Dear New Jersey, my story

While I am better with painting my thoughts and ideas, I think it would be worth it to explain, with words, where I am coming from. I finished a painting recently, after a period of painter’s block, that encompasses an especially large part of my story.

I’d like to say I was born for instability. My parents were temporarily living in Hawaii when I was born while my dad served a four year term in the military. Soon before my first birthday we’d fly back to the “mainland” of the USA and travel, by car, across country back to Pennsylvania. The first six or seven years of my life my parents were talking, preparing and training for the mission field. We’d travel back and forth from North Carolina, North Dakota, and California and we drove through state after state for these missionary preparations. After my second grade year we sold all of our things and flew to the Philippines where we would learn how to live on the “field”. I was “homeschooled” for the first semester of my third grade, which really meant visiting local farming factories, bakeries, rocky beaches where we collected starfish, rice patties, waterfalls, the various religious temples and shopping malls of Manila, and bathing in the river with the village cebu. From there we moved to Bandung, Indonesia where I finished the year of school in an international school with my sisters.

Because my parents were busy with language school every weekday, we had a driver, a nanny, and a housekeeper; our new Indonesian family. My sisters and I spent many afternoons walking to the swimming pool at a local hotel several blocks away. And the Call to Prayer ringing out from loud speakers at the neighborhood mosque became usual to us.

The summer after third grade we packed everything again and flew off to Papua, Indonesia, which would become our more permanent home. My two sisters and I attended an International school, which stood parallel to the famous Cyclops Mountain. I learned to climb plumeria trees to gather its freshest flowers at the tippiest-top, my friends and I would hike Cyclops to the waterfall, and climb the eucalyptus tree hill for picnics. We would spend weeks in the highlands with the villagers, helping them to dig trenches through the mountain for a source of fresh water from the springs higher up. We sat around fires with them and plates of smooth banana leaves spread out on the cool, damp, mountain ground where we would have celebration feasts.

The humid days were everyday life days. Harsh rains would come, knocking out local bridges and houses, riots would come, shaking up the peace of the town, hard days would come when we would lose my baby brother, and days turning into weeks sick with malaria, infections, and financial despair. I graduated high school with my friends at our International school and said goodbye to a beautiful makeshift family that I would unlikely see again. Decisions about college had been difficult and tedious and no one had the money to fill in the blanks that financial aid couldn’t, and I had to reject my acceptance to a college in South Carolina where I had planned on studying Humanities. With the culture shock of being “American” and once again living in America I trudged through community college hoping to study Elementary Education, though still feeling the disappointment of the loss of an opportunity to study Humanities. I tried desperately to fit back into a culture that I didn’t “get” the many cultural references or slang, and go about life as if Indonesia had been a strange and beautiful dream. No one seemed to care that I was trying or even notice that I was “different”. And so life went.

I attended the next two years of college at a Bible college where I would receive an associate’s degree in Bible and Theology. Still even there I felt far away, but always doing my best to assimilate myself back into the culture and life of the U.S. I met my husband my last year at college, but wouldn’t get to know him until we started exchanging art and poetry in letters across the country. He was the only one who seemed to understand, who seemed to get the perspective of the world that I experienced. A year later we got married and moved to Tennessee. After much conversation about hopes and dreams, the meaning of life and our social responsibility, we joined the ESC and we moved away to here, New Jersey, where I’m still doing my best to understand the American culture, the concept of the American dream, and trying not to feel like a jungle girl lost in a mass of chaos.

I am learning much, growing much, and experiencing a new and rich culture.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”  – J.R.R Tolkien, "The Fellowship of the Ring"

Hannah