAC kids singing the National Anthem

A Bajaj Adventure

Grade 5 Graduation Performance

The drive to our old house (bajaj style)

Reach Tanzania Bible School graduation processional

It was really hard to narrow down which pictures to post. There are so many more wonderful people we got to see that aren’t represented here.