Home Across The Sea

A lot of people frequently ask me what it was like to live in another country for my whole life. This question is very hard to answer if the person asking has never left America. Very few people I know have ever left their own state, much less the entire country, which makes explaining to them how absolutely extraordinary the rest of the world is impossible.
South Africa is a beautiful, exquisite, beyond words place. The majority of my childhood was spent there, and I look back on all of those years with fondness. Whenever I hear that someone has never traveled, I want to take them with me to South Africa so that they can fall in love just as I have.

In my social circle, the only reason anyone leaves the country is to go on missions trips. To be completely honest, I don't think that missions trips will ever truly expose you to what a country has to offer, especially if it's only for a small amount of time. Granted, my years in Africa were because my parents were doing missions, planting churches and AIDS hospices, but I wasn't. I was there to live. And live was exactly what I did.

Most people who know me know that I like to use "I'm from Africa" as an excuse when something American goes right over my head (or I'm just ignorant on a certain issue and use my roots as an out). You would be surprised how many things I think are interesting that others don't care about, purely because I lived in another country my whole life. When people hear that my minor is American History, they ask why. I tell them it is because American history is the most fascinating thing in the world to me, and they don't understand. They grew up learning it, having it drilled into their heads since elementary school. America was brand new to me when I returned here at age thirteen.

More often than not, I feel like I don't entirely belong here. Travel makes you restless; seeing how enormous the world is outside of your tiny town makes you desperate to explore. This stint in Oklahoma is the longest I have ever lived anywhere. Even my life in Africa was interrupted by a brief year-trip back to the States. I'm antsy, itching to get going, to go back to my home across the sea. The place where zoos let you go into the exhibits with the animals and you can pick which ocean you feel like swimming in.

South Africa is the place where penguins are the meanest, most vicious creatures, and they freely roam the beaches, chasing people around like they own the place. It's where everyone will smile at you, whether they are millionaires or live in a house made out of things they fished from the trash. It's where the mountains tower over you, begging you to climb them, and lions and giraffes live next to each other in the wild, not in cages.

This place is the place that made me want to travel the world, to study abroad, to live somewhere new. I cannot describe to anyone how wonderful my home is, and I wouldn't dare try to for fear of ruining it with silly words. Who knew a place so far away could stir such deep feelings within my soul?

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

~Ecclesiastes 3:11