helping women connect with their world
Mother’s Day may not be celebrated at your overseas post. But Peter’s Wife would like to take this opportunity to honor mothers.
Being a mother is a full-time job. Yet when we are living overseas we may have one or two other full-time jobs. Mother’s Day is a good time to remember the importance of mothering.
Our children are only with us for a few brief years. Our time of character formation and influence is very short. We want to use those years to the best advantage.
Living and working in a culture other than our own provides opportunities and challenges in our childrearing. I was reminded recently about the importance of seeing all the ways our children can excel. Sometimes we focus so much on their academic achievements that we miss opportunities to reward them for other areas of strength.
Dr. Howard Gardner wrote Frames of Mind in which he says everyone actually possesses all seven intelligences, but we are each unique and special in the way that the seven intelligences express themselves in our lives. Most of us naturally have a couple and then develop a few more to a high degree. Only the rare individual has all seven to a high degree.
Specific Learning Disabilities sabotage the efforts of many children to learn in the traditional way. Our son was having an extremely difficult time in school. His classmates treated him like the class dunce and his teachers said he was rebellious. I was spending innumerable hours helping him through home work. He was bright, but just didn’t seem to be able to do school work. I knew something was wrong, but what?
Even our furlough year in the States didn’t help. In a Christian school, they just treated him like he had spiritual problems! In the last month we were home, I heard a radio broadcast that mentioned learning disabilities. But it was too late to do anything about it then.
Today I’d like to do something a little different. Our topic is helping children adapt to another culture. A few years ago I wrote this children’s story to illustrate the importance of preparing our children for change. For those of you with children, reading this story together may give you a springboard for discussing the changes they have experienced. For those of you without children, I hope you will be blessed as you take a few minutes to read a children’s story. [Read more…]
My husband and I arrived back in southeast Asia last Wednesday. We checked into a hotel for a couple days to get over jet lag and reacclimate to our second home.
Our family lived here for eight years while our boys attended a school for PW kids. Then we moved back to the States for our eldest son to attend college. For the last nine years we’ve been making two trips each year for two months each time. So we feel at home here.
For about a week before we leave the US and for a few days when we arrive, I feel like I’m changing gears. Everything here is quite familiar and I’m quite comfortable, yet everything is so different from the US. When we try to describe life here, our friends back home tend to think different is bad. We try to tell them this is a modern city with all the conveniences. They could eat western food all the time if they chose to. They could buy everything they would want here. Yet they still seem to think we are some kind of different breed to be able to come to this part of the world.
