As a child growing up in Nigeria, I often wondered what being a “proper” missionary kid was like. I created elaborate fantasies that involved my family moving across the world to some unnamed country where I would learn to speak another language, immerse myself in a new culture, and have an entirely new family in yet another part of the world. The problem was that my mother, Rev. Arlene Onuoha (currently a regional minister in Temiskaming presbytery), was already a missionary in Nigeria and had been for years. Being half-Nigerian, the country didn’t feel foreign to me. It was simply home.
From the time I was two until the summer I turned 16 and we moved back to Canada, we lived in Aba, a town in the southeastern part of the country, probably best known for savvy businessmen and product manufacturing. The town had its fair share of foreigners, although it was nothing compared to Lagos or Port Harcourt where many multinational companies had set up offices. Our older sister Nene went to a federal government college in another city, but my older brother Agwu, younger sister Rebecca, and I went to a secondary school owned by an African-American woman married to a
Nigerian. We all wore uniforms and were required to shave our hair (as almost all students were required to do, except for extenuating religious or medical reasons). While my siblings and I were not the only mixed children running around the town, we were part of a small minority, and being raised by a Canadian mother in that pocket of the Nigerian south was a meeting of two different worlds.
On one hand, we were Nigerian and we lived it every day. Our mother, having lived in Nigeria for decades before any of us were born, let us absorb the culture, even after our father died. We spoke Igbo, could switch between a Canadian and Nigerian accent mid-sentence, and could understand Pidgin English. And while I was born in America, we are from Abiriba (in Nigeria, people say you’re “from” the place where your father—or mother, depending on the village—is from). Abiriba is about two hours from Aba and is filled with so many hills we used to pretend to be on a rollercoaster as the car coasted down them. There, we had our family home (similar to a cottage in Canada) built on land my father owned, a place we normally only visited during Easter and Christmas, which was when most people went back to their villages for celebrations. We attended retirement ceremonies (ime uche), funerals and weddings, all of which combined traditions from the past with Christian rites. We met cousins and aunts and uncles we hardly saw during the rest of the year and went to the stream to fetch water because we could, following cousins on sloping dust paths that we couldn’t have navigated on our own.
But we were also Canadian and we knew we had an equally large extended family half a world away. We travelled every few years to Ontario and it was during these trips that I began to compartmentalize things in my mind; to associate certain experiences with the places where they had occurred, forming generalizations as a result. For instance, even though, like Canada, there were supermarkets and boutiques in Aba, I associated shopping in an open market with being in Aba. Aba was known for the massive Ariaria market, which was akin to a mall in its diversity. There is probably nothing you can’t find in that market if you can keep from getting lost trying to navigate the maze of shops.
Canada, on the other hand, meant shopping malls and grocery stores with standard prices and no haggling. I preferred this only because I’m not a very good haggler, a necessary skill for anyone choosing open markets. There is an art to haggling that I knew in theory but was never really able to execute. My cousins did the food shopping and when I went to buy clothes, I stood in the corner and watched as my older sister Nene joked around with shopkeepers, talking them down to a price she was comfortable paying. And losing electricity in Canada was always cause for alarm, but in Nigeria it was common. We would either use a generator or go about our business with torches, candles and kerosene lamps.
For as long as I can remember, we attended St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Aba, a three-story building on a hill with a strip of side-by-side churches of different denominations. Since our mom was a minister, we had a basic understanding of the structure of the church, mostly because we had waited more than once for a synod or session meeting to end. But, we also learned about Presbyterian World Service & Development and the importance of various projects our mom worked on—from the urban health centre to the women empowerment talks. We met ministers and missionaries from other Presbyterian churches who would sometimes stop by or stay over when they were in Aba, more “aunties” and “uncles” to visit when we were in Canada. Meeting them gave me a glimpse into the bigger church community—I had known the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria and the PCC, but never really thought about all the other missionaries in all the other Presbyterian churches around the world.
Coming to understand that made me realize that we were part of this bigger community and that my mother had been called to serve an even greater mission, even if I didn’t feel how I thought a missionary kid should feel. Sometimes I still wonder how I would have fared in a place that was neither Nigeria nor Canada, but I also realize how fortunate and blessed I am to have been able to be raised in a culture I was connected to, a culture I’m still very much a part of.
About Urey Onuoha
Urey Onuoha is a copywriter with an advertising association in New York City.
