The Fey Family

When we had made the decision to uproot our lives in the US and move to South Africa, I was so hungry for information about what living in South Africa would look like. We had been to South Africa several times as a couple, Darin had come on work trips, and we had spent 10 weeks here with our children. We knew some people, had been into various shops, and had a familiarity with the sounds of English being spoken with a variety of accents. However, there is a big difference between leaving home to visit a place for a few weeks or months and entirely uprooting your life in one place to start over in another. What were the schools like, would I have access to familiar ingredients to cook with, what about healthcare?  I scoured the internet to find stories about living in South Africa and found a few women who were more than happy to answer my questions, however random and weird they were. There was Annie, an American living in Pretoria, whose entire blog I read in one day and when Darin c

  This is a quote I have come across many times in our years overseas. It has shown up in online retreats, books about Third Culture Kids, essays by expat writers, Instagram stories and Facebook posts. I have felt the sentiment behind these words to some extent during our visits back to the states in 2014, 2017, and 2019; the feeling growing stronger with each successive trip. However, with those journeys, we always had a returning, a coming home to what had become familiar, known and loved.  And now after nine years of fighting to make our home here, we are looking ahead to the next time we will fly across worlds, and this time, there will not be a ticket to return us to our hard won home; this place of cultures and languages that are not our own, red dirt and thorns, veldt grass and lemon trees, goats and cows roaming freely and donkeys pulling carts, our neighbors we see during the day and party sounds we hear each night.  Instead, sometime in May, we will head back to West Michigan