I remember my husband and I discussing on the morning of the 18th of March whether we should buy a big container of coffee or just a small one. We were running out, but we didn’t know how much longer we would still be in South Africa.
Just after 11 a.m. that same morning, we received our tickets. We were leaving in six days.
Looking back, that conversation about coffee probably explains where our minds were better than anything else. We weren’t wondering whether to buy coffee. We were trying to work out how much longer we needed to prepare to be there, and that was an impossible question to answer.
We had completed the refugee processing in South Africa and received our approval for resettlement to the USA. Everything required from our side was done. We knew we were moving from South Africa to America, but we didn’t know when we would leave or where in America we would be going.
There were Facebook groups with other people going through the process, and we knew of people who had completed everything and still waited months for their tickets. So although we knew ours could come soon, we also knew we might still be waiting for a while.
Every morning, you woke up thinking that maybe today would be the day. Then the day passed, and you were still waiting.
It really was living in limbo. You couldn’t properly plan ahead or commit to anything long term because you didn’t know whether you would still be there in a few months or be packing to leave within days. Life carried on, but even something as ordinary as choosing a container of coffee came back to the same question: how much longer were we going to be here?
And then we had our tickets, a departure date, and a destination: Spokane, Washington.
I’d never heard of Spokane before.
Eben and I immediately started researching Spokane, trying to find out as much as we could about where we were going to live. Up until then, we’d known we were going to America, but America is a big place. Now we finally had somewhere specific to look up.
Looking back, the information we found wasn’t necessarily inaccurate, but the idea we formed of what life would be like wasn’t quite how it turned out. We were trying to understand a place we’d never been to, and there was a lot we didn’t know to look for or ask about.
But at that point, we only had six days, and there was still so much to do.
We’d already started selling our furniture and clearing out our home before we received the tickets. We had moved in with my dad to save on costs so that we could bring more money with us. We thought we’d already got rid of quite a lot.
Then we started trying to fit what was left into our bags.
That was when leaving South Africa really hit me.
We knew from following other families’ travel updates in the groups that baggage allowances differed depending on the airline. We were lucky to be flying with one that allowed two fifty-pound bags per person. For the four of us, that meant eight fifty-pound bags to fit everything into, plus a carry-on each.
At first, we tried packing two bags for each of us. But that didn’t work with the weight, so eventually we distributed everyone’s things between all eight bags, trying to even it out and bring as much as we could.
We packed and repacked three or four times. Every time the bags were overweight, we had to take more things out.
We knew we were leaving, and we’d tried to prepare ourselves mentally. But standing there, trying to fit our life into eight bags, was when I actually felt how big this was.
I was making decisions about what to leave behind without knowing whether we would need it once we got there. I knew we needed warm clothes, but I was also thinking about work. Should I take business casual clothes? Office attire? What would I need when I found a job?
There were a lot of shoes we eventually left behind. There were things we thought we’d be able to take until we weighed the bags again. And there were things I wanted to bring simply because they mattered to us.
Our twenty-two-piece canvas set was one of those things. My grandfather had given us money as a wedding present, and we’d used it to have the set made. We wrapped the canvases carefully in bubble wrap and packed them, hoping they would arrive in one piece.
We were also trying to find space for our puffer jackets, which were taking up a lot of room. We expected to need them in Spokane, especially once winter came, so we didn’t want to leave them behind.
Although we hadn’t seen the airline specify it, people in the groups mentioned being able to bring a comfort item, like a teddy for the children. So we ended up folding and rolling the jackets into pillow shapes and putting them inside pillowcases. Each pillowcase held two or three puffer jackets, and we travelled with what looked like pillows.
By then, we were doing whatever we could to make everything fit. We were weighing bags, moving things between them, taking things out, and rolling jackets into pillowcases to bring a little more with us.
Eventually, we decided to take an extra bag and be prepared to cover the cost. Luckily, we didn’t end up having to pay the extra charge. But even then, there was still a mountain of stuff we couldn’t bring.
My dad had to deal with everything we left behind. I think some of it went to the lady who worked for him, but I’m honestly not sure what he did with all of it.
That was an emotionally overwhelming part of leaving for me. We’d done so much preparation already, but there I was, still taking things out of bags and deciding what we would walk away from.
It was also when the doubt crept in. I still believed this was the right decision, but I remember thinking about how big a sacrifice we were making. We were literally leaving everything and hoping for better.
And even with all the thought we put into packing, we didn’t get everything right.
We researched Spokane’s spring weather before we left. But we were not prepared for how cold it would feel to us.
I think being used to Celsius contributed to that. We were looking at temperatures in Fahrenheit without really knowing what those numbers felt like. When you’ve spent your whole life thinking of thirty degrees as hot, it takes a while to get used to thirty meaning something completely different.
We’re more familiar with it now, but at the time we didn’t have that understanding. We knew we needed warm clothes, yet a lot of what we brought still wasn’t warm enough. Once we got here, we had to replace a lot of our clothing with warmer things. I think we’ve ended up donating most of what we originally brought.
It’s strange to think about that now, considering how many times we repacked and how difficult it was to choose what to leave. We were trying so hard to bring what we would need, but we didn’t really know what that was yet.
The packing kept us busy, but the practical things weren’t all I was thinking about.
I worried about the financial side. We were used to earning and paying for things in South Africa. We didn’t know yet what we would earn in America, how far that money would go, or whether it would cover what our family needed. We were going to a country where we didn’t really know anyone, and there was a lot we would have to figure out.
I also thought a lot about the children and how they would cope with the change.
We had conversations with our thirteen-year-old about the fact that it wasn’t going to be like the movies from the start. We were going there to build a life. We weren’t arriving with everything already in place.
I wanted her to have realistic expectations, but there was only so much I could explain when we were also going into the unknown. We were trying to prepare the children while still trying to prepare ourselves.
Then there were the goodbyes. Before the tickets arrived, we knew we would be leaving, but we couldn’t tell anyone exactly when. Suddenly, we had less than a week.
I remember looking around and thinking that these were our last days in South Africa. The ordinary things felt different once I knew we only had a few days left. At the same time, there was so much to finish that we couldn’t spend all our time taking it in.
I’d wanted the waiting to end, and I was relieved when it did. But receiving the tickets brought its own kind of overwhelm. We finally knew when and where, and now we had to be ready.
Through all of it, I still believed we were making the right decision for our family. That didn’t mean I wasn’t worried or that leaving was easy. I had plenty of questions, and most of them were still unanswered when we finished packing.
Six days earlier, Eben and I had been discussing which size coffee to buy because we didn’t know how much longer we would be there. Now we were leaving South Africa with our children, our bags, and puffer jackets rolled into pillowcases.
We’d prepared as much as we could. The rest, we were going to have to figure out when we got there.
