Earlier this month it was one year since I
left Tanzania to come back to my other home in New Zealand. The past year has not been an easy
one. It has been a year of being broken, of watching life fall apart, of
nothing making sense, of intense loneliness and insecurity, of depression and
questioning. Tanzania wrecked me.
It is only now, 12 months later, that healing
is beginning and I’m starting to make sense of the things that I learned there.
A year ago, I left my heart in the hands of
28 babies, of three beautiful triplets and a set of twins who I will always
love. I have thought about those babies, prayed for them, cried for them, loved
them from afar for all these months. I learned a lot about love in Tanzania.
The kind of love that I imagine a mother has for her child. A love that will
cross oceans and cultures and bloodlines to be made real.
I had a much harder time re-adjusting to
the culture that I grew up in than I ever had experiencing Tanzania for the
first time. I didn’t really have culture shock there. I was introduced to the
country slowly, discovered the culture over time. When I came back to New
Zealand though I struggled for a long time. People seemed to take so many
things for granted. At first I couldn’t justify a lot of things. I had a
problem with spending money. Say I bought my lunch two or three times a week,
perhaps I would spend $50 in a fortnight. That’s half a month’s wages for the
nannies I worked with at the baby home. How could I justify it?
I saw people absorbed in things that seemed
shallow to me after the things that I had seen. I couldn’t fathom spending
thousands of dollars traveling around the world simply for your own pleasure. I
couldn’t understand how updating to the newest gadgets, when your old ones
worked perfectly fine, was okay. All the time I was thinking of the children,
of my babies. I thought about Maria who though she was only 51, a lifetime of
hardship had made her look closer to 70. I thought about her children who went
to bed hungry every night and about her poor dead husband whose starved body
had so easily succumbed to typhoid and malaria. I thought about the look in
Maria’s eyes, vacant and hopeless that still haunts me now. I thought about
how all that money would help them, of how many lives could be changed and made
better; how many wouldn’t have to die of preventable and treatable diseases; how
many people could be reached with that money. The guilt of living here, of
being a part of this culture ate me up inside.
And yet, I had to live in my own country again.
I had to learn to be happy here. I could not feel miserable constantly; guilty
of the money I was spending. So I cried some more and prayed some more and spent hours
talking to my long-suffering family. Yes, there is poverty there. Yes, horrible
things are happening all over the world. I cannot turn a blind eye to it. I
cannot (and will not ever) ignore it. But I also cannot, must not, let it ruin me. I must be here now. Enjoy life for what it is at the moment and bide my time, waiting to be sent back to the front lines.
And so I learned to live here. To buy my
lunch now and then or to enjoy a movie with my friends. I learned that people’s
lives lead them in different directions. Their choices are just as valid as
mine are and I cannot judge them, just because their path has taken them a
completely different way to mine. I learned slowly to live in New Zealand
instead of inside my memories.
Tanzania wrecked me. There is no other way
to say it. Everything I thought I knew about life and the world and about who I
was, it was all gone. It changed me completely. I saw more in that eight months
than many people experience in years, perhaps even a lifetime. And over this
past year, as the pieces of my heart got put back together, God showed me
what’s next in His plan for my life. He knew that Tanzania is in my blood, that
it calls to me and that I cannot resist it. I think that’s God calling. So I
said yes. I’m going back.
