One Year Later

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.