helping women connect with their world
From Dinah
I too traveled or moved a lot even before I got married to a wonderful man from America and became a PW here in Brazil.
I guess the most scary part to me was when I traveled to a giant country called the U.S.A. to visit my sister. I had traveled a lot around the Philippines and Thailand and Indonesia with our volleyball team. Travel was fun until I realized I would be traveling alone in the U.S.A. But I know God was with me, so it wasn’t that bad.
One of the most frequent questions we are asked when we are overseas is, “Where is your home?” I don’t know about you, but for us that was a difficult question to answer.
We would think, “Should we answer with where we were born, or where we have family, or where we last lived?” As Christians, we often think, “Our home is in heaven.” But that isn’t a very satisfying answer to acquaintances who would just like a starting point for conversation.
I have been thinking about the long term effects of raising our children cross culturally. When they spend more than half their growing up years outside our home culture, they are called “third culture kids (TCKs)”. They blend both good and bad from the cultures they have lived in and come up with a third culture that is their own.
In 1991, Kathlene wrote an article for PW about growing up in France and how that experience molded her life. Iain, an adult PW son, recently wrote about his experiences in West Papua and where he is today. Then I read an article by Matthew Link in Budget Travel, November, 2002, about his “homes.” Like children everywhere they each had a mixture of good and bad experiences growing up. Like all teenagers they had to deal with their identity. But because of their TCK background, they came to some different conclusions than their peers in their home culture.
Living and working cross culturally can bring out the best or the beast in us. Our topic for this month was about dealing with difficult co-workers. The topic is so broad that we are going to only touch on one aspect, betrayal. We first published this article in 1993, written by Mike Constantine.
Of the many trials and struggles that every worker faces, none brings more pain and perplexity than betrayal. There’s no better way to describe its effects than to look at David’s experience as it is recorded for us in the Book of Psalms:
“If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him. But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of God…My companion attacks his friends; he violates his covenant. His speech is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart; his words are more soothing than oil, yet they are drawn swords.” Psalms 55: 12-14, 20, 21 NIV.
If you’ve ever made alphabet soup, you know how the letters get all mixed up and topsy-turvy as they float in the bowl. That’s how the language appears to the newcomer to Russia. Every sign is a code to be deciphered and the spoken word sounds as confusing as you imagine it would!
Here we were, just a couple of country folks living in a city of six million people, facing crowds, and waiting in lines that would lead to China if stretched out. We had been in the city one week and needed to face our first subway expedition to find some stores for food. We lived at the end of one line, so getting downtown was simple; just hop on the down escalator and get on the train. We carried a little cheat sheet that would help us recognize the subway stop to get back home. Things were going great on our maiden voyage of food gathering. Our bags bulged with the “catch of the day,” and it was time to go home. We headed for our subway station to reverse our course. To our dismay, the down escalators had been reversed. Everyone was coming up!
