Tag Archives: Africa

30 Hours in Transit: Africa Day 1

Africa, Blog, Burundi, Expats, Expats and TCKs, International Travel, Third Culture Kids, Uncategorized, , , , ,

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!

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Helping with the luggage

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.

Bujumbura, Burundi

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

You can also sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar to get new posts sent monthly to your inbox.

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

Coming Full Circle in Africa

Africa, Blog, Expats, Expats and TCKs, International Travel, Third Culture Kids,

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!

Swinging on vines – not just in movies!

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.

Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya

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.

  • Sailing Lake Tanganyika
  • Baboons (Ben calls them BADboons)
  • Overlooking the Rift Valley
  • Subbing at a Deaf school
  • Friends who helped with navigating the language barrier
  • Burundi
  • The ferry across Lake Victoria
  • Road trip- the real meaning of “Safari!”
  • The tourist version of “Safari”
  • Starbucks for zebras
  • Learning to sail

African Beef Sauce

Africa, Cooking, Expats and TCKs, International Travel, Third Culture Kids, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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I need a little Africa in my life!

Last week, my friends Taylor and Bethany came to visit. While they were here, they treated Ben and I to a special dinner. Since food is expensive here, and we don’t often buy meat or certain fruits and veggies, they gave us the gift of yummy by taking me shopping and buying me groceries for an awesome meal.

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We decided to make one of Ben’s favorites: meat sauce on rice, Africa style. Well, sort of. We didn’t have any curry powder. But I improvised, and it turned out great!

You need:

  • A couple pounds of beef
  • Rice
  • Oil for frying
  • An onion
  • 4 oz of tomato sauce
  • 2 T pilau masala
  • 1 T of garlic
  • 1 t of ground ginger
  • 1/4 cup corn starch
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 2 cups Chicken broth (or bouillon cube and water)

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Prepare rice.

Cut the meat into one-inch cubes. Slice onions.

Heat oil in a frying pan. Fry onions until translucent. Remove from pan.

Fry meat until thoroughly cooked.

Add spices to meat and stir.

Add tomato sauce, water/broth, and onions. Allow to simmer.

Slowly whisk in corn starch until sauce is thick.

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Serve sauce over rice. Pair with tropical fruit and salad. Enjoy!

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100th Post Jamberry Giveaway!

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Jamberry nail wraps are pretty cool- all you have to do is order a kit, apply it at home, and forget about ugly chipping nail polish. Sound great? Well guess what? To celebrate 3rd Culture Wife’s 100th post, you could get one for free!

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You may not know that Ben and I founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a few years ago. It’s called Bariki Africa, which means “Blessing Africa” in Swahili. We raise funds to support the education of village kids in Africa. If you want to know more, you can visit our website.

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Me at the Kampande Village school in 2013

 

Due to paperwork complication and our international move, we were unable to do our spring fundraiser this year, which is a 5K race/fun run in Phoenix, Arizona. But don’t worry, Phoenix friends, it’s still happing this fall!

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A student leads the class in reading practice

 

Instead of a race, our wonderful intern, Mandy, came up with a great idea for an alterative fundraiser: a Jamberry Nails Party! She’s generously giving the organization 100% of the proceeds to her unique Africa designed nail stickers and 30% of her overall commission. That will translate into a whole lot of free lunches for the impoverished kids in the schools we support!

To join the party, you can visit the Bariki Africa Jammin Fundraiser on Facebook.

To win a free Jamberry Nails Kit, go to the Fundraiser Facebook page, find the design you like best, and comment here to tell me your email address and which one you like. Comments will not be published. A random winner will be chosen and notified on March 30, 2016.

We’d also love it if you’d support the village kids by purchasing a kit for yourself or as a gift. A little money goes a long way in East Africa, so your contribution can make a huge difference to a child.

East African Cooking: Chips Mayai

Africa, Cooking, Expats and TCKs, International Travel, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the easiest and fastest East African food I’ve found so far.
My sister, who’s a junior at Arizona Christian University, is working on a project on Burundi for her geography class. Burundi is a tiny African nation near Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It also happens to be the country where my husband, Ben, was born. Of course, she and her project partners interviewed Ben as their expert on Burundi. 

 

Ben being African: he climbed a tree to get this coconut and opened it with a rock.
  

She also asked me for a recipe to bring to class, so I sent her directions to make chapati and mandazi. However, those take a long time, so I thought I’d write up a recipe for something a little quicker: chips mayai.

  
Chips mayai is basically a french fry omelette. It’s a popular street food from Tanzania that is also easy to find in surrounding countires. You can make it from scratch, but this is the busy college student version.

You need:

-Frozen french fries

-Eggs

-Oil (palm oil is the most authentic)

Thaw your french fries.

  
Heat a generous amount of oil in a frying pan. Cook fries until hot. 

Beat eggs (eggs and fries should be 2:1 ratio) and add a little milk, salt, and pepper.

  
Pour eggs in pan. Allow to cook over medium-high heat until the bottom is cooked. Flip over. It’s fine if it’s messy once flipped.

  
Cook thouroughly and remove from heat. Serve with ketchup.
 
Happy Burundian!

Kenyan at Heart

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Today’s blog post is a special guest post from Gabriela, a Third Culture Kid living in Kenya. Enjoy– and don’t forget to like and share!

Having lived in four different states (having traveled to most of the fifty of them), been in six different countries (not counting airports), and lived on two different continents in my 17 years of life, I don’t have a culture to call my own. This is what makes a third culture kid (TCK) different: we make our own culture. I might have a name that is in English, Gabriela Reincheld, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m totally American. As a TCK, I take parts of different cultures and shape them into my own worldview. At the moment, I’m a senior in high school at a Christian boarding school called Rift Valley Academy in Kenya. My parents are missionaries and teach here. I love it. This school is so awesome because all of the kids here are TCKs, like me. For a while, my parents were dorm parents for ninth and tenth grade boys where Ben Johnson was one of my dorm brothers. It was awesome having twenty older brothers and my one younger sister. Over the years, I have learned so much through living in Kenya, while having more of a Western mindset.

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In March, I had the privilege of going on a cultural trip for school to a place off the coast of Kenya called Chale Island, where I would be studying Reef Ecology for one week. With a total of about 30 high schoolers and six adults, we had been traveling for nine hours by bus…you can imagine how that was. On our way to Chale, we were winding down a dusty narrow road surrounded by a vast forest. We came across an incident where a semi-truck was tipped over and we had to help flip it back over in order to keep going. The long drive from central Kenya to the coast usually takes about 9 hours, but for us it was 12. You never know what awaits you on these adventures…this is Africa. Although it was a long and tiring trip, it was worth it.

Jellyfish

We spent the next week in paradise. One thing that interested me was how pollution is destroying the environment and the natural habitats in the ocean. We got to have hands on experience by picking up 1516 kg of plastic on a 200 meter stretch of a deserted beach. Also, we learned about the different types of sea-life in the Indian Ocean and discussed how we can see God working in this environment. It was amazing to see how a tiny brown jellyfish can make a group of students laugh through their snorkels while tapping its top.

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Lastly, I must brag and say living in Kenya has its perks. Although we often have droughts and there are still internally displaced people (IDP) from the 2008 election, there is still beauty and joy found in this country. The people with less materialistic values are the ones you can see the most joy in. Whenever I visit orphanages and the IDP camps, I never cease to be amazed at their joy. God is continuing to work here and it’s awesome how he reveals his majesty.

If you would like to keep up with different events going on in my life as a TCK, come visit my blog: scarfedpassenger.wordpress.com

Image credits Gabriela Reincheld and Brian Wagner