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.