Honored to be guest-posting today at WeareTHATFamily.com, the site of my new friend Kristen Welch. Her humility amazes me, and I love that her blog funds her non-profit that supports impoverished women around the world–including some maternity homes right here in Africa. The post: 31 Ideas to Encourage Your Kid on a Bad Day.
P.S. My kids have had enough bad days to make this post based on, uh, a lot of life experience–!
Author’s note to newcomers: Our family of origin—or the culture in our own homes—has a considerable impact on our work, our rest, the lens through which we interpret relationships, our kids, our conversation, our spirituality, even our sex life (betcha didn’t think you’d find them in there!).
Plus, I just think it’s plain interesting to understand where we came from—as someone who lives in a different culture that’s helped me better understand my own. It’s helped me be more gracious, more wise, more self-knowledgeable (which helps me be more aware in my relationship with God), and hopefully more holy.
Remember when using these to imagine tacking on the end of every question, Why? and How did this affect you and/or your family?
It’s one of the reasons Africa still suits me well: It walks.
Only about 9 people for every 1,000 owns a vehicle in Uganda, as of 2009. (As long as I’m doing better math than usual, that’s about .9% of the country.) Now. This, along with other reasons, means some roads with potholes like Swiss cheese. And it somehow still means said roads are perpetually clotted with traffic that makes us shake our exhaust-clouded heads. It also still means that, in my new remote neighborhood, I skate to the grocery store behind the tinted windows of our dinged, high-clearance minivan.
But it does mean that as I’m sitting on my front porch with one of my children or my Bible, I can wave at neighbors and greet them. It means that through my open windows flit assorted languages chatting on the road outside my house. It means that last year, as I picked my way to the refugee center, backpack full of the odd teaching supplies (even a couple of Nerf swords to act out stories; the guys seemed to love those), I tacked on at least an extra ten minutes for those meandering African greetings, the smiles and handshakes and Uglish (a Luganda/English equivalent of Spanglish).
Where do you feel most at home? And how do you know when you get there?
I’m consistently riveted by this concept. My current home is in this place with so little that is familiar or familial. When I return to United-States-home, it no longer completely feels like home, either. Even the landscapes in Little Rock vary vastly from the spreading green acreage surrounding my childhood–so different from the developing-world urban sprawl that backdrops my kids’ development.
Home has evolved into this multi-cultural, multi-textural collage of places where I feel embraced and understood (but of course not always), and with people I love (who are of course never all in the same place). I mentally halt over my words referring to “home” in an e-mail or conversation. If anything, living in Africa has cemented the rich promise that my true Home is yet to come. What, or perhaps where, in the world is home?
Good chunks of my afternoon last Saturday were spent with gray flecks of clay compressed beneath my fingernails, and frequently a big, goofy grin on my face.
I was reveling in one of my favorite locales here in Uganda: a small, inexpensive, DIY pottery studio.[1] My husband, in his compassionate, intimate knowledge of me–and frankly, picking up on a struggle for joy–had urged me to get away for the night. I felt like a kid on the first day of summer!
Maybe that’s why I barely noticed the tumbling pile of lumber beside us in the open-air studio with its peeling paint, or why I found the chickens strutting around the table quaint and authentic. The melodic backdrop of the birds complemented the primary school children somewhere practicing their African nyoma drums—and later, belting out a robust version of “Our God is Greater”. How is it that this dusty, rugged, cluttered “studio” struck me at that moment as one of the most beautiful places to work in the world?
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
© 2024 THE AWKWARD MOM
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
