*Laura graduated from Richmont Graduate University with a specialization in Child & Adolescent Therapy. She works with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. She is passionate about missionaries and their families. As a missionary kid growing up in East and Southern Africa, she has personally experienced the complexities of cross-cultural living and challenges of reentry to the U.S. Laura also uses her training and experience in helping highly mobile military families who face similar challenges. Laura desires to provide these children, adults, and families the support they need to be successful both on and off the field.

 

I grew up in East and southern Africa, the daughter of missionaries. We lived in Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa. I spent the majority of my school years overseas and returned to the United States for college. It was during my years at Covenant College on Lookout Mt., GA that I realized how profoundly my life had been shaped by my experiences growing up in other cultures. As I went through the long process of reentry and understanding my cross-cultural childhood better, I became passionate about helping others who had experienced similar transitions. This passion led me to the counseling field, where I hope to be a support to missionaries, military personnel and other cross-cultural workers in the midst of transition.

 

As our world becomes more connected through technology and air travel, cross-cultural transitions happen with greater frequency. While missionaries and military personnel remain two of the largest groups of cross-cultural workers, diplomats, business people, and those in the academic field are also living and working in countries around the world, far different from the one(s) in which they grew up. As these individuals return to the US, whether for a few weeks or the rest of their lives, they experience a variety of challenges.

 

In addition to jet lag, there is culture shock and catching up with all of the changes that have taken place while they were away. Additionally, there is the reintegration into the lives of friends, families, and coworkers who have gotten used to not having these individuals around. As if that wasn’t enough, they experience the inevitable clash between the values and attitudes of the culture from which they came and the American culture that they are living in. Alexandra Fuller eloquently explains the difficulty of reentry:

 

Returning to the US is daunting on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. These individuals need time, understanding, and support while they transition into life here.

 

For missionaries in particular, the church can provide specific support. In The Reentry Team: Caring For Your Returning Missionaries, author Neal Pirolo offers strategies for how the church can help missionaries to make successful transitions back to life in the United States. One of the most important things the church can do, advises Pirolo, is give the missionary countless opportunities to tell his story and have caring people who listen to it.

 

So many missionaries return from the field eager to share their life there, only to be met with vague interest or impatience on the part of their church family. This listening must extend beyond the “travel snapshots” of life in another country. While it is interesting to hear about different foods, or landmarks, or wildlife, the missionary’s daily life consisted of much more. Listening well also means not expecting missionaries to always have great success stories about their ministry. Pirolo writes that setting “secular goals as the measure of success”[2] (e.g. 10 churches planted or 5, 000 conversions) leads missionaries to feel as though they cannot be honest about the work they are doing.

 

 It also leads to feeling as though their work was not valuable or their time on the field was a waste, because it did not meet the criteria for “successful work” by secular, Western standards. Give missionaries the opportunity to share the lows as well as the highs, the difficult things about life and ministry in another country, as well as the triumphs.

 

Above all, when listening, provide genuine care and acceptance. Missionaries long to be accepted as real people. They love the work that they do, but it can be discouraging to feel as though they are super-spiritual beings who must produce “results” in order to receive support from the church. Missionaries reentering the US need people who will let them be honest about the successes and failures of their ministry, and who will continue to support them, regardless of how much they have “accomplished”.

 

Barack Obama. Madeleine Albright. Pico Iyer. Greg Mortensen. Glenn Close. What do all of these individuals have in common? They are TCKs or, Third Culture Kids. This term, coined by sociologists Ruth Hill Useem and John Useem in the 1970s, refers to individuals who have spent a significant part of their developmental years in a culture outside their parents’ culture. These individuals build relationships to all of the cultures while not having full ownership in any. While elements from each culture are assimilated into TCKs’ life experiences, their sense of belonging is in relationship to others from a similar background.[3]

 

In this globalized world, the TCK experience is more and more common. Yet TCKs continue to struggle because the unique aspects of their experience are seldom understood. As the definition denotes, a TCK is caught between multiple cultures, and their sense of belonging is most strongly felt when among other TCKs. This poses multiple challenges for the reentering TCK. Most TCKs return to their “passport country” for college, a time when they are learning to be independent adults. Yet they are entering a mainly foreign culture, one in which independence is difficult to achieve because they do not understand the rules of the culture around them. Additionally, they are experiencing a variety of emotional, psychological, and spiritual responses to their shift in culture, which complicates the already difficult transition to college.

 

College-aged TCKs are often far from home and any support system that they know. They are seeking to navigate through a foreign world of American customs, academic expectations, and social mores. One of the most significant things the church can do to help TCKs is to provide them with a “home away from home” – a family or a group of people willing to offer support, guidance, and care for them in the midst of transition. TCKs need safe, available people to whom they can bring their questions, confusion, and feelings about being in a new culture. They need people who will give them advice but also the chance to rest or get away from the constant demands of their new world.

 

TCKs also need people who will listen. They need to process their experiences, to recount stories of their time overseas and make sense of the new people and places they are encountering. They need a place to be fully themselves, where all of their cultural influences are welcome. This might mean taking them to a local Mexican or India restaurant so they can eat some food from “home” and reminisce about life there. Or it may mean offering to have them over for a meal after church so that they don’t have to go back to the dorm by themselves. Sundays are often the loneliest days for college-aged TCKs, because of the lack of activity on campus. It highlights, especially for missionary kids, the difference between their host country (where they might often spend all day doing ministry with their family) and the US, where they have no specific purpose or status on a Sunday. It could mean asking them to show you their pictures of the people and places that they miss. It may also mean going with them around town and introducing them to various important places or customs of the city. For example, many TCKs do not know much about American sports, such as football. An introduction to a football game and all of the customs surrounding football culture in the US would be very helpful to the TCK trying to fit in with their football-crazed peers.

 

TCKs encounter a variety of challenges upon their return to the US. The church is ideally positioned to offer support, acceptance and care for these individuals.

 

 

[1] P. 67 in Fuller, A. (2004) Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Solider. New York: Penguin.

[2] P. 36 in Pirolo, Neal (2000) The Reentry Team: Caring for Your Returning Missionaries. San Diego, CA: Emmaus Road International.

[3] From Pollock, David C. & Van Reken, Ruth E. (2001) Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds Boston: Nicholas Brealy Publishing,

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