Category: Third Culture Kids Page 3 of 5

Boarding School

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On January 4, 2021

In Third Culture Kids

Thirty years ago this month, I left my family for boarding school. According to American assumptions, that must mean I was a juvenile delinquent. Or maybe a wizard.

But no, Hogwarts didn’t exist in January 1991 when I was 14, but Rift Valley Academy did. My family had recently moved to Ethiopia, and there was no international high school for me. All the missionary teenagers were sent off to RVA in Kenya, so after a semester of lonely correspondence school, I asked my parents if I could join them.

I wanted to go, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified. I was painfully shy and very much a homebody, and though I had already traveled the world in my short life, I had never been away from my family for more than a couple of days.

I can remember seeing my mother’s tear-stained face through the glass at the airport, trying valiantly to hold it together myself. Though I was traveling with a number of older missionary kids, I didn’t know any of them. It was my first time going through immigration on my own, getting on an airplane, and landing in a country I had never been to before. 

A bus picked us up at the airport, and we arrived at the school at dusk. A crowd of kids were there waiting for us, and I saw my suitcase cheerfully carted away by two of the girls from my dorm. There were scads of teenagers, enthusiastically greeting each other after their Christmas “vake,” as they called it, a new vocabulary I knew nothing of. Somehow I managed to be swept along a path, down a set of stairs and into my dorm, where I met the three girls who would be my roommates. 

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The December I Was 14

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On December 15, 2020

In Liberian Childhood, Third Culture Kids

It was December 1990, exactly 30 years ago. I had just turned 14.

It was cold that December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A cold Christmas in Africa was new to me, after spending my childhood in the west African tropics. But Addis is almost 8000 feet above sea level, and the temperatures go down into the 40’s at night.

Our house was drafty, if you could call it a house. It was actually an apartment that had been created from a school dormitory, so it wasn’t exactly homey. The hallway was long and wide and sterile, tiled floor and high ceilings, and the hallway seemed to make up the bulk of the house. Huge rolling barn doors separated us from the apartments on either side. The living room was attached to that hallway, and the one source of heat came from the fireplace. Everything else was cold–the floor, the concrete walls, my bedroom, my heart.  

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How We Are Adjusting

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On December 5, 2020

In Re-Entry to America, Third Culture Kids

People ask me quite often, “How are you all adjusting?” and I kind of want to say, “As best as can be expected. How are you adjusting?” Because really, we all are adjusting right now, aren’t we? 

An article at A Life Overseas talked about how adjusting to this pandemic feels a lot like culture shock, because we all are trying to learn new ways of living. So I guess you could say that our family is experiencing a double whammy of regular culture shock on top of pandemic culture shock, and it’s hard to separate the two. But all things considered, we are doing okay.

My two younger kids have been able to attend school in person since the beginning of the school year, and the two older kids started entirely online. However, they have had the option of being on campus (socially distanced in the gym or library) to do their distance learning, and we jumped at that opportunity. This was partly for sanity’s sake, since August was not a pretty month in our house and we seriously needed some space from each other, but mainly because it would be the only way for our kids to start making friends. 

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Not Just Any Rock

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On April 21, 2020

In Leaving Tanzania, Liberian Childhood, Third Culture Kids

The day before we left Tanzania last month, I found my rock from Liberia in a bathroom drawer. I had forgotten it was there; I had forgotten to look for it, and I came across it by chance. A shock went through me when I saw it, because it was with some things I was going to throw away, and I shuddered to think that I could have accidentally thrown it out in my hasty packing. I quickly put it in a small bag with other important things that went into my carry-on luggage.

This was not just any rock.

I found this rock on the shores of the ELWA beach in Liberia where I grew up. It was smooth, its rough edges worn off by the sand and waves. I kept it on my windowsill with other childhood treasures. One day, it fell off and split into two pieces.

When I was twelve, my family left Liberia for a year. The plan was that I would do 8th grade in the States, and then we would return to Liberia for the rest of high school. I loved Liberia. It was home to me, and I was not looking forward to being away for a year.

I took the broken-off piece of that rock and hid it in a corner of our house. I took the larger piece with me to California. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing this, and looking back, I’m actually pretty shocked that as a twelve-year-old, I thought of something so symbolic. I was leaving part of myself in Liberia. When I returned, I would be complete again.

Half way through that year, my family listened in despair as we heard reports of rebel soldiers closing in on the capital city in Liberia, of a government coup, of panic and evacuation of almost all the missionaries. Then–a civil war, a descent into chaos and devastation.

We never went back. We lost all of our possessions. We never said goodbye. People we knew were killed. Suddenly loss and grief were a part of my story in a way they never had been before. So it was fitting that the two halves of my rock never found their way together again.

Just a few short months later, we were re-stationed on the other side of the continent, this time in Ethiopia. I was in 9th grade, and chose to go to boarding school in Kenya. I had a new school and a new direction. But that year, rebels descended into the capital city in Ethiopia. During school announcements, all of us missionary kids from Ethiopia kept getting pulled aside for grave conversations. Things were bad, they said. Some of our parents were getting evacuated, they said. My mom and my brother were among them. They were on the last flight out, and later my mom told me how they watched the tanks roll into the airport as the plane left the runway.

My dad stayed behind with some other men, and they slept in a windowless hallway at night. I was still at school. For six weeks, my family was on three different countries. When I arrived back in Ethiopia, the city still had curfews and lockdowns. My dad crammed what he could into several suitcases, and he and I left. Once again, I didn’t get to say goodbye.

I look back on the timeline of my childhood, and Liberia and Ethiopia lay there like the jagged end of my broken rock. No opportunity to finish well. No closure. Just loss.

The night that we were told we had to leave Tanzania, that wound re-opened. I can’t believe this is happening to me again, I wailed to Gil. I can’t believe now it’s happening to my own kids. As foreigners living in a land that’s not our own, we like to believe that we belong there. That we can pretend it’s part of us. Then we are unceremoniously yanked away, and given the stark reminder that like it or not, we don’t belong. Yes, that blue passport is a privilege, but sometimes it takes me places I don’t want to go.

The grief sits on my chest every day. It’s hard to separate out its various forms. Which is the grief in leaving Tanzania early? Which is the grief in knowing that it won’t be my home again? Which is the grief for the sorrows my children are facing, or my friends back in Tanzania, or my beloved school? They all just swirl into one complicated mixture of sadness.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” I find myself not particularly eager to move beyond this grief. It is sacred and beautiful. Being wrenched from Tanzania is worth grieving over, because it was worth loving.

Perhaps the fault in my youthful naivete was assuming that something, once broken, could ever be put back together in the same way again. Jesus’ body, when gloriously resurrected, still bore the scars of his suffering. If I could choose, would I want my scars erased? Probably not. They are part of my story, of who I became, of God’s work in my life. That is the mysterious glory of redemption. And redemption is how we see through the tiny keyhole that shows us the beauty on the other side of that giant door of suffering.

Yes, the Kids Know

By

On October 17, 2019

In Leaving Tanzania, Other, Parenting, Third Culture Kids

Do the kids know? What do they think? That seems to be everyone’s first question when they hear we are relocating to America.

Yes, they know. We talked about it with them hypothetically for a long time, and they were the first people Gil and I told when we made the decision.

Michele Phoenix, who has written extensively on the impact of transition on missionary kids, wrote:
“Those who repatriate to their “home” country aren’t just moving from one state or province to another. They aren’t just losing a measurable number of people, places and ‘sacred objects.’ It’s the intangibles that exacerbate their grief and intensify their response to it. Missionaries’ Kids who are enduring transition have lost the languages, sounds, aromas, events, values, security, familiarity and belonging that have been their life—an integral part of who they are and how they view the world. When they leave their heart-home, it feels as if they’re surrendering their identity too.

Moving back is more than a transition for many MKs—it’s a foundational dislocation and reinvention that can take years to define and process.”

I read this and nod, Yes. I experienced all of this myself, when I moved back to America at age 14, after spending much of my childhood in Africa. It was hard. I grieved a lot. I struggled with belonging and identity. Yet for me, my passport matches with my country of birth. I left a house in San Jose, went and experienced life in Africa for six years, and then returned to that house in San Jose. I had a sense of place in America. My children do not.

America is, quite literally, a foreign country to them. Though they are the children of missionaries, they won’t be returning “home,” they will be immigrants moving to a new land. They will be leaving their home–possibly forever.

We told the kids the news in June, just a few weeks before we went to the States for the summer. That trip was a good gift. It helped them to process the idea of leaving while they were visiting America, yet knowing that they still would be able to return to Tanzania for another year.

A lot of big emotions came out this summer. On a walk through my parents’ neighborhood one evening, one child (who doesn’t often get angry) expressed a mountain of anger about what is ahead. You are taking me away from my country! Anger at us. At circumstances. Let it out, I said. It’s okay to be angry.

Another night, I heard a different child’s muffled sobs late in the night. I sat on the floor next to the sleeping bag and just listened. I don’t want to leave my friends! I’m not going to know anybody in America! I’m not going to have any friends! I could relate to that, so I cried too. I don’t want to leave my friends either, I said.

My biggest girl spent all summer doodling, I am a TCK on every piece of paper her pencil met.

In the past, they’ve always been excited to visit the States. McDonald’s, Disneyland, Target: The Promised Land of Shopping and High Fructose Corn Syrup makes everybody giddy. But when we told them we would be moving there? No excitement. At all. Just tears. And a resigned acceptance. I recently asked Grace if there is anything she is looking forward to in America. Well, my family is there, she said dully. I’ll be happy to be closer to them. That was all.

Since we returned to Tanzania in August, life returned to normal. Our days are full and we want to live fully without the weight of leaving over our heads. Besides, though a year is short for me, it is long for a child. There will be time for grief later. But I know it’s coming.

I struggle to find a category to put my children into. They are not typical missionary kids, since they belong to Tanzania more than Gil and I do. We didn’t bring them here; they already were here. Moving them to America is probably similar to adopting older children internationally, except not quite. Traditionally adopted kids are leaving an orphanage–something sad–and joining a new family–something redemptive. But my kids won’t be leaving a sad situation. Grace is middle school president this year, and got bumped up to the high school varsity soccer team–as an 8th grader. Josiah is the fastest kid in his class. They’ll be leaving a life that they love–a perfect life in many ways–surrounded by kids just like them, kids they’ve known since they were babies.

One of my kids asked, Can I go to a non-bullying school in America? I can’t promise them that. I can’t tell them everything will be okay. I can’t tell them it won’t hurt. I can’t guarantee to myself that this will all turn out right in the end, that this is the right choice, that I won’t have any regrets. So I worry, What have I done to my children?

The hardest year in my childhood was the year I turned 14. Liberia was torn away from me, my family was relocated to Niger, but before we could get there, we were relocated to Ethiopia. I found myself in a new country with no friends, no familiarity. I was grieving Liberia deeply. There was no high school for me, so I sat day after day in the elementary school library, by myself, trying to teach myself French and Physics through correspondence classes. By December, I was begging to go to boarding school, so in January, I relocated to another country again, transitioned again, grieved again–this time I had friends, but not family. And then at the end of that school year, my family was evacuated from Ethiopia and we began life in the States….again.

My parents’ plans had been for me to spend all my high school years in Liberia, in stability and sameness. Transitioning through three countries and two schooling systems in the course of one year was not part of that plan, and all of us shed a lot of tears and endured a lot of stress. But you know what? I look back on that year as crucially important in helping me become who I am now. I grew up that year. My faith in Jesus became my own. The people I met and the things I experienced, even though it was a short time, indelibly impacted my “becoming.”

I cling to this memory as I look towards taking my children through the biggest transition of their lives. I can’t make it easy on them, and that crushes this mama’s heart. But easy isn’t always best.

Just last night I read this quote from one of the wisest women I know–Elisabeth Elliot:

And we parents, I’m sure, suffer sometimes a hundred times more than our children suffer. Although we think that the situation is worse than it is, what we can never visualize is the way the grace of God goes to work in the person who needs it. 

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