And Then...

.... I drank local medicine meant to cure all manner of maladies out of an ancient gin bottle.

.... I saw a bus driver pull over to the side of the road, open the cargo hold and forcibly remove a very startled looking goat.

.... Our car overheated at the top of the mountain and I volunteered to go with the local men to find water to put in the radiator, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t about to be married off to a Maasai warrior.

.... We found a mouse in the toaster.

.... A motorcycle drove past us on the highway, the passenger on the back sitting sidesaddle, calmly reading a newspaper.

.... A lizard fell on my head when I was closing the curtains.

.... As I sat in the District Commissioner's office I saw two men side by side – one wearing a traditional Maasai shuka, the other wearing a silk Armani suit.

.... They named me Mama Mchungaji, “the pastor’s wife”.

.... A goat chased me in circles around a bush while the local children screamed with laughter.

.... Tizo asked if we could stop the car so he could tie a donkey that had been half eaten by wild dogs onto the roof.

.... And then I ate too much and made a lot of new friends and had a thousand hugs from dozens of children and I played a game made up by six year old Dorry which involved a handful of pebbles and nothing else. And I held my sweet friend’s newborn baby and watched as he opened his eyes and looked at the new world around him for the first time.

.... And then I laughed until I cried and my stomach ached and my cheeks hurt and then little Millen called me “mama mdogo” (my young aunt) and I felt my heart constrict and then open even further.

.... And then I realised that my life is crazy and busy and I love it and that God is so good and I am so blessed and I wouldn’t change any of this. Not for anything. Not for the world.

xoxo,

-Hannah

Long Journey Home

February 27, 2014

"I am finally in a place where people look like me, they talk like me. Their skin is the same colour, their voices round over their vowels, just like mine does. It sounds strange. Is this really what I sound like, look like? Are these really my people? They don't feel like it. My people have dark skin and big smiles. They speak another language - a beautiful language which my head is constantly full of. Every time I open my mouth I have to remember that it's English words that need to come out. In Africa I forget that I am white. Here, I am reminded of it constantly - my reflection in stranger's faces, my voice echoed in theirs. I feel like an imposter in my own country, in my own skin.

I know I am from this country. New Zealand. I know that I grew up here. That I love it. But it feels so strange. So unlike home.

Home is far away, in a hot country in East Africa. Home is where a dozen tiny arms reach out to me for hugs, who love me simply because I love them. Home is a group of children singing in the twilight, a bunch of boisterous nannies laughing. All the time I was in Tanzania I kept thinking about home - how far away it was. Turns out it was right there all along."


Fast forward 18 months and I am back in Tanzania, back in my other home. I arrived here two weeks ago today. Tanzania is a long way from New Zealand whichever way you look at it - it's long through the Middle East, long through Asia and long through Europe. It's just really far away.

It wasn't just the distance that was long though - the journey here this time was not an easy one. There were many setbacks and delays, even right up until I tried to check in at the airport. I cried there and said, as I had a dozen times in the previous week, that I had changed my mind and didn't want to go anymore. All the problems had left me thinking that maybe I wasn't meant to come. My mother said the opposite, "Perhaps you're meant to be there and something is trying to stop you."

Either way, I'm back. I know I will always be torn between New Zealand and Tanzania. When I was there, all the time a part of me wished I was here. Now I'm in Tanzania, a bit of my heart longs for NZ. I can't see there ever being a solution for that. I have a home in both places. And I don't know how long I will be here, whether it will be one year or ten. All I can do is trust that I am here for a reason, that God has a plan and that I will be useful to His work in this place.

And to put it briefly - despite everything, I'm glad to be back. I'm happy to be home once again.

xoxo,
-Hannah

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.

Homesick for Africa

I have been back in New Zealand for four weeks and away from Africa for seven. Being home is strange. Everything looks familiar and feels familiar, but it also feels strange at the same time. It was odd to think that I had been away for so long and yet virtually nothing had changed. Sure there were little things - the road that I have driven most days for years had a change in layout and was almost unrecognisable in parts, and my little brother had grown to be almost as tall as me. But really? Not much was different.

It's still strange to be honest. My family is the same. Church is the same. My house is the same. I have the same bed and my closet is filled with clothes that are familiar but that I haven't seen for months. Now that I have started work again, that too is the same. I wear the same uniform as I did before, I drive the same roads, I have the same colleagues, I do the exact same work. Sometimes it feels as if the last nine months of my life were just deleted, they didn't exist or I imagined them somehow.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

While I was in Africa, my world here went on without me. I don't know what I expected it to be like when I got home, but it wasn't like this. I am different now. I might be looking at the world with the same eyes as I was before, touching it with the same hands, but it feels different, and as kind as people are, nobody really understands that.

And all the time I am thinking about Africa. About Tanzania. About the babies. About Angel and Angelous. I miss Africa with every part of my being and there's not a time in the day that I don't wish that I was there. I think about them all the time. I wonder how much Maxine weighs now, if Riziki can walk yet, if Ibrahim is still a biter, if anybody calls Gian "Baby Gi" anymore.

Everything I see and do and hear is covered in Africa. Swahili words slip into my head uninvited, when English words are what I need. Several times I've accidentally referred to Tanzania as, "back home." Some days even ugali and mboga sound appetising.

I knew I would miss it when I left, but I didn't realise how deeply. I didn't realise that Tanzania would become a part of me, something that I'm constantly longing for. I didn't realise that 23 years of life in New Zealand would give way to eight months on the other side of the world. I didn't realise that your heart could have a different home to your head, to your history.

And the longer I'm away the worse it gets. The more often I cry. The more I sleep, hoping that I'll dream of it. Even if it's only a dream, I can still feel their little arms around my neck, kiss them before they go to sleep. And more and more I struggle, sinking into myself, unsure of anything anymore.

Most nights I cry. Every night I pray. For the children. For my babies. For the African mamas and my local friends. The only thing I can hold onto at the moment is that God is here. He's just as much in the mundane routine of daily life, as He was there in the big things in Africa. He's just as near to me when I'm driving to work as He was when I was feeding orphans. That's what comforts me most right now.

xoxo,
-Hannah

Traveling Days

I left Africa, Neema House and my life with the babies behind on Saturday, February 8. While it was incredibly hard to leave, I hold on to the thought that I will be back some day. 

While I might have left Africa almost two weeks ago, I am not home yet. My first stop was Dubai, where I stayed three days with my friend Shermaine. When I first got to Neema House last June, Shermaine was my roommate and we made friends quickly. Shermaine is originally from the Philippines, but is currently living in Dubai with her Belgian husband. One of the other volunteers commented how funny it was that two people from completely differently places in the world, who had completely different lives, could somehow find such a good friend in a little orphanage in Africa. 

My first day in Dubai I experienced extreme reverse culture-shock. I had gone from witnessing abject poverty, to extravagant wealth in the space of a few hours. I hadn't even had the more average experience of my home in New Zealand in between. That first day, Shermaine took me to the Dubai Mall, which was an interesting experience. I hadn't seen a mall in eight months and suddenly I was in the biggest one in the world. I hadn't even seen clothes shops really as almost everything I bought in Tanzania came from a market. It wasn't uncommon there to see clothes stacked in a pile, taller than I was. The first shop in the mall we went into, I didn't even want to touch anything. I'm too used to the African thing where you never touch anything unless you want to buy it. If you do touch something, the shopkeeper or stall owner will usually harass you to make a purchase, so you learn quickly to look with your eyes only. However, I got used to it relatively quickly thankfully, so I was able to enjoy it!

Inside the Dubai Mall is several "world's biggest" this or that. There's the largest candy store, the largest aquarium viewing panel and nearby is the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.

The aquarium inside the Dubai Mall.

This is one of the reasons I felt so culture-shocked. The day before I had been standing in a schoolroom with thirty children, mud covering my feet, their clothes barely adequate to cover their bodies, all of them hungry. 24 hours later I was standing in front of shops like Burberry for children, Armani Junior and Gucci baby.

I couldn't stop thinking about how even the very cheapest item from a shop like this would be more than what the average Tanzanian would earn in a month. 

The Burj Khalifa - tallest building in the world at 828m.

On the first night I was in Dubai we had dinner at a restaurant on a balcony overlooking the Dubai Fountain. Every thirty minutes there is a show with lights and music.

Shermaine and I spent a day at the silk and spice souqs (markets).

To get to the silk souq we had to take a boat, like this one, to get to the other side of the river. In most places Dubai is modern and extravagant, but down by the river, where the markets are, feels like taking a step back in time.

Shermaine and I on the boat.

Dubai was absolutely amazing to see and experience, but I don't think it is somewhere that I would care to live. A couple of the things I liked best were very simple - a shower with good pressure and as much hot water as I wanted, and a comfortable bed to sleep in! It was also really nice to eat good food - we had everything from French to Pakistani to Polynesian. Even though it was a shock to go straight there from Tanzania, I'm so glad I went as it was lovely to explore a new place and to see my sweet friend Shermaine again.

From Dubai it was on to the Philippines. With my flight leaving Dubai at 4am and only getting one hour of sleep on the plane, I was pretty tired by the time I arrived in the Philippines eight hours later. In the Philippines I am visiting and staying with my lovely friend Jill and her very kind family. Jill is a paediatric nurse who I have known for the past five years - it's been really nice to spend some time with her!

Mostly in the Philippines I haven't been doing much besides resting. I was very tired because since the beginning of January, I have been working 7 days a week as I was spending time at both Neema and Havilah. I have also been sick on and off since the beginning of December, with one thing after another, which has been tiring. Jill has been working, so I've been staying at home and not doing a lot for the most part. Something I have done a lot of here is trying of new foods! It's been very interesting and there have been quite a few things that I have really liked.

The local transport here is known as a "jeepney" and, in terms of looks at least, is even more interesting than a dala dala!

On one day we went to Tagatay to do some sightseeing. We left at 4am so that we would miss the traffic (Manila traffic is crazy busy) and we got there about 6:30. It was up in the mountains and after spending the past almost-year in sunny Africa, the cold was a bit of a shock!

We stopped at a local restaurant for breakfast (rice, poached eggs and whole fried fish) and this was the beautiful view from the roof as the sun was coming up.

I probably only wore this jacket half a dozen times since I left home, but I was very grateful for it that morning! 

Edith (Jill's mother), Jill and I.

Valentine's Day with Edith and Annie (Edith's friend) at a small botanical gardens in Tagaytay.

We went to Sky Ranch, a small amusement park, so that we could ride on the ferris wheel overlooking Taal Lake, in the middle of which is the smallest volcano in the world.

The view from the top of the ferris wheel. It was a bit hazy, but you could clearly see the volcano, which has a crater lake.

At the top.

Jill.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave the Philippines, which will be sad as I have had a lovely time here. It has been really interesting to visit some new places and I have absolutely loved catching up with and meeting some new friends. As for now though - onward to Singapore!

xoxo,

-Hannah