Send Their Letters Back

How does a 13-year-old girl process the destruction of the home she loves? In 8th grade, I watched helplessly from a distance as I heard reports of civil war destroying Liberia, the country that defined my childhood.

My expectation of returning to Liberia for my high school years slowly evaporated over the spring of 1990. As our mission organization scrambled to find a new assignment for us, my life skewed off in a direction that felt darker, unsteady, unsure. 

I worked through that grief over many years, but recently an unexpected gift from Beth, a long-ago friend, helped me more clearly process it. This missionary-kid friend from my years in Liberia wrote to tell me that she had found the letters I had written her during our 8th grade year. Would I like them back? 

Not long after, the packet arrived in the mail, and my girls studied my letters with fascination. What are these? they wondered, as if looking at ancient relics. There was a time before the internet, I told them with exasperation. People used paper. 

To be honest, I didn’t expect to find much value in my letters. So I was surprised by how meaningful it was to read them again. 

Interspersed in the drivel about vacations and teachers were windows into my inner life. I see the “between two worlds” struggle I was experiencing, common for third-culture kids, but not something I could keenly express until I was much older. 

And then there are the parts about the upheaval descending on our lives.

Coups aren’t supposed to be in the experience of 13-year-olds, which explains why I couldn’t spell it, and why it’s in the same paragraph about the weather and Disneyland. 

The coup turned into a civil war. It wasn’t over by the time Beth got this letter. In fact, it wasn’t over for another 15 years. 

Which makes this postscript all the more poignant. 

I never did go back. 

The realization that my life would never be the same crept up on me, stealing my security that the world was a predictable place. 

After several months of delays and false starts, my family ended up in Ethiopia, and I went to boarding school in Kenya in 9th grade. But then a war started in Ethiopia, my family was evacuated, and I joined them back in the States when my school year ended. It was the end of my time as a missionary kid. 

Ironically, it was exactly seven years before I went back to Africa. 

These letters opened a journal from my childhood that I didn’t know I had written. Reading them meant so much to me that I went digging into the boxes that my longsuffering father allowed me to store in his garage for 25 years. Happy (for once) that I was a child packrat, I found a bunch of my friends’ letters. And I sent them back. 

My encouragement for you today? If you were born in the age of letter-writing, send your letters back to the writer. Help them process their childhoods. It’s cheaper than therapy!