Repatriation: We Don’t Have a Clue until We Have a Clue

I recently received an email from a friend, Sherrie Russell. She and her husband, Glen, have been missionaries in Panama since 1997, working with an indigenous tribe there. They have also served in Puerto Rico (10 years) and have ministered to international students at the University of Missouri-Columbia (6 years).

Sherrie was responding to an email from me, updating her on our transition back to the States. Looking for full-time work over the last two years has been a disappointing process for us, and she and Glen understand, as they were in a similar place when they came back from Puerto Rico. I can’t say the same for myself back then. I was one of those she is talking about when she says, “No one had a clue about what we were going through.”

Sherrie’s openness and honesty is an encouragement to my wife and me. I am grateful to her for letting me post some of her letter here:

I remember so well coming back from Puerto Rico and moving to Columbia and working with Latins at the campus ministry, how I had to take a job at McDonald’s and Glen had to drive a school bus while trying to reacclimate and keep it all together, and trying to understand “why” God didn’t supply what we needed to stay in Puerto Rico, in a work we loved (although it was hard and slow), with a people we wanted to see come to Christ, and in a place that was home.

I’ll never forget feeling so alone among so many kind people after we moved and began to know all of you. . . . It was like no one had any clue about what we were going through (not your fault and we knew that at the time)!

And eventually, when we did decide to go to the Dominican Republic and started trying to raise support . . . I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a friend at DQ. We were there talking, and I was expressing my doubt about raising support (I mean, we couldn’t even raise a little more to stay in Puerto Rico) to her and she said something like, “You know the Lord will provide if it’s His will.” Of course she was just trying to encourage me . . . but out of my mouth and heart came this response, “He didn’t!” And as soon as I said it, I realized how wrong I was! I was so shocked that I felt that way and knew I had to remember that He does provide . . . but it was a very difficult time for us!

Even thought the Russells had made plans to move to the Dominican Republic, Sherrie says, “God took us to Panama instead.” About their six years in the States, she adds, “We began to learn how to wait on the Lord in Columbia, but it’s one of the hardest lessons in my opinion!”

And living abroad, too, hasn’t been easy for Sherrie. In 2007 she contracted mononucleosis and has suffered from bouts of severe exhaustion since then.

I haven’t been able to go to church or Bible studies this week because of my health situation. It’s been six years now, but I know God is faithful, and He is teaching me so much that I couldn’t have learned any other way. One thing is that I’ve become so much more content! Being able to cook sometimes in the morning to help Glen prepare some of the dinner for that day makes me so happy and thankful!!

One morning I posted on my wall on Facebook that I was listening to Andrea Boccelli and making spaghetti sauce with fresh basil and loving it! A friend from Columbia whose child I taught at the preschool where I worked wrote that I was easy to please! I thought about that, and I have become easy to please, and that’s good!

My wife and I enjoy Bocelli’s music, and while we were in Taiwan we bought our first Bocelli CD. Sherrie’s letter got me to look him up on YouTube, and I came across a video for his “Canto Della Terra” (“Song of the Earth”). If Steve McCurry made music videos, they might look like this.

[photo: “Loneliness,” by Flavio Spugna, used under a Creative Commons license]

Two Great Resources for All Things Member Care and Missions

Missionary Member Care
I recently found out about an ebook by Ronald L. Koteskey, Missionary Member Care: An Introduction. Koteskey and his wife, Bonnie, have served in member care for over 16 years and share this and other “resources for missions and mental health” at the website Missionary Care.

There is a wealth of useful information in Missionary Member Care‘s 169 pages, but the parts that interested me the most were

An overview of the trials faced by the “father of modern missions,” William Carey, and his family. (I’d read about some of what they went through, but hadn’t known the full extent of it.)
The writings of other early missionaries, revealing their struggles and their need for member care.
Numerous books and websites dealing with member care.
Information on a number of member-care organizations.
A list of conferences for member-care givers.

Brigada
And the second great resource? That’s where I heard about Missionary Member Care. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s Brigada, a weekly “web journal offering resources, strategy tips, tools and ‘hacks’ to Great Commission Christians.”

There are a couple ways to read Brigada, edited by Doug Lucas, founder and director of Team Expansion. One is to go to the website, where the newest issues are displayed, as well as a link to the archives, with issues dating back to 1994. The other way is to join thousands of other subscribers by signing up for weekly updates.

Brigada‘s information comes from a myriad of sources, and if you’d like to submit your own items for publication, you can do that, as well.

[photos: “Number One,” by John Ayo, used under a Creative Commons license, and “Copper Number 2,” by Leo Reynolds, used under a Creative Commons license]

Nancy Berns: “Closure Doesn’t Exist,” Let Grief and Joy Be Intertwined

“What have you grieved in the past?” asks Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake University. “What might you grieve in the future? And some of you are grieving today. It’s not just the death of loved ones that we grieve. Our life is full of losses.”

These include the losses associated with transitioning between homes and cultures, away from family, friends, and the familiar.

When faced with that grief, we usually look for ways to move on, to find closure. But according to Berns, “Closure doesn’t even exist. It’s a made up concept that we use to talk about loss and grief.” And trying to gain closure “can do more harm than good.”

in her TEDxDesMoines talk below, Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, says that we shouldn’t box up our pain, close the lid, and walk away to look for a separate place of joy. In a previous post I asked, “Can Grief and Joy Coexist?” Berns is convinced that not only do they exist together, but they are intricately intertwined.

Listen to her explain this relationship and open a box to share stories of people expressing their grief . . . and joy. Hers is a message for those who are grieving and for those know others who are dealing with sorrow. And that pretty much includes us all, doesn’t it?

Knowing that joy and grief can be carried together is so important,” says Berns, “because it’s a long journey without the possibility of joy.”

So the next time that you see someone who’s entering that space of grief—might be a family member, might be a friend, a coworker, just someone you recently met—don’t hand them a box. Don’t tell them to find closure. Meet them where they’re at. And they might be broken and down and beaten up.

Then, kneeling on the stage, she continues:

Meet them where they’re at. And while you’re there, take a moment and look around, ‘cause you might be surprised at the view you have when you’re on your knees. And if you’re the one broken, you might be surprised at how comforting it can be to have someone just meet you where you’re at, not to try and get you to stand before you’re ready, not to try and take away your pain or explain it away. Just to be with you. And when you’re ready, to give you a hand up, to take those steps. . . . You see it’s not about closure. Healing? Yes. But that’s different.

[photo: “Box 5,” by Brenda Clarke, used under a Creative Commons license]

Member Care: Learning from Each Other

Blogger Maria Foley, at I Was an Expat Wife, writes that her husband’s employer did a great job of easing her family’s transition to life overseas. In fact, she calls the help they got in their move to Singapore “wonderful.” But the return trip was a different story. When they came back to Canada, she says, “the silence was deafening.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In “What the Missionary Sector Can Teach Us about Handling Re-Entry” (May 6, 2013), Maria applauds the work of the Assemblies of God in meeting the needs of their cross-cultural workers. She tells about her friend, Heather, who is a youth coordinator in the International Society of Missionary Kids‘ reentry program, part of the AG’s efforts to help missionaries and MKs adjust to the comings and goings of their cross-cultural lives. Part of Heather’s motivation to help MKs comes from her own experiences as a child in a missionary family. “I wish I’d been able to go through a program like this. It would have been helpful to have those tools,” she says. “That’s why I think it means so much to me to work with these kids, because I had such a difficult re-entry.” (You can read more from Heather at her blog, Adventures in Transition.)

This is a common sentiment among those who work in member care: wanting to serve current cross-cultural workers and their families by providing the kind of help that wasn’t available when they faced similar difficulties in their own lives.

That’s what happened with Lauren and Jo Ann Helveston, who started The Mission Society‘s pastoral-care department in 2007. When the couple were missionaries in Ghana, they weren’t part of “an agency like The Mission Society,” says Jo Ann. “So debriefing, or even training, was not part of our experience.” Now they debrief missionaries who are back in the States.

Jo Ann’s comments come from The Mission Society’s spring 2013 issue of Unfinished—an edition devoted entirely to member care. The article “What Missionaries Don’t Tell You” describes the issue in this way:

The pages of Unfinished typically tell the stories of what God is doing through our missionaries. This issue, however, is more about what God is doing in them, particularly during those difficult seasons that aren’t typically chronicled in their newsletters or blogs. It’s about how missionaries themselves need to be cared for and ministered to.

A Little Slice of Germany on a Mountainside in South Korea

As I was finishing up writing about China’s penchant for imitating foreign architecture, I thought I’d end with something like “Not to be left behind, South Korea has its own German village.” But when I looked into the history of that town, I realized it deserved more attention, so . . . here it is:

In the early 1960s, South Korea’s economy was in shambles. Unemployment was high, and per capita annual income was low (only US$87 in 1961). In order to help the desperate situation, in 1962, the government began sending its citizens to work in West Germany. This continued until 1973, when West Germany stopped accepting gastarbeiters, or guest workers. Over that time, more than 8,000 miners and 13,000 nurses made the move, sending most of the money they earned back to family in South Korea. In all, they contributed US$50 million to the Korean economy, and in exchange for the influx of needed workers, West Germany gave South Korea credit at reduced rates.

When President Park Chung-Hee visited West Germany in 1964, he met with about 300 Korean miners and nurses. According to an article in The Chosun Ilbo, Park told the group,

Let’s work for the honor of our country. Even if we can’t achieve it during our lifetime, let’s work hard for the sake of our children so that they can live in prosperity like everyone else.

The president’s speech ended when he choked up with emotion, and the final strains of the Korean national anthem were nearly drowned out by all of the crying.

Years later, South Korea showed its appreciation for the sacrifice of those who went to Germany by inviting them and their families back to take advantage of discounted plots of land. Namhae County, in 2002, even founded Dogil Maeul, or German Village, on a mountainside overlooking the ocean. The community is open to those returnees who spent at least 20 years in Germany and who want to build a subsidized house following a prescribed German style.

Buim Ulmer, from South Korea, and her German husband, Ulrich, moved to German Village in 2006. She told Spiegel Online last year that she came back because she “didn’t want to take [her] homesickness to the grave.” But she still doesn’t feel completely comfortable in Korea. For instance, her Korean, she says, is the Korean from “40 years ago.” And while Ulrich says, “My home is where my wife is,” Buim disagrees: “We have no home, there is always something missing.”

In the Engelfried family, too, the German husband seems more content living in South Korea than his Korean wife. Wilhelm Engelfried has lived in German Village for more than 10 years. “It would hurt me to leave here,” he tells Spiegel Online, but his wife, concerned about issues such as healthcare, wants to move back to Germany: “What should I do here if he gets sick? How should I take care of him?”

In a 2005 New York Times article, former miner Bai Jung-Il says, “I left when I was 26; I’m now 65. I’m more accustomed to the customs in Germany and the people there. When I come here, I feel I’ve come to a foreign country.” During his time in Germany, Bai became a home builder, and back in South Korea, he refused to follow the home designs provided by Namhae County. “The other houses here are German on the outside but on the inside they’re Korean,” he said. “Only my house will be German on the inside and outside.”

Take a look at this trailer for a documentary by Cho Sung-Hyung on German Village. The film is titled Endstation der Sehnsüchte, or Home from Home:

The head of Namhae County, Ha Young-Je, told The New York Times that one problem with the village is that some residents still live in Germany and make their house in Korea a holiday home, traveling back to Europe every nine months to retain their citizenship there.

At the time the article was written, Namhae County was making plans for an American town for returning Korean-American retirees. One difference from its German counterpart is that people who move there would need to give up their foreign citizenship, said Ha, requiring them to live in South Korea full-time.

Since then, American Village has been completed, and you can see photos of it at the blog Daniel’s Rants. (I particularly like the entryway sporting a miniature Statue of Liberty.)

And for Korean Americans looking for a more urban experience to return to, there’s Korean American Village, scheduled to be built in the Songdo International Business District. The Korea Economic Daily reports that the finished multi-structure high-rise project will contain over 3,000 residential units, including apartments, office-residence complexes, and residence hotels.

(“60 Years of the Republic: Koreans Go to Work in West Germany,” The Chosun Ilbo, July 18, 2008; Manfred Ertel, “Weisswurst and Beer: Tourists Flock to South Korea’s ‘German Village,‘” Spiegel Online, July 12, 2012; Norimitsu Onishi, “In a Corner of South Korea, A Taste of German Living,” The New York Times, August 9 2005; “Korean-Americans Flocking to Songdo for Residential Town Development Project,” The Korea Economic Daily, November 16, 2012)

[photo: “More German Houses,” by Ian Burrett, used under a Creative Commons license]

These Newsletters Aren’t Sent Either

Ruth E. Van Reken’s honest revelations in Letter’s Never Sent has me thinking about all the missionary newsletters I’ve written and read. Missionaries are a good group for emphasizing the positives and putting a good spin on the negatives. Newsletters just aren’t a safe place to share deep struggles, especially when many of the readers are current or potential donors.

I’m not saying that every newsletter should be filled with pain. I’m not even saying that every missionary has enough pain to fill a newsletter. What I am saying is that if the only things you know about missionaries come from newsletters, presentations, and answer-the-routine-questions conversations, then you don’t know the whole story. And what I am saying is that if you are a missionary who is hurting, you are not alone in what you’re going through.

In fact, if you’re any kind of cross-cultural worker or a Third Culture Kid or a trailing spouse or an expat or a repat or a soldier overseas or a family member left behind, and if, at one time or another, any of the following could serve as a heading for your next newsletter or blog or prayer update . . . believe me, you are not alone.

Nobody cares.
God has been silent for a long time.
This was a mistake.
I’ve changed, and I don’t like who I’ve become.
I feel betrayed.
I’m overwhelmed.
I don’t care anymore.
I think I’m going crazy.
Where is my joy?
I wish I could die.
I feel like a failure.
I’m afraid.
I’m lonely.
I’m angry.
I’m disappointed in myself, and I think God is, too.
I don’t belong.

Let me say it one more time: If this is where you’re at or where you’ve been, You are not alone.

And I hope you’re never, ever left to feel as if you are.

[photo: “Creativity,” by Mark van Laere, used under a Creative Commons license]

“Letters Never Sent” but, Thankfully, Published Instead

It’s been 25 years since Ruth E. Van Reken first published Letters Never Sent, but I hope it doesn’t ever become a book rarely read.

Following her experiences as a Third Culture Kid, born to missionary parents in Nigeria, and later as a missionary to Africa herself, Van Reken wrote a series of “letters,” to her mother and father, and to God, expressing feelings that earlier she wasn’t able to fully share.

While it would be easy to assume that the details of Van Reken’s story are dated—the book begins with her trip to boarding school in 1951—her expressions of honest emotions cut through the years and show the wonderings and pleadings of a heart that beats in many missionaries and their children today. But it is a heart that is all too often hidden and quieted.

One of the feelings voiced by the young Ruth Ellen is guilt . . . guilt that her inner thoughts are a betrayal of her parents’ calling. During her high-school years, she and her sister stayed in the States, while their parents returned to their work in Nigeria. As her mother and father’s departure nears, Ruth Ellen fights with her emotions, writing in a “never sent” letter:

If I throw myself into your arms and sob my heart out, it might keep you from going. And even though that’s what I want, how could I ever bear the guilt of being the one who kept you from doing God’s work? I’ve always vowed I wouldn’t be one of “those kids,” the kind that other missionaries talk about in whispers, with a sad shake of their heads. “So-and-so couldn’t come back to the field because of their children.” They must be pretty bad kids, I’ve always figured. I don’t want anyone to say that about me or our family.

And I can’t very well come to God with this because, in a way I feel like it’s all His fault.

Years later, as Ruth Ellen ponders her approaching wedding to David Van Reken, she expresses a distrust of God, developed from many years of having, as a TCK, to let go of what is dear to her:

I can’t believe God will let me keep David. It’s like He’s dangling Dave on a rope, letting him come closer and closer. I’m afraid that at the last moment, when I put out my hand to take him, the string will be jerked back and God will laugh.

“Ha ha. Thought you finally had someone you could keep. Don’t count on it. Whatever you depend on, I will surely take that, so that you’ll depend solely on Me.”

Ruth does get to keep David, and the two are soon joined by a baby daughter. But depression comes to Ruth, seeming to be at odds with the spirituality that she longs to possess. “How many hundreds of testimonies have I heard about the joy that Jesus gives?” she writes. “He surely isn’t giving it to me right now—or maybe I just don’t know how to receive it.”

Her depression becomes deep enough that she thinks about suicide:

I’ve actually wondered what it would be like to take pills and never wake up. But in my heart I know that wouldn’t solve anything. I have a child I’m responsible for, and I want to see her grow up. And I want to live, if I can be the person that I’ve always thought I had the potential to be. But right now that seems like a hopeless dream.

Then, using words that are reminiscent of those penned by the Psalmist in Psalm 13, she writes,

The thread I’m hanging on to is an intellectual belief that God still has a purpose for my life. I can’t imagine how He can ever put all the pieces back together and make me whole, but it’s my only hope. I told Him today that He could forget helping me to do better—there’s nothing left of me to help. If He doesn’t do something new, I’m finished.

But there is hope. There is help for her to do better. And it comes in the form of a new friend, Linda, who opens a path for Ruth by sharing her own personal struggles in a Sunday school class. This is something that Ruth hasn’t experienced before, and it gives her courage. This leads to many conversations with Linda, in which Ruth shares her pain, and Linda listens without judgment.

Within a few years, the Van Rekens are preparing for their own missionary work in Africa, and Ruth continues to learn how to function without hiding behind masks. Sometimes the masks come off gently, as with Linda, but at other times, they are pulled off forcefully, as when a pastor shares from the pulpit about some of her struggles. But to her amazement, she writes, when “[t]he awful, naked ugliness of my soul was exposed, . . . I was still accepted!”

Healing also comes through forgiveness: forgiving her parents for her many separations from them and forgiving “all those who locked me up with pat answers or quick words of encouragement, when what I needed was understanding and a hug.” Following the death of her uncle, Ruth gets a different kind of response from Jesus: “He held me and understood. He acknowledge my pain. He didn’t try to talk me out of my hurt. . . . I’m learning about God as the Comforter and binder of broken hearts.”

But in letters dated less than two years later, as she and David are serving in Liberia, Ruth writes that the depression has returned. She tells God, barring a change in the next month, to let her die. In her conversations with God that follow, she learns that she has not addressed all of the anger that is leading to her depressed feelings. She still needs to “forgive” God.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” she hears herself say. “Ever since I came to Liberia to serve you, You’ve done nothing but bad things to me. I’m sick and tired of it.” And she hears God say to her that he isn’t at all shocked by her anger. He can handle it. “You can love someone and still be angry at him,” God tells her. Acknowledging this anger is an important step for Ruth, a step that leads to more healing.

One of the final letters penned by Ruth is dated 1984. That’s 24 years after Ruth Ellen had voiced her struggle with guilt because she wasn’t the perfect missionary child. In it, she says, after reading through all of her previous letters, that there still was one more person to forgive:

I can forgive the little girl I was, for not being all she thought she was supposed to be. The greatest joy has been to understand for the first time in my life that God is the “God of all Comfort.” I could not understand that until I recognized how much I needed His comfort.

Ruth’s story is one of faith and anger and hope and fear and sadness and peace, all flowing one into another. It is a story beautifully and sincerely told. It is a story that can speak to generations of TCKs and cross-cultural workers and to those who want to understand them. And it’s a story that continues. Last year, Van Reken published a newly revised edition of Letters Never Sent, containing 30 additional pages, with photos and an epilogue addressing her later life, including a bout with cancer.

It’s been 25 years since Ruth E. Van Reken first published Letters Never Sent, but I hope it doesn’t ever become a book rarely read.

The above quotations are taken from the 1988 edition of Letters Never Sent. The book was first printed in the US in 1987 under the title Letters I Never Wrote.

[photo: “unreachable,” by Daniel Zimmel, used under a Creative Commons license]

Thanks, Wal-Mart, for Helping Vets in Need

Two weeks ago, my local newspaper had the following headlines on facing pages:

“Wal-Mart Announces Plan to Hire Veterans” and
“Military Suicides Hit Record High in 2012”

At first glance, the stories are unrelated, but deeper in, there is a connection.

(The information below comes from longer online versions of the AP stories printed in The Joplin Globe).

Wal-Mart Offers a Helping Hand

In a nutshell, Wal-Mart’s plan is to hire, over the next five years, every honorably discharged veteran who wants to work for it within the veteran’s first 12 months after leaving active duty. The program will start on Memorial Day, and the company projects that it will amount to more than 100,000 new hires.

This should be good news to veterans who have returned from serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In December, that group had an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent, three percentage points higher than the overall rate in the US of 7.8.

Rising Suicide Rate a Troubling Issue for Returning Troops

Another statistic affecting military personnel is that last year, 349 active-duty troops committed suicide, the highest number since the Pentagon began keeping a more accurate record of suicides in 2001. The military’s suicide rate of 17.5 per 100,000 is still below the rate for civilian males aged 17-60, which, in 2010, was 25 per 100,000. But it’s the increase that is most troubling: up 16 percent over last year’s rate and more than doubling the rate of 2005.

“Now that we’re decreasing our troops and they’re coming back home,” says Kim Ruocco, whose husband killed himself in 2005, between Iraq deployments, “that’s when they’re really in the danger zone, when they’re transitioning back to their families, back to their communities and really finding a sense of purpose for themselves.” Ruocco now works with Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS).

Though the prospect of joblessness is not the most prominent factor in military suicides, it is a factor, being one of the many difficulties that returning veterans face. According to Joe Davis, spokesman for the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, some veterans struggle with moving from the intensity of war to adjusting to their home bases, while some have trouble transitioning from their military job to looking for work in a slow economy.

Coming Back and Joining the Un- and Under-Employed

First Lady Michelle Obama supports the hiring plan of the largest private employer in the US, saying, “We all believe that no one who serves our country should have to fight for a job once they return home. Wal-Mart is setting a groundbreaking example for the private sector to follow.”

I agree. Maybe the jobs Wal-Mart is offering aren’t the absolute best (look here for a Stars and Stripes blog post on the plan’s detractors), but Wal-Mart is at least clearing one path for a group that faces so many obstacles.

While I was overseas—as a missionary, not a soldier—I and my coworkers would sometimes say, after a particularly frustrating day, “I just feel like leaving all this and moving back to the States and getting a job at Wal-Mart.”

What I’ve learned since then is that getting that easy full-time job at Wal-Mart isn’t the slam dunk that we thought it would be. Number one, working at Wal-Mart shouldn’t have been our go-to example of the simple, stress-free job we were willing to settle for. And number two, what made us think that ex-missionary’s applications are going to be at the top of Wal-Mart’s stack anyway?

I’ve been back in the US for over a year and a half now, and I’m still looking for long-term full-time employment. I’ve seen that while some employers might value the experiences gained overseas—whether by veterans, missionaries, or other cross-cultural workers—it is more than offset by the fact that those seeking new employment after working outside the US have been out of the loop when it comes to relationships. And, as Nelson Schwartz notes in a New York Times article published this week, being in the loop has become crucial in today’s job market. “Big companies . . . are increasingly using their own workers to find new hires,” he writes, “saving time and money but lengthening the odds for job seekers without connections, especially among the long-term unemployed.”

Schwartz quotes Mara Swan, executive vice president for global strategy and talent at Manpower Group, who says, “The long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged people don’t have access to the network. The more you’ve been out of the work force, the weaker your connections are.”

Being out of the country weakens your connections, as well.

(Anne D’Innocenzio, “Wal-Mart to Hire Vets, Buy More American Products,” NBC News, January 15, 2013; Robert Burns, “2012 Military Suicides Hit a Record High of 349,” The Big Story, January 14, 2013; Nelson D. Schwartz, “In Hiring, a Friend in Need Is a Prospect, Indeed,” The New York Times, January 27, 2013)

[photo: “121006-F-LX370-103,” by Justin Connaher, used under a Creative Commons license]

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