Life–Cross culturally

Mom Overseas

Diane and Tom Every mom wants the best for her children. And we do our best to provide all they need: unconditional love, training, and even correction.

But when we live and work overseas, we have additional concerns for our children. Normal maternal desires become multiplied and complicated by second home realities.

Some of you had to decide whether to give birth on your field or to return to your home country for delivery. Either choice causes concerns. If you remain on the field and you have a difficult delivery, will you get the medical care you need? If you return to your home country, there are additional travel costs and expenses both before and after the delivery there.

While your children reach pre-school age, other challenges pop up. If you are fully involved in work or ministry, you wonder whether child care is a safe option. Can you trust your little darling to someone else? If you are able to be at home with your child, you still may wonder about his playmates, what language he is learning, etc. When we lived in Africa, our youngest son complained to me that his playmate was stealing his toys. “Impossible,” I thought. But I talked to the boy’s mother anyway. In return, I got an angry scowl . . . and a big bag of my son’s missing toys.

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Friendship Revisited

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Friends chat Fifteen years ago I wrote an article on friendship for PWs. (That link will take you back there.) But this seems like a good time to rethink the issues and take a fresh look at how we make and keep friends while living and working outside our home culture.

We might think that friendship is simple and automatic, but we soon find out that it’s more complex than we thought. Then add the pressures of our work and the quirks of our host culture. All of that makes friendship a challenge.

Many of us have watched the effect of social media on friendships. It is not uncommon to see a group of people sitting at a café table, all looking at their phones and clicking away. They seem totally unaware of their companions at the table.

On the other hand, there are others who would dearly love to have any kind of relationship with peers, but there are none within a 500 mile radius.

Kimberly Todd, writing for VelvetAshes.com, has some helpful insights about finding and developing friendships. Let’s look at a few of her ideas:

Anyone is a potential friend. When we first arrive on our host culture, we may look desperately for someone ‘like us’ to befriend. If we hold onto that measure of friendship, we will find ourselves very lonely indeed. But when we look at everyone as a potential friend, we will be surprised with the great variety of friends we can have. Not everyone will become a close personal friend, but each can fill some part of our need for friends. And, we help them stretch their friendship boundaries too.

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The Blank Stare

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Last week some wonderful friends visited us. They are long-time cross-cultural workers serving in a limited access country. We had some very interesting conversations. I’m sure you can imagine them, for you have had your own similar experiences. I’d like to share some insights from one of those conversations. Let’s call the topic, “The Blank Stare.”

We talked about how difficult it is to share our lives with our friends and family back home. See if this sounds familiar: Someone asks a question about our overseas life. We start to reply, only to see their eyes glaze over. “Knock, Knock? Anybody home? Where did you go? You were in there a minute ago.” We know they are friends and want to talk to us, but they just cannot relate to what we say about our work overseas.

As we discussed the problem, we saw that the hardest questions to answer were the big general questions. What do you do in XYZ? What is XYZ like? Maybe you’ve had a conversation like this one:

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When is it Time to Go Home?

Typical? What’s That?

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Recently Lori Wilhite wrote an article called, The Typical Pastor’s Wife is Dead. She talks about the ideal of the perfect pastor’s wife. The one who always has it together, never seems to struggle, plays the piano, attends every event, and meets everyone’s expectations. She goes on to describe how she doesn’t measure up to that standard. This image seems outdated in much of today’s Christian world. In fact, there seems to be a new typical.

Of course my thoughts jumped to PWs (as we call them in these letters). It’s my shorthand title for those of us who live and serve outside our home culture.

I remember well our first field, more than 33 years ago. There were two veteran PWs who lived in our apartment building on the grounds of the ministry we served. Now, they were typical PWs in my mind. They cooked only with local ingredients, they were as involved in the work as their husbands, one homeschooled her children, and the other one delivered her baby in a local hospital. In my newbie mind, they seemed like real PWs- whatever that was. I tried hard to come up to their standard, but with two small kids, homeschooling for the first time, never having lived in a developing nation, and fighting shyness, I constantly fell short of my expectations for myself. [Read more…]