From the beginning

Many people have asked me if I was born in Africa.  

I was not. 

My life began in San Diego, where my dad was partway through medical school. I'm the youngest of three biological children, and I was three when my dad earned his MD. I have few clear memories from those San Diego days, but one of those is flushing a goldfish down the toilet. I believed that the fish had diarrhea (and wonder now if this idea came from my older brother). 

When I was three we moved to Los Angeles for my dad to complete his residency in pediatrics at UCLA. I have several memories from our first apartment that first year, including our first cat Velvet. After one year we moved to student housing, where we lived for three years until I was seven. I started school while we were in that apartment, and my best friends were Monica Smith, a neighbor who was in my first-grade class and attended the local LDS church, and Shane Stafford, who played ice hockey and showed me Beetlejuice. (I don't remember the film but remember getting in trouble for watching it.) 

Things started changing when I was seven. We moved to another apartment while Dad was getting his Master's in Public Health and working at a county clinic. (Much of this may be not quite accurate, as I was too little at the time to pay attention to these details and may have mixed up my timeline.) My brother and I rode the school bus an hour each way to a magnet school, and we spent the ride listened to Weird Al and played Tetris on Brad Warner's Gameboy. Our bus driver, Ms. Lightner, listened to pop, to which we were never exposed at home, so we learned songs from MC Hammer, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson. Those two years were my favorite of my childhood in the U.S. I adored my teacher; I had friends at school, church, and in the neighborhood; we had an adorable foster baby; and I was a happy kid. 

But that first year, when I was seven, I also learned that my parents wanted to move overseas and be missionaries. (The word "missionary" can mean so many different things, but here it refers to a Christian who goes to a foreign country to improve the lives of the needy and under-served in a practical way, e.g., as a medical doctor.) I don't remember their sitting us down to tell us, but I think they must have. I'm sure they talked about it a lot, maybe even to us, but I have no memory of any related discussions. I gather that they had always planned to go overseas, even from their earliest days as a married couple, as they had met and fallen in love when they were missionaries in a foreign country. It had just taken a bit longer, perhaps, than they had expected – a bachelor's, two master's, and a doctorate degree and three kids later. 

In any case, that year I found out we were going overseas. In October, we flew to North Carolina, where we lived for a month while my parents went through candidate orientation for our mission. I don't know what all they learned (though, looking back, I can imagine), but we kids spent our mornings doing schoolwork we'd brought with us and our afternoons learning about other cultures. Our teacher, Mrs. Gibbs (whose daughter and son-in-law would one day make a huge impact on my life) taught us songs in French and Spanish. We dressed up in outfits from other countries. We learned about different foods and got to taste them. We went on a couple field trips to local places of interest. And at the end of the month, we were told that our host country would be Nigeria. 

I knew nothing about Nigeria but learned bits and pieces as time went on. My parents prepared presentations to give at churches when we went around to raise support. They called it "deputation" at the time, but now I think they call it "friend-raising." My brother and sister and I learned a couple skits to help my dad demonstrate the importance of rural development and the hilarity of language barriers. We traveled often on weekends to various churches in southern California to speak about Nigeria and meet people who would support us monthly while we were overseas. (Most missionaries rely on the financial support of donors in their country of origin in order to work overseas.) As a kid, it was fun going to different places and meeting new people, especially going to other people's homes for meals or eating out. We wore tie-dyed clothes and felt special. I, after all, was not the one who had to drive, sometimes leaving well before dawn to arrive in time for a morning service. To me, it was an adventure. We spent two years raising support, planning, and eventually packing up our lives. 

But then I began to realize the implications of our moving overseas. It would mean leaving behind our church, our schools, our friends, and our family. It would mean potentially not seeing my grampa and my closest cousins for four years at a stretch. It would mean no pepperoni or M&Ms, no magnet school with my amazing combo-class teacher, no youth group houseboat trips or winter camps, no ice-skating rinks or McDonald's. I was blown away by everything I felt I was being asked to give up. And the most gut-wrenching of all was that we would have to leave behind the foster baby we'd had for two years, whom we'd gotten straight from the hospital after his premature birth, whom we adored. 

And I started to not want to go. It's funny now, looking back, that I was the one who made the most noise about moving. True, as the youngest and the brattiest, I usually made the most noise about everything. But in retrospect, I had the least to lose. My brother and sister were finishing up elementary school and junior high, respectively, and because of the difference in school systems – junior high versus middle school – my 7th grade brother would be starting middle school after all his classmates had been in middle school for a year, and my 10th grade sister would be starting high school after all her classmates had been in high school for a year. They were leaving behind good schools and amazing academic opportunities we would never get in Nigeria. My sister was leaving behind a youth group she loved and many very close friends who were like family.  

But it was I who loudly struggled with the transition. I begged and pleaded with my parents to let me live with my aunt and uncle, to let me stay. I cried. I may have screamed. At nine, I should have been beyond temper tantrums, but I fought the move with all I had in me. 

Ultimately, though, what can a nine-year-old do? 

On the afternoon of August 21, 1991, we boarded a plane at LAX that would take us to Amsterdam, where we would spend a 24-hour layover before heading to Nigeria. It was a long flight to Europe, an overnight flight during which none of us slept well. I refused to eat anything, though at breakfast, just before landing, I was forced to take my anti-malarial medicine with a glass of orange juice. We were exhausted as we deplaned in Amsterdam – not only from the flight but from the weeks of late-night packing and cleaning that led up to our move. I don't remember much from our layover. I remember riding a train through farmland. I remember being responsible for our guitar – feeling like Maria from The Sound of Music. I remember visiting Anne Frank's house (so many stairs!) and passing a man playing the violin in a large, open square, with his open case in front of him to collect money. I remember going for dinner to a corner restaurant near our little hotel called L.A. Bar, which horrified me because I'd always thought bars were essentially evil. (All I had was a glass of water.) That's about all I remember, and the next day we were on the plane to Kano, one of two cities in Nigeria that at the time had an international airport. I had not eaten anything since we'd left Los Angeles, and my dad threatened that if I didn't start eating, he would hook me up with an IV once we got to our new home. I'm pretty sure he was serious. 

Little did I know that stepping off of that plane onto the tarmac in Kano would begin the best days of my life.