Kristina Lindström was ten years old in 1979 when her family left Sweden for what was then Zaire, where her father, Gösta Stenström, had taken a post as a doctor at the IME hospital near Kimpese. The family expected to stay one year and stayed three. This autumn she will travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo again, carrying as many copies as she can fit in her luggage of her father's book, "Vi möts vid Mukimbungu" ("We Meet at Mukimbungu"), which has just been translated into French. "The handover is the purpose of this trip," she told the Swedish church newspaper Sändaren.
Her story is one strand of a much longer thread. Kristina's grandparents, Ruth and Oscar Stenström, went to French Congo as missionaries in 1928. Her father was born there, returned later as a doctor, and after the family came home became secretary for external mission in the Mission Covenant Church (Missionsförbundet), a predecessor body of today's Equmeniakyrkan. She is the third generation of a family shaped by Congo and by Swedish free church mission — a heritage she describes as carrying both pride and questions that have grown sharper with the years. The road back was long. Sent as a child to a Swedish boarding school in Pointe-Noire in neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville, where the journey to her parents took three days and letters could take nearly two months in each direction, she returned to Sweden at 13 and put her Congo childhood aside. "I thought everything was embarrassing," she recalls. "Congo was embarrassing, the church was embarrassing, the boarding school was embarrassing. I pushed all the feelings down into a little box, put the lid on and put it away."
The lid stayed on for years. Only in 2009, at a retreat for the children of missionaries, did she begin to understand how deeply that upbringing had shaped her, and six years later — 32 years after leaving — she was ready to go back. The trip fell in a season of grief: her mother, Ulla-Gretha, died on Christmas Day 2014, weeks before departure, and the encounter with the places of her childhood brought up more than she had expected. She spent the following two years in therapy. Today she speaks of her "adult Congo" — a country she chose rather than one she was taken to as a child. After 26 years working in preschools she retrained as a garden architect and started a business she named Kikongo, after the language of the region where she grew up, and arranged for a seamstress in Kimpese to make bags and cushions for it; the income allowed the seamstress to buy an electric sewing machine. She now returns almost every year. "I am not a separated missionary and I do not call myself a missionary," she says, "but I am deeply shaped by all of this. The trips and the projects are my way of working internationally and trying to make something good out of what I was given."
(Originally published in Swedish. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Sändaren (Sweden) — sandaren.se
