I
can’t remember the year, exactly, but it was sometime in the mid 1960’s. My
family lived in Nigeria, West Africa because my parents were stationed there by
the Christian mission they served. Nigeria was not an easy place to be in the 1960’s.
That
decade started out hopeful when on October 1, 1960, Nigeria was granted its independence
from Great Brittan. But hope crumbled in the subsequent years as tribal
infighting increased and rumblings of war began. This fighting culminated in a tragic civil war known as the Biafran War. My family lived
there during all of this—my physician father, my nurse mother, my two sisters,
one brother, and me.
Like
other missionaries, my parents usually brought with them, tucked away in the
missionary barrels with all of their other personal items, at least some of the
presents they would need for the various occasions over the three years they would
be in Africa. But they assumed they would be able to also purchase other toys and
other items in country. Nigeria’s larger cities like Lagos and Ibadan had
British stores with many of the goods we were accustomed to in America. Most
Christmases, my parents and other missionaries made trips to Ibadan and
purchased gifts for each other and us children, which they gave us along with
the one or two things they had brought with them. But that year, travel was
restricted due to the unrest all around us.
What
was a parent to do in a situation like that?
Nonetheless,
I remember that Christmas as one of the grandest I ever had. I woke up that Christmas
morning to what seemed like a living room full of new toys! It felt to me like I
had received more toys than I had ever received at any one time in my life. It was
a magical morning; Christmas magic, I suppose. I can still remember looking
around the room and seeing a new item of one kind or another seemingly
everywhere. And what were these gifts? How had my parents solved the problem of
not being able to travel and purchase gifts for their children?
That
year, my parents had brought only a set of plastic dishes with them in their
missionary barrels as their gift to my sisters and me. Those plastic dishes were all they had to offer their three
daughters. Oh, they had brought other gifts, but these had already been given
in the previous two years on the field. This year, the last year of their term,
they had only one set of plastic dishes left. I do not know what they had thought
they would be able to do but I assume they had planned on giving one of us
those dishes and buying other gifts for the other two of us. But as it was,
that set of plastic dishes was all they had. So, they improvised and made
gifts, or had them made actually.
That
morning before my bright, wide-open child’s eyes, I saw laying around my living
room in various places; a small wooden sink and kitchen cabinet combination, a
small wooden refrigerator with doors on hinges that opened and shut and shelves
inside, a wooden stove with a door that opened just like a real stove, a miniature
wooden table and four small chairs. These, it turned out had been made by the
hospital carpenter using my dad’s design and then hand painted by my father.
Sitting on the table were the plastic dishes and laying on the floor near these
were three aprons, a small tablecloth, napkins, dish cloths, and a hot pad all
made by my seamstress mother with material she had bought at the local market.
The
gifts were for all three of us—both my sisters and me—but that didn’t matter to
me at all. It all seemed so marvelous! My sisters and I shared a room, anyway.
All three of us slept in one double bed. I, of course, got the middle since I
was the middle sister. After we moved our toys to our room from the living
room, we had every little girl’s dream of a bedroom. Our three baby dolls
already had their spots in the room. We had one small wooden cradle that all the
dolls laid in. That didn’t seem strange to us. They shared that bed just like
we shared our bed. But now we had a table and four chairs so the dolls could
sit at our little table instead of sleep in the cradle if we wanted to place
them there. Against one wall now sat the toy kitchen sink-cabinet combination,
stove, and refrigerator and in front of that we placed the table complete with a
tablecloth on it. We stored the dish towels, and aprons on one of the shelves
inside the cabinet. The dishes could be found anywhere—in the cabinet, in the
refrigerator, in the sink, or on the table.
I
didn’t feel like I was in a small mission house in a war-torn African country.
I felt as though I was in the richest palace in the world. Surely no little
girl anywhere had as many wonderful kitchen toys as my sisters and me!
