I have now completed my first week of living in Madagascar. It has been a whirlwind of events as we’ve tried to settle into our new home.
I’ve been gone from our previous home in Tulsa now for two weeks. The time leading up to our departure was full of many goodbyes and not just to people. It reminds me of some random lyrics of a song keep playing in my head ” Goodbye to you, goodbye to everything that I knew…” While this old school Michelle Branch song is about a broken relationship, those few words are very applicable to my life right now.
Here are a few of the goodbyes I’ve encountered in moving to Madagascar.
1. Driving myself around. This is a goodbye for now, but hopefully I can master the roads in Madagascar soon enough. There are some major obstacles of throngs of people, cows, and dirt roads. Even once this is mastered, I will miss the freedom and convenience of driving to Target or Hobby Lobby, or meeting up with friends.
2. Strawberries. Ok this one sounds silly, but in Madagascar the strawberries are grown in pig poop, SO…unless you bleach them and cook them into a sauce, goodbye to these at least until our own plants start harvesting. I ate the nearly every day in the states.
3. English. I’ve already been gone two weeks and noticing my English slowing down with clearer annunciation which means my speech is changing. While some people including other missionaries speak English in Madagascar, it is not one of the two primary languages among the Malagasys. So bonjour or hello to French!
4. Indoors…while I won’t be living in a grass hut, I won’t have central air or heat which means the indoors as I know it will be a thing of the past. l get to say hello to many new little friends like mosquitoes (we’re off to a really bad start), geckos, ants and flies around inside everyday.
While I will miss food, Target, my chilly air conditioning and the ease of speaking my native tongue, the thing I will miss the most are people back home. With family and friends spread across the USA and the world, I’m thankful for the internet which I now have in my house and am using for this post! :)
As the lyrics stated earlier, I did say goodbye to everything that I knew and said hello to this new world of Madagascar. As challenging as that may be, it reminds me of the parallel of how giving my life to Christ was goodbye to my old life and hello to my life in Him. What else could be a better reminder to embrace this life that He has given me and show His love to a broken, dying and hurting world? So for now I’ll keep the goodbyes near to my heart and embrace the hellos that are before me in this season.
“Say goodbye to the you I knew before…say hello to a new beginning. This is your genesis”-Joy Williams