What follows is a series of entries about how I got to the point where I am getting ready for a 15 day trip to East Africa. I figured breaking it into installments would be better than expecting someone to read a novel. But be warned…it may still be a bit like a novel.
Almost everyone I know who has been to Africa says, “Africa gets in your blood…” For me, that is true. Not just because I was born there. Not just because my dad grew up there. Not just because my grandma was born there. Well…maybe those things helped. But when I was graduating from high school in Kenya and people would say, “do you think you’re ever going to come back?” at that time I would honestly say, “I don’t know if I’ll come back as a full-time missionary…but I would love to help find ways of bridging the gap between Christians in the States and what is going on in Africa. I’m not sure I knew what that bridge would look like, or how I expected building it…but I knew that there would just be a benefit to helping people in America challenge their stereotypes and conclusions about “Africa.”
Fast forward to the year after college, when I moved back to Minneapolis without really a clear idea of what I would do with my life. All I really had going for me was a Journalism degree I knew I didn’t want to use and a desire to re-establish some sense of home and family with my parents. During most of my college life I was deeply involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and was in the runnings for chapter president my senior year. The details are a story for another time, but I ended up turning down the role of president in an attempt to begin building an identity for myself outside of “professional Christian leader.” During my senior year of college I was approached about considering going on staff with IVCF, and while it seemed like a really logical next step for someone like me, I just couldn’t get myself to do it. Being on staff for IVCF involves raising support and having a network of supporters–individuals and churches. And I felt so disconnected from any sort of solid foundation or identity of any kind. I could talk myself into Christian leadership with the best of them, but I just wasn’t sure if that was who I really was. And I felt like I couldn’t really know that until I tried to do something besides Christian leadership. So I moved to Minneapolis and got a job at Panera Bread.
In my attempt to ‘find a life’ in Minneapolis, I shadowed my parents to a World Mission Prayer League prayer meeting one night. In the typical embarrassing fashion of my mother, she went up to the guy coordinating the young adult group for WMPL and said, “this is my daughter…she needs friends.” This resulted in an invitation to go on a retreat with that group, which led to some important fellowship and friendships during my first few years out ‘on my own.’ I didn’t know much about WMPL before I started attending their monthly prayer meetings, but I found out they were the sending agency for a family that was good friends with my family in Kenya.
When families are friends on the mission field, it usually means the parents are in the same mission organization and work together so the kids cross paths at mission events, or the parents are friends with each other enough to open up their guest rooms when the other family is visiting. With the Collins family and the Koski family, it was the guest room relationship. The Koski family had 3 kids that were similar in age to me and my older brothers. The story goes that our families were vacationing at the same missionary facility at the ocean back in the early 80s. Us kids started playing together, which meant the parents met, which led to us spending many nights on the floor in the Koski house in Nairobi when we would be in the city for a few days. In fact, the story goes back further to a little old lady who went up to my mom at her home church in California back in the late 70s, as she was raising support to go to Kenya for the first time. This little old lady found out my mom was going to be a missionary in Africa and said something like, “I have a niece who’s in Africa,” but she couldn’t remember where in Africa. Turns out, Mrs. Koski was that niece.
So I had met Kristen Koski when I was a kid, and our families were friends. We had stayed at their house lots of times through the years. They were the house we always got to really late at night, where we had to honk the horn and bang on the gate to wake the guard up, where we would climb up into the trees and knock down a multitude of Guavas, and where we could eat fancy stuff like toast from a toaster and cold cereal for breakfast (toast in our house was made over the stove, and instead of cold cereal we consumed a LOT of hot porridge for breakfast). I’m sure there were guavas elsewhere in Kenya, but in my mind, they were exclusively available at the Koski house. But as we grew up I went to boarding school and she went to day school, and our schools were pretty strong rivals. So then our friendship became some familiar glances at each other at inter-school sports events. When I was a junior and Kristen was a sophomore we were both in Model United Nations, and when our schools both attended the MUN convention in Nairobi, we re-connected and found ways to pass notes to each other using the parliamentary procedure required for that event.
I lost touch with Kristen as we both graduated high school and transitioned back to the States. So it was a great surprise when, after moving to Minnesota and being invited to join the young adults on this retreat, I found out that WMPL was the sending mission for the Koski family. It was an even greater surprise when my brother came back from playing soccer one day to say that on his team were two MKs we knew from Kenya–one guy who had gone to school with us, and Jonathan Koski…Kristen’s older brother. This introduction inevitably led to inviting Jonathan and Kristen over for chai, which resulted in Kristen telling me about a vacancy for a roommate in her apartment. I applied to fill this vacancy, and was accepted to spend a year as an Urban Neighbor with Kristen and 3 other young adults.
After being roommates for a year, the friendship between Kristen and me, which had really extended back to when we were both really young and was initially possibly a friendship of convenience due to circumstances, became a friendship we both chose. In my need to create some solid identity, it was not insignificant to me that at a time in my life when I could count my “longer than 5 year friends” on one hand, Kristen and I had a shared history. And yet, because her life in Kenya was not tied up with the same mission organization or boarding school as my life in Kenya, our histories were also quite separate. That year that we lived together, though, was a gift, as Kristen and I validated things in and about each other than those around us didn’t quite understand. I drove with Kristen up to Winnipeg to visit the guy she was dating, and then played flute at their wedding a year later. Shortly after they got married, Kristen and Ryan set their sights on becoming missionaries. Ryan is a pilot, so they joined Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) and went back to Kenya. After spending some time in Kenya, MAF transferred them to South Sudan, where they are currently located.
So yeah…there are bridges in this story. Bridges across time. Bridges across mission organization. Bridges across school loyalties. Bridges across geographical boundaries. And this is the first part of the story of why I’m going to Sudan. I’m going to Sudan because I know some missionaries there who are doing really interesting stuff, and I want to see for myself what that is and how I can help.