Tag: The Interesting and the Amusing in My Daily Life Page 1 of 10

I Never Thought I Would Miss the Spiders

On November 16, 2020

In A Life Overseas, Leaving Tanzania, Re-Entry to America

Earlier this year, my kids and I were still in Tanzania, and while driving home, we stopped at a roadside fruit stand.

I asked for a huge bunch of bananas, handed the seller my money, and she passed the bananas through the window to my pre-teen son, sitting in the passenger seat. This was routine; we did it several times a week.

I pulled back onto the street and had driven just a few yards when I heard my son give a horrified yell. Alarmed, I looked over and saw an enormous spider, about the size of a silver dollar, crawling on top of the bananas in his lap. The yell turned into a guttural yelping, as my son stood up, dropped the bananas on the seat and proceeded to clamber over all of the seats and into the trunk of our minivan.

Meanwhile, I was still driving, and meanwhile, the spider was also running for his life in my direction, so I joined in with the cacophony of noise in the car. The spider then decided that hiding underneath my seat was a safe place to get away from all the screaming.

Some Things Just Make You Laugh With Delight

By Amy Medina

On October 23, 2019

In Other

On Gil’s bucket list for our last year in Tanzania was to see baby sea turtles hatch, one more time. We had seen this remarkable event several years ago, but our kids were too little to remember it. Gil had several contacts that were letting him know when a hatching would take place, but this particular beach is over two hours away, and he could never get us over there in time.

As we were driving to the beach for our vacation last week, Gil got a text: There would be a hatching the very next day, and it was only about a mile away from where we would be staying. How very, very kind of our gracious God!

Watching baby sea turtles hatch is one of life’s most extraordinary experiences. The conservationist who opened the nest told us that we must not touch the turtles or carry them to the ocean. It’s extremely important that they make the journey themselves, because as these tiny creatures frantically bolt their way towards the sea, their pea-sized brains are actually taking a GPS pin during their frenzied 50 meter journey. And someday, thirty years from now and after swimming thousands of miles, the females lucky enough to survive will return to the exact same beach to lay their own eggs.

Some things are just so astonishing, all you can do is stand in awe, marvel in wonder, laugh with delight.

We Have a Hedgehog and His Name is Hamilton

By Amy Medina

On January 27, 2019

In Other

“What do baby hedgehogs eat?” I hear Grace ask.

“I have no idea,” I say.

She gives me a 13-year-old look. “I wasn’t asking you, Mom. I was asking Siri.”

Well, excuuuuuse me.

Contrary to what many may believe about our life in Tanzania, we don’t live in the Serengeti; we live in a city of six million people. But we do have a rather enormous backyard, and it has brought us an interesting variety of wildlife: Chickens (not really wildlife, but certainly wild), tortoises, kingfishers, monitor lizards, bats, snakes, and hedgehogs. I got over the novelty of hedgehogs a long time ago….those things are loud when they want to be–like when a dog is trying to kill it. After many, many evenings of frantic barking and wailing hedgehogs, we got used to finding the poor prickly creatures and chucking them over the fence, just to get everybody to shut up.

But then my children found a baby hedgehog, which, according to my children, is apparently an entirely different category of hedgehog which shouldn’t be thrown over the fence but needs to be brought into the house and fed and named and snuggled (as much as a creature with spines can be snuggled). The children’s father immediately went along with this idea as soon as Google told him that this type of hedgehog will cost you about $200 in the States. He’s always up for a good deal. The children’s mother was not consulted, because she is the family’s stick-in-the-mud.

So there you have it: We now have added Hamilton Willow Leo Medina into our family, which is a very long name for something that weighs about five ounces. Hammie now has his own, homemade, elaborate cage complete with a hamster wheel, even though he is not a hamster and may not like wheels. In fact, he showed very little appreciation for the cage, because while we were eating dinner he got out of it and got lost in my bedroom, which meant that there were four children crawling around the floor with flashlights while Mom was hollering, “I don’t want a hedgehog to die in my bedroom so no one gets to watch AFV until you find it!”

And of course, this is all very confusing to Snoopy, who as a Jack Russell was bred to search and destroy small moving creatures and has, until this point, been encouraged to do so. But no one seems to listen to me when I bring this up. Siri is smarter than me anyway, so what do I know?

Friday Night Dinner

By Amy Medina

On January 19, 2019

In Other

Usually we buy barbecued ribs from our friend Frank on Friday nights, because they are awesome and who wants to cook on Friday nights?

But this week Frank wasn’t cooking, and at 5:00 I lay there on the couch, thinking through my options. More than one of my children asked, What’s for dinner, Mom? To which my gracious and loving response was, Food.

Options at 5:00 on a Friday evening are limited. We could order pizza, but they can never find our house which means we have to meet them somewhere, and that’s even if they remember our order in the first place. We could go to that street-food place that sells life-changingly good chicken, but even though it’s only a couple of miles away, it’s not good enough to battle 45 minutes of traffic and another half hour of waiting for it.

I sighed and got up to stare into the refrigerator for inspiration. But I shop on Saturdays and so there wasn’t much much inspiration to be found. I remembered that my house helper had left a large pot of peeled tomatoes on the stove. Okay, I guess we’re having spaghetti.

So I started chopping up onions and throwing in spices, having done this so many bazillions of times that it’s been years since I’ve used a recipe. Oh, and butter. If you didn’t know that butter is the key to amazing spaghetti sauce, then I’ve just revolutionized your life. You’re welcome.

I went to the pantry to get the pasta, but then I realized…..no pasta. Which is impossible because I always have pasta. Always. I even checked under the shelves, thinking that maybe it must have fallen back there.

I slumped down onto a dining room chair, despairing of life itself. I could make pizza, but it would take too long for the dough to rise. Gil offered to run to a store and go buy pasta. But I weighed my options. I would rather go out and look for pasta than stay home with the four hungry children. I think I can find it in a nearby duka, I said. I could use a walk anyway.

I took my shorts off and put my skirt back on and put the water to boil on the stove. I walked out our heavy metal gate, and up the rocky path to the main road where I met a mass of Friday-evening humanity. Women–and girls–with babies tied to their backs. Children in uniforms walking home from school. Men in long white shirts leaving the mosque.

I walked along the side of the busy road, dodging motorcycles and bikes, scanning the tiny shops for the ones that sell food. I passed the guys who fix our flat tires and a shop that sells fifty pound bags of rice. I stopped at one duka that looked promising, but they only had soap and bottles of oil and soda. No pasta.

I passed enormous piles of pineapples for sale, gradually fermenting in the humid air. If I hadn’t already bought three yesterday I would have picked up a few more. At fifty cents each this time of year, we do our duty in supporting the pineapple economy.

I peered hopefully into another tiny shop, but saw only notebooks and pencils. I almost moved on when my eye caught something in the corner–neatly stacked packages of spaghetti noodles. But I played it cool, not wanting to get my hopes up. Can I see the spaghetti? I asked the teenager manning the shop. He handed me one, and I inspected it carefully for bugs. Thankfully, it passed the test. I was back home a few minutes later, just as the water had started boiling.

Someday, I’m going to be really thankful to live in a place again where I can order pizza on a Friday night. But I imagine there’s a part of me that will still look back wistfully on a night like this one.

Hot Sweaty Christmas Nostalgia

By Amy Medina

On January 13, 2019

In Other

It’s always hot in December, but this year, Dar es Salaam tried to kill us.

It’s not supposed to feel like this until February! I grumbled into the sauna-like air. The whole point of a sauna is how good you feel when you come out of it. But Dar es Salaam is like one of those nasty villains in a Marvel movie who throws you in and locks the door. Now, go bake some Christmas cookies in there! she shrieks in that high-pitched monster cackle. And see if that doesn’t turn you into the Grinch!

Christmas is all about nostalgia, isn’t it? Fueled by Hallmark movies and Thomas Kinkade paintings and everyone’s perfect Instagram pictures. Crackling fires and children in sleeper pajamas and sparkling lights. You can say all you want that Christmas is about the Incarnation or the spirit of giving or blah blah blah, but actually, it doesn’t “feel” like Christmas unless you get the nostalgia part right. Which is why Christmas is usually the hardest time of the year for Americans living overseas.

But then this funny thing happens once enough time goes by. You do the same thing enough times, even if you hate it, and one day you find your own form of nostalgia. The plastic tree held together by zip ties, the bizarre shopping excursions that include haggling over used shoes in an open-air market, the cans of Root Beer that appear in Christmas stockings. Suddenly you can’t imagine Christmas without those things.

At our mission Christmas party this year, the theme of the gift exchange was food items that we usually wouldn’t buy because they are too expensive here. So we cheered and laughed and fought over packages filled with tortilla chips and nacho cheese, s’mores ingredients, and–the most popular–a homemade cheesecake. Our family walked away with the package of bacon, and it was awesome.

We made gingerbread houses and took our worker’s family to the water park; we made seven kinds of cookies that had to be kept in the freezer so they wouldn’t melt. We went to the movie theater and saw “The Grinch,” but my favorite part of the movie was the air conditioning. We had crepes and strawberries on Christmas morning, because strawberries are hard to come by. Gil gave me an orange-chocolate bar for Christmas, and I gave him a bag of Hershey’s caramel kisses that were on sale (since normally they would have been twelve dollars). But our main gift to each other was running the air conditioner in the living room for the week before Christmas, because air conditioning is the Superhero against that heat villain.

It’s never going to look like a Hallmark Christmas movie, but it’s nostalgic just the same.