Africa

We’re in Africa! We’ve been looking forward to this trip for nine years, and we’re finally here.

Kirundi word of the day: Amahoro (hello)

Fun fact: It takes 30 hours to get from Glendale, Arizona to Bujumbura, Burundi.

Actually, it should take longer than that if you schedule long enough layovers– I don’t recommend sprinting across Chicago O’Hare Airport toting six carryon bags and an angry preschooler to catch a connecting flight.

Little Man was happy for most of the trip 🙂

If you’ve been following for a while, you might remember a previous post announcing that we’d be in Kenya for six weeks last spring. Well, that didn’t work out. But the Africa vacation to Burundi and Tanzania that we’re taking now is turning out to be much better than trip to work in the hospital would have been!

Ben was born in Burundi and lived here until he was four, when his family was displaced to Tanzania during the war. In fact, he lived in the house where I’m writing this– his father built it on the family’s mission station 30 years ago and now his oldest brother lives here. But being born in Burundi gives Ben more than just a passport that makes border agents do a double-take. It’s also given him a lifelong connection to a place that will always feel like home.

It took three hours to get through the Bujumbura airport

After our long trip to Bujumbura, Burundi, we finally managed to extricate ourselves from the airport to find the people who would pick us up. To my joy, I saw eight family members waiting for us in the parking lot, where they had spent hours so they could be sure to greet us! We haven’t seen some of the nephews in six years, so our drive to their home a few miles away was a happy reunion.

Keep following to hear about the rest of our Africa adventures! We’ll be here for a whole month traveling between several locations.

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Africa Day 1: 30 Hours in Transit

Africa Day 2: Crossing Burundi

Africa Day 3: A Dowry Ceremony

Africa Day 4: A Burundian Wedding

Africa Day 5: Gisuru School for the Deaf

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Africa. For one thing, I’m writing a novel about an American kid in a Kenyan boarding school. For another, we’re planning on taking a trip to East Africa in the spring. Ben is allowed a residency rotation overseas, and obviously, he picked going home!

Ben near Lake Tanganyika in his hometown

It’s hard to believe we haven’t been to Africa since 2013! For someone like Ben, who grew up there, eight years is a long, long time to stay away. We were the only ones to miss the last family reunion, thanks to Ben’s med school schedule. And when you have 35 people in your immediate family (hope I added that right), living in six countries across three continents, it’s quite a bummer to mess up an opportunity to get a family photo where nobody’s photoshopped in.

Visiting a Burundian national park. Ben’s grandfather helped to start it after WWII.

Fortunately for Ben, even though it’s been a long time since he’s used Swahili on the daily, he does have frequent opportunities to use it at work. There are many people from Congo in our city, and whenever someone shows up to the hospital, Ben is able to conduct exams in a language they are more comfortable using. I, on the other hand, am getting pretty rusty. You know, rusty on the hundred or so words I actually know in Swahili. Looks like I have some work to do if I want to be able to practice any conversational skills at all while we’re there!

We’re excited to go to Africa, introduce our son to the continent, and revisit the places Ben grew up. But one of the coolest things about this trip is that Ben will get to work at the very hospital where his life was saved, where he realized his calling into medicine. Over a decade ago, he was laying in one of the beds with a IV in his arm, recovering from spinal meningitis and watching the staff go about their daily tasks. He knew he wanted to use the second chance at life to pour into patients, just like those doctors and nurses. And now he gets to go back to the same hospital and do just that.

Isn’t it amazing how God redeems our circumstances? Sometimes we never see how he does it, but other times life comes back full-circle and we can see how to worst days of our lives change us into the people we are supposed to be.

Just for fun, here are some of my favorite photos from our 2013 visit to Burundi, Kenya, and Tanzania.