Reflections on Failure in The Fog

“I cannot go on. You must leave me…. A.W., you know the way. Lead them to the summit. Follow the painted rocks. I… must… go back!”

The four of us stood there in the 1 a.m. fog, listening to our guide deliver his dramatic monologue as he slumped down on a wet clump of alpine grass.

Even though this local man and security guard at our missionary compound had climbed this mountain a dozen times in the past, he had suddenly been hit with severe altitude sickness. To be fair, we were almost ten thousand feet higher than the green valley full of coffee gardens where we lived and where our MK school was located. Still, we were surprised that this veteran guide would come down with altitude sickness and the rest of us would be fine. Typically, the local highlanders would beat us in almost any form of physical endurance.

(Side note: Here’s a principle that you can bank on. Mountain peoples, whether in Melanesia, Central Asia, or anywhere else, are almost always remarkably tough.)

We stood there and considered our plight. We had come so far. It had been a risky idea from the start, attempting to hike the highest mountain in the country during rainy season. But one member of our group was a classmate whose family had unexpectedly moved back to the US a year previously. He had flown all the way back to Melanesia, in part to do this hike. So, both in his honor and also because the rest of us wanted another crack at the mountain before graduation, we had made the attempt.

Up to this point, it had been tough going. Dirt roads melted into knee-deep mud and landslides had rendered portions of the road that led to the base of the mountain almost impassible for the vehicles we had hitched rides in. We’d only just barely made it through, courtesy of a Land Cruiser that appeared at just the right moment. “That’s the first vehicle to get through in over two weeks,” we’d been told. Then, our several hour hike on foot up to the base camp had been a long, wet, sloshy, and cheerless affair.

Because of all this, two of our classmates had decided to remain at base camp and not attempt the middle of the night climb to the summit. They assured us they would be content with some sleep and a slow morning at the stunning alpine lake next to the base camp. But four of us opted to get only a few hours of sleep and then press on to the top. It was me, Ross*, the one who had come back from the US to visit, Will*, our Canadian classmate who liked to hike in the bright red long johns of his homeland, and Van*, our young Belgian soccer coach who was a pretty cool guy even if he would sometimes lose patience and holler at our team, “Fife yea ollds in Belgium play betta socca zan you guyss!”

To be fair to Van, this critique was probably true.

“What do you think, A.W.?” asked one of the guys, “Do you remember the path?”

“Well,” I answered, “It was three and a half years ago. And it was the middle of the night, just like now. But like he said, the trail is marked by painted rocks, so we should be able to follow them up without too much trouble. I’m up for if you guys are!”

“Let’s do it!” the group agreed.

Oh, the boundless optimism of adventurous and idealistic eighteen-year-olds. The world was our oyster. Or, at least it was our beef cracker and tea biscuit, hardy local snacks that we carried an abundance of in our packs. Van, to his credit, did not use his role as the only grown man among us to tell us that we would not be allowed to make the attempt.

Having made our decision, we left our guide to stagger back down to base camp and began plodding slowly uphill again through the tufts of mountain grass and stubby palm things that looked like they belonged in a book about dinosaurs. No more rainforest up here, just strange and mysterious grassland gradually fading into rock.

Initially, spotting the rocks that marked the trail didn’t prove too difficult. Although, it had probably been as far back as the 1970s that someone had splashed these small boulders with white paint. Still, on my previous hike as a ninth-grader, we’d been able to spot them in the starlight. One crucial difference was that tonight there were no stars.

Not long after we separated from our guide, the fog rolled in even thicker. Suddenly, we could only see about ten feet in front of us – and the rocks that marked the trail were placed maybe thirty to forty feet apart.

To make matters worse, the fog also took away our ability to orient via sound. Normally, the roaring waterfall down at base camp provided a constant point of reference. You might not always know the exact way forward but if you were moving toward the distant sound of falling water, then you at least knew you were going in the wrong direction. Now, the waterfall echoed at us from all directions.

Undaunted, we trekked on. We eventually realized that we had lost the main trail altogether. But since by this point we were mostly trekking over rock, we figured we might as well keep going up, hoping to come across the trail later on. We continued on like this for several hours, our eyes and ears playing tricks on us. Is that the same or a different cliff there? A potential dropoff there? A painted rock! Nope, just white lichen. As hopeful confidence faded to uncertainty and then to frustration, we began to identify with Frodo and Sam, endlessly walking circles in the Emyn Muil, “Because we’ve been here before. We’re going in circles!”

We finally lost hope of finding the main trail when we came across large pieces of old metal scattered over the slope we were climbing. We quickly realized what this was. Way back in WWII, an American bomber had tragically crashed on this mountainside while doing a flight celebrating America’s victory over Japan. Large pieces of the aircraft remain scattered on the mountain to this day. But the part of the mountain the bomber is on is not the part of the mountain that leads up toward the summit. Somehow, we had ended up way off track.

Disheartened and exhausted, we turned around and started making our way back down the slope. Sometime around 5 am, we reached a grassy area and plopped down for a little bit of sleep and sustenance. There was no sense continuing on in darkness when the summit was out of reach. The dawn’s light would make the descent easier. Whatever adrenaline we’d had left was now long gone, killed off when we saw the bomber and realized just how far we had wandered in the fog.

I remember reclining, pack on, against the wet slope, munching on an Arnott’s tea biscuit. I could see a dropoff not far below me. But in the fog, there was no way of knowing if it was only a few feet high to the bottom or hundreds of feet. And I was so tired that I felt a curious lack of fear at this potential threat. I drifted off to the sound of a thousand waterfalls, steadily humming at me from all directions.

It’s quite impressive that the human body can actually sleep in such conditions. But sleep we did, waking up strangely refreshed in spite of the cold and wet all around us. That little bit of sleep and the fog beginning to clear brought with them a remarkable lifting of the spirits. Our crew of four groggy hikers passed around some more tea biscuits as well as some hot tea mixed with milk powder and cane sugar we had brought in our thermoses. Then we proceeded to have an extremely enjoyable descent down the mountain – even though the daylight revealed that at many points we’d been much closer to plummeting to our deaths than we’d ever realized.

Perhaps it was a little bit like feeling well again after a long sickness, when simply feeling normal is so new and different that normal actually feels amazing. But there was something about the ability to see again and to hear the direction that blasted waterfall. Or, perhaps we were just a bit tipsy from exhaustion and altitude. Whatever it was, I remember having a lot of fun hiking down the mountainside with these friends. And with the pressure of summiting no longer on us, we took the time to slow down and notice the beauty all around us. In fact, the picture at the top of this post is from one of the many lovely wildflowers lining the path of our descent that morning.

When we got back to base camp, our better-rested friends greeted us with cheers, even after they found out we had failed to reach the top. They were cooking breakfast, doing their devotions by the lake, and drying off soggy clothes by the fireside. We happily joined them in these activities, with Will proceeding to accidentally melt his shoes on the fire. This was an unfortunate and undeserved development for my hardy Canadian friend, but least he hadn’t burnt a hole in his legendary red long johns. We also spent some time comforting our guide, who was feeling a bit embarrassed at how everything had gone down.

Looking back, there are a couple of lessons I’ve drawn from this particular misadventure. First, it’s of absolute importance to be able to orient so that you know where you’re going. I actually used this story as an introduction to a lecture I gave on the importance of vision at one of our regional retreats a few years ago. I was presenting our vision as a group of teams working with the same people group, which was, “To see networks of healthy churches among the _______ (our people group), raising up their own qualified leaders and sending out their own cross-cultural workers.” I told this story of my friends and me getting lost on our hike to illustrate what happens when you do not have fixed points of reference to guide your way. As in hiking, so in missions. A lack of clear vision sends many a poor missionary wandering off trail in the metaphorical fog.

Second, this particular hike reminds me that anything worth doing is also worth failing at. Failure can be, in fact, a good thing depending on the reasons you made the attempt in the first place and the sort of experience you get out of it. We had gone on this particular hike as a way to encourage our friend who was struggling deeply with his family’s move back to the US. We had also gone to do something hard, to summit the highest mountain in the country during rainy season. We’d gone to be more fully alive by experiencing the beauty of God’s creation and having an adventure with our friends. These were all good reasons to do something risky.

True, we had failed to summit. But we had made it to the mountain in spite of serious obstacles. We had pressed on, even when our guide turned back. We had stumbled upon the wreckage of a WWII bomber in a rocky wasteland 14,000 feet high. We had munched on midnight tea biscuits with the fog dripping off our frigid noses while scaling cliff trails worthy of Central Asia’s nimblest donkeys and mountain goats. It had been a hike to remember. Perhaps even more so because we had failed.

Failure can be good, necessary even. “Do I have the freedom to fail?” is a question I’ve learned to ask my various supervisors over the years. God has made me a risk-taker. And the gospel work in Central Asia is a lot like a foggy and rocky mountain range where we know where we want to go but it’s often not clear at all how to get there. This means much failure is likely necessary in order to find the paths that actually wind toward the summit. And when failure does happen, it doesn’t always mean that the attempt was wrong-headed from the start. I’d go as far as to say that faithfulness sometimes means failing – at least failing as seen from our perspective.

Looking back, I’m grateful we had the chutzpah to keep going even without a guide. Would my middle-aged self make the same decision I did as a high school senior? I’m not sure. I have tasted the costs of failure so much more since then. But is there still a part of me that wants to charge off into the fog in hopes of finding a summit that we know is out there somewhere? Yes. Most definitely – especially if I have a crew of friends willing to take that risk together (and maybe some tea biscuits).

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*names changed for privacy

The Red Snapper Fishing Disaster

In the summer before my seventh-grade year, we went on vacation down to the Melanesian coast with some of our longtime family friends. They were missionaries also and had known us way back during our first term on the field when my dad was still alive. He and Uncle Joe had become fast friends, in part because of their shared experience of being in the US Marine Corps. They also hit it off because both were extroverted leaders who were always up for a good laugh or an adventure. Even after my dad passed away, Uncle Joe always honored that friendship by looking out for me and my brothers. He and my dad were examples of how the Marine commitment to Semper Fi is only deepened when those Marines are followers of Christ.

Note: missionary kids tend to call the other adult missionaries “aunt” and “uncle” rather than using other titles. Whatever the origin of this practice, it’s now a global thing and part of missionary culture everywhere. Since adult missionaries are not in fact biological aunts and uncles, this can lead to some temporary confusion among the kiddos, as it did when each of my kids got old enough to work it out. “Dad, why do we have so many aunts and uncles?”

Anyway, as a twelve-year-old I found myself the youngest member of our two-family convoy, happily descending 4,000 feet on switchback roads to the sugarcane fields and the tropical beaches beyond. Uncle Joe had promised to take us boys on a night fishing expedition – and I was excited. I had never been night fishing on the ocean before, and this was likely to be a lot of fun.

The night finally came when we had planned to do the midnight fishing. Our two families enjoyed dinner together, with each of us kids eating generous amounts of beef burrito. Only five of us would go fishing together: Uncle Joe, his seventeen-year-old daughter, my two older brothers, and me. My mom, quite the adventurer herself, was a little envious that she didn’t get to come.

Our group set out from the beach cabins where we were staying, full of anticipation. But as is so often the case in island culture, the plans Uncle Joe thought were set in stone with locals were not exactly understood as such by those same locals. So, when we drove to the home of the boat owner and pilot, he was nowhere to be found.

In the age before cell phones, this meant we had to wait a long time until he showed up. At last, he appeared. But then he informed us that there was no gas for the boat. So, we waited another hour or so until gas could be procured. After that, he also told us that he didn’t have an anchor. Yet another long process of borrowing an anchor from someone else led to even more delay.

Even though we had all lived in Melanesia for a long time, culture clashes like this between the plan-oriented Westerners and the take-it-as-it-comes locals still came up on the regular. These sorts of misunderstandings would years later contribute to me and my friends being chased down a mountain by a tribal war party. But on that summer night, it just meant that we sat for a couple of hours in the humid evening air, bored, and wishing we had brought more burritos. But at last, we had a boat, a pilot, gas for the boat, and an anchor. Now the adventure could begin.

Our vessel was what is known as a banana boat. This is a long open fiberglass vessel with several benches spanning its width, propelled by one outboard motor on the back. Along with outrigger canoes, it’s a pretty standard craft for local fishermen who make their living from the abundance of the coral reefs and tropical seas in that part of the world.

We all piled into the boat, five of us Westerners and three local men. Almost as soon as we got onto the water, a light, warm rain started. We couldn’t see any stars due to the thick clouds that had rolled in – not a good sign. Then, the wind picked up, which meant the waves quickly became too choppy for us to stay in place over the reef. A few initial fishing attempts only produced some small bait fish, which were tossed into the boat to flop around on the floor for a disturbingly long time.

Things were not off to a great start, but Uncle Joe was on a mission. He commanded the boat’s pilot to make for deeper seas. At about this point, we started to regret the burritos. As our banana boat bounced off one wave and then another, first, one of my older brothers lost his supper over the side. Then, the other followed suit. From the churning of my stomach, I knew that I would not be far behind them. I tried my best to keep my supper down, but it was in vain. Dutifully following birth order, I puked as well. At least we might draw some more fish this way.

After a little while we finally come to a stop and the men were attempting to fish again, this time in deeper water. Uncle Joe’s daughter, for her part, was laughing at us weak-bellied boys. She appeared to be fine. Suddenly, one of the men had a bite. It seemed to be something sizable. He fought with whatever it was on the other end of the line and steadily reeled it in. All at once, it seemed to give up the fight. We understood what had happened once he fully reeled in his line. On it was the massive head of a fish that looked like a red snapper (The only reason we knew this was because of the ridiculous Weird Al movie, UHF, and its Wheel of Fish scene). But the rest of the fish’s body was gone. It had been bitten clean off on the way up, likely by a barracuda. The disappointed fisherman unhooked the decapitated fish head and unceremoniously tossed it into the bottom of the boat, right down by our feet. There it lay, staring into oblivion, surrounded by the still flailing and gasping bait fish.

At this point, my brothers and I started round two of blessing the ocean in birth order with regurgitated burrito. We realized that night that we each have distinctive styles of throwing up. My oldest brother seemed to be the most normal-sounding. Overall, he had pretty balanced heaving noises. The middle brother sounded like he was either giving birth or dying. I’m sure that he was in pain, but he was also quite painful to listen to. As for me, they claimed I had a very strange style. I didn’t seem to heave or grunt, but merely opened my mouth and closed it in a very nonchalant fashion. Allegedly, it sounded like someone turning a tap on full blast, then turning it off – or like someone pouring a gallon of milk onto a cement floor. That’s gross, A.W., move on already from the puking styles.

We felt miserable. But at least Uncle Joe’s daughter had joined us in our misery. No longer snickering, she was in the back by the motor trying to throw up as discreetly as she could. Worn out though we were, we still felt the justice in this. By now, the rain and storm had picked up and we were starting to shiver. My oldest brother gave me his jacket (a very good big brother thing to do, by the way). But it wasn’t long before we were all soaked and the growing puddles in the bottom of the boat were breathing fresh life into the flip-flopping bait fish.

It was now past midnight. Uncle Joe was at the helm, laughing in the rain and thunder, like some kind of Viking giving out orders, telling us all to steady on and be men. But even the locals were starting to get grumpy. It was a terrible night for fishing, even for men of their skill. Still, we soldiered on, taunted by the staring decapitated head of the red snapper – and the evil barracuda who had denied us our one good catch.

The last thing I remember is curling up on one of the hard benches, drenched and exhausted, and trying to get some sleep. I remember seeing my middle brother curled up in a puddle in the bottom of the boat, seemingly in a glazed staring contest with the red snapper. Why is he trying to sleep in that puddle? I wondered to myself. Somehow, I drifted off into a strange sleep.

We made it back to the beach cabins after 2 am. Once my mom heard what had happened, her envy at not being able to come quickly turned to relief. She and the other ladies who had stayed behind had a lovely evening – and still held down their burrito supper. Out of us Westerners in the fishing party, Uncle Joe was the only one able to pull off that kind of feat of iron stomach.

I was just messaging with Uncle Joe the other day, telling him that my brothers and I were recently laughing about our epic night fishing trip. “What an adventure that was!” I told him.

“Adventure? It was a disaster!” wrote back Uncle Joe.

Indeed, it was a disaster, for us humans anyway. Other than some bait fish and that red snapper’s head, we hadn’t caught a thing.

But I imagine there were at least a few fish who had a good night. Certainly, those who enjoyed the doomed burritos. And of course, one very happy barracuda.

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How We Snuck

They would never see it coming. No class would sneak off for their senior trip during the festive and lucrative Independence Day celebration. Yet that was exactly our plan, at least the first part of it. There were layers to our sneakiness. We would indeed skip out on Independence Day, but then we’d also pass the whole thing off as what was known as a fake senior sneak. Once everyone was convinced it wasn’t the real thing and that we were just spending the night somewhere nearby, we’d get on a plane and be gone for real. It was, in the language of Dune, “a feint within a feint within a feint.”

At our missionary kid school in Melanesia, the senior sneak was a proud annual tradition. Eleventh graders would work hard all year long hosting skate nights, cafe and restaurant nights, selling frozen burger patties, and doing other fundraisers in order to afford one secret and epic senior trip. Since we were living in Melanesia, the options were either to leave our school in the highlands to fly to one of the tropical coastal cities or even to take a trip to Australia. My class opted to stay in-country and go to a beautiful area none of us had ever been to, one famous not only for its peaceful and beautiful beaches but also for a historic WWII naval battle that took place nearby.

We planned to sneak during our school’s Independence Day festival because that was the one day no one would ever suspect. During the festival, each class set up booths and games to raise money for their class projects – picture fundraising activities like grease poles, dunking booths, and fake wedding booths where you could pay to have two very embarrassed classmates “married.” I remember one year cracking up as two mortified students were ceremoniously dressed up in ridiculous costumes and my older brother (the “reverend” that year) pronounced them man and wife, followed by a mournful tune on his trombone.

Anyway, the assumption would be that we’d need to work on Independence Day in order to raise more funds for our class trip. But we must have done a good job in our junior year’s work because these funds weren’t necessary for us to pull off a combined fake sneak and real sneak in one.

Our parade float was the first thing that gave any clue of our intentions that morning. Our float vehicle was a pickup truck. But instead of members of our class riding it in float-themed costumes, the truck bed had a bunch of life-sized cardboard cutouts waving out at the crowd. Each cardboard stand-in was wearing one of our class shirts and had the face of someone from our class glued onto it, grinning mischievously. On the sides and the back of the truck were large signs that read simply, “We Snuck!”

Layer one. The crowd saw the float going around and chuckled. “Clever! But surely they wouldn’t sneak, today of all days.” Slowly, the crowd realized that there were no twelfth graders anywhere. “Did they actually sneak?” By that time we, along with our class advisors, had been smuggled out of the base in big vans, heads down and giggling, trying to make sure that no one who just happened to be on the wrong side of the base that morning would spot our getaway.

Layer two. Once we escaped unnoticed, our destination was the one nice hotel in the nearby provincial capital town, named after the national bird. We would spend the day at “The Bird,” swimming at the pool and enjoying burgers and milkshakes. Meanwhile, our co-conspirators back at the base would spread the word that the seniors had been spotted at the hotel, clearly enjoying an overnight fake sneak. Everyone would laugh and assume that we would be back on base the next morning. But we had packed our bags for an entire week.

Layer three. The next morning, rather than drive back to the base, we drove to the airport and boarded a small Dash 8 plane to make our way to the nation’s capital city. We’d spend a day and a night there. While there, we visited a gold refinery, toured the one TV station in the whole country, and had dinner at a posh seaside restaurant. I remember ordering a massive mud crab for dinner, just for kicks. Its bright red color matched my gaudy red button-up and red lens sunglasses. Alas, the things we do when we are seventeen.

Layer four. The next morning we boarded another small plane to travel to our final destination. I was class president and I was thoroughly pleased at how well we had tricked everyone. Surely, how we snuck would long be spoken of in our school lore. The plans had gone off without a hitch and I for one didn’t think that there were any surprises left.

We were all settled into our seats but the plane seemed to be waiting for one last passenger. Someone stepped onto the plane. It was another American high school kid. That’s strange, I thought to myself. He looked oddly familiar. Suddenly I jumped up, realizing who it was. He came down the aisle, beaming, and we gave one another a huge bear hug – and then we cried a little.

It was one of my best friends. His family had left unexpectedly during our junior year, his dad suddenly caught in ministry-ending scandal. When they had left we’d all wept together at the airport, not thinking we’d see each other for years to come. It was terrible. Another close friend was unexpectedly gone, our friendship cut off by some of the hardest of circumstances.

Somehow, our class advisors had managed to be even sneakier than we were. They had arranged for him to come all the way from the States to join us for our senior trip. Now he would get to be with us during the trip we’d worked so hard for together.

It was one of the best surprises of my life.

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When Carsick, Be Sure to Look Behind You

When I was a young child, my family lived in one of the highlands provinces of our Melanesian country. Most of my parents’ colleagues lived one province over from us, near the central town of another mountain valley, the same one where I would spend my middle and high school years. There was one paved road between these two areas, known as the Highlands Highway. The drive from where we were living to the location of my parents’ quarterly meetings with their broader team took about two and a half hours and dropped the traveler’s elevation by about 1,500 ft.

The Highlands Highway is a storied piece of road for a reason. It winds around sharp ridges covered in misty mountain rainforest, over rivers that roar out of steep cuts in the mountainsides, and through valleys populated by enemy tribal groups regularly involved in blood feuds. On a given trip you might encounter a tribal, criminal, or police roadblock, a portion of the road missing because of a landslide, or a free-for-all as local villagers help themselves to the goods contained inside a tractor-trailer that has broken down or tipped over. Almost always, someone in your vehicle is going to get sick.

It was the morning of December 26th, the early ’90s, and I was a happy three-year-old sporting rubber boots and a curly mullet. I was happy because it was the day after Christmas and we had all received big plush teddy bears as gifts. These were hanging out in the back seat of our white ’80s Toyota Hilux pickup with my two older brothers. I was sitting on my mom’s lap in the front passenger seat, presumably enjoying the drive – until the hairpin turns started churning up my stomach.

My mom, ever practical in times like this, told me to stick my head out the window to throw up if I was feeling sick. My dad just kept on driving as I stuck my head out into the chilly wind, hoping that the wave of nausea would pass. It didn’t, and I began losing my breakfast. In later years, my brothers and I discovered that we all have distinct styles of throwing up. They would chuckle at mine, claiming that it’s like someone just turns on and turns off a faucet. The good side of this is that once I’m done, I’m done, and I can return to whatever I was doing previously with minimal bother. “You just threw up? You carry it well, brother,” as a fellow pastor would one day tell me. So, this particular bout of carsickness should have been over and done without too much of a story.

However, what my mom and I didn’t know was that one of my big brothers, the middle one, already had his head stuck out the back window. He may have been on the lookout for the local children who wait at the side of the road, selling small wreaths made of mountain flowers and ferns. Well, to his horror, he was suddenly hit in the face with his little brother’s vomit. So, he did what any six-year-old with a bad gag reflex would do in this situation. He pulled his head back into the cab and threw up all over the back seat, all over the new teddy bears. Our oldest brother, witnessing this carnage, couldn’t contain himself either and added to the horror by also vomiting all over the back seat.

What followed must have involved a lot of yelling as my dad rushed to find a spot to pull over and my mom tried in futility to contain the chain reaction happening among her children. Sadly, the teddy bears did not survive this experience. I assume they were left on the side of the highlands highway, perhaps to be carried off by some jungle animal.

The last thing I remember is driving into the main market of our destination town, a large area teeming with local people there to buy and sell garden produce. I was sitting in the back seat with my brothers – all three of us wearing nothing but our whitey-tighties, our underwear. We must have either been parked or were stuck in bad traffic because we were at a standstill and surrounded by lots of highlanders staring and smiling. The locals tended to stare as it was, but this time we especially felt it, like we were in one of those dreams where you are wearing no pants, but this time it’s come true in real life. I remember really wishing that we had tinted windows.

Now, we are not usually in full control of ourselves when we are about to throw up. But I did learn that day that if you are in a moving vehicle and about to lose your breakfast, it’s best to look behind you. If you do, you just might spare your brother from a rather traumatizing experience, spare your parents from one of the worst clean-up jobs they’ve ever been handed – and spare your new teddy bears also.

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The Night of the Cane Toads

It was good to be a missionary kid in Melanesia the 90’s and 2000’s. Internet existed, but it was dial-up, pre-social media, and not yet in our pockets. This meant we had the chance to be a bit more creative with our boredom. One way that we did this was by doing our part to maintain a strong culture of pranks among the teenagers on the missionary base.

I have fond memories of toilet-papering different missionary’s houses, launching water balloons at the high school seniors giving rides to girls on their motor bikes, lobbing stink bombs and cough bombs into living rooms full of movie watchers, and causing other (mostly) harmless mayhem of this variety.

On a typical Friday night, many of the junior-highers and high-schoolers, whether base kids or dorm kids, would be out milling around, playing dodgeball, riding motorbikes, or hanging out in small groups. But some nights, especially during breaks when the dorm kids went back to the tribal areas, it seemed like everyone had already made plans, and no one was coming out. The base was dark, quiet, and lonely. One might wander around hoping to find someone to talk to, only to encounter the shadowy local security guards with their bows and arrows, or the ever-present cane toads who would stage a nightly mass invasion of our soccer field and basketball courts.

One quiet Friday night like this, I was out sitting on a cement wall with a couple other boys from my class and two girls. The girls cheerfully announced that they would have to go soon, because a group of them had secured the privilege of using the only hot tub on the base. We couldn’t believe it. Only one house at the far western edge of the base had a jacuzzi, set up under a covered balcony outside. And since this was the only hot tub on the base, perhaps in the entire province, it was a big deal if anyone ever got to use it. Apparently, five or six of the girls from our class had made arrangements, some kind of girls’ night – and we were definitely not invited.

As I recall, they seemed to enjoy flaunting this to some extent, which didn’t do much for the mood of those few of us who would be left by ourselves on a boring Friday night. So, after the girls left, I had the thought of pranking this girls’ night, thereby killing two birds with one stone. We’d find something fun with which to occupy ourselves, and we’d also get some revenge on our female classmates for their ill-advised flaunting.

But what to do for a prank? We knew where they would be and roughly what time they would be there. What sort of prank would rise above the common ones, and go down in the annals of MK prankery as truly worthy? Slowly, an idea formed in my mind. Maybe we could “recruit” the cane toads in our cause.

Cane toads, if you’ve never seen them, are a large, brownish yellow, invasive species of toad that have taken over Australia and Melanesia. They are appropriately warty (being toads) and as I mentioned above, they would emerge at night and hop all around the open lawns and sports areas of our school, looking for bugs to eat. It was all too easy to catch one, or if needed, a whole bucket of them. One just had to watch out for the poison glands, and the toad pee.

We agreed on a plan. We would collect an entire bucket of toads, sneak up on the hot tub, and while our classmates were enjoying themselves without a care in the world – dump the entire bucket of gnarled amphibians into the jacuzzi with them. It would be a lightning sneak attack followed by us immediately melting away into the darkness.

The three of us boys commandeered a large yellow plastic bucket from somewhere and went down to the basketball courts to collect our little coconspirators. It didn’t take long to fill up the entire bucket and soon it was full of a wriggling and hopping mass of cane toads – maybe around twenty of them. They had peed on us quite a few times, but we brushed this off as simply the cost of victory.

Casually and unobtrusively, we made our way all the way across the base, waving at the few people we passed and trying not to smirk when they looked askance at the moving contents of our bucket. Soon we were at the edge of a small field, just across from which stood the gate of the target house, and just beyond that, the wooden lattice that shielded the hot tub. It was perfect. The lattice would block our approach, meaning the girls would have no idea we were sneaking up on them until the very last second.

We snuck across the field and opened the metal gate as silently as possible. The hinges creaked and we froze, considering whether to abort the mission. But it seemed to go unnoticed. We could hear laughter and see movement behind the lattice. Now was the time to strike. We snuck as close as we dared to the lattice – and then we attacked. With a movement that took only a few seconds, we bolted around the side of the lattice, dumped the bucket of toads into the frothing waters of the hot tub, and then sprinted back into the darkness.

As we ran as fast as we could down the dirt roads, we wondered why there wasn’t any screaming. There had been some initial shrieks of alarm as we had shot into view, dumped the bucket, and took off. But after that, there wasn’t the kind of reaction we were expecting. I later found out that we had dumped the bucket so quickly that the girls hadn’t been able to tell what was in the bucket. Some thought it was just some brown leaves. However, soon they started to see and feel big brown-legged things – many of them – moving around in the foamy water. And then the screaming started.

We were halfway across the base when we heard the blood-curdling screams, and lots of them. Feelings of satisfaction and victory mingled with those of alarm as we realized that that level of screaming would probably trigger some kind of response from security. Still, we laughed as we ran. The night of the cane toads would be one those girls would never forget.

We later found out that all but one of the girls had leaped out of the hot tub in terror once they realized it had become the equivalent of the second plague of Egypt. One of the girls, however, who had grown up in a tribal village, stayed in the hot tub and began matter-of-factly plucking the slowly boiling toads out of the jacuzzi. At some point they had all been removed, hopping off into the nearby field, with only a few who had become casualties of the conflict. The girls then got back to enjoying their evening. And of course, plotting their revenge.

For our part, we greatly enjoyed boasting about our triumph for weeks to come and telling the story over and over again. We knew they would try to get us back, but really, what could they do?

One afternoon I came home and noticed that my mom was acting suspiciously. Mildly concerned, I turned down the hallway toward my room and was suddenly greeted by a cane toad, sitting in the middle of the hallway, looking at me condescendingly. I knew this probably meant something bad, so I hurried to my room and flung the door open. Rather than my normal bedroom with its usual high school boy decorations and trappings, I was instead greeted by a suffocating amount of pink – pink everywhere. The walls and the surfaces had been absolutely covered in hearts, girly decorations, and Precious Moments paraphernalia. And in the midst of the barbie-style devastation were two more cane toads. The girls had gotten their revenge, and not only had they recruited toads. They had gone so low as to recruit my very own mother. Touché.

It took an awfully long time to get all that pink out of my bedroom and to return it to its proper masculine state. But even as I cleaned and fumed and plotted how to escalate this vendetta, I remembered the quality of the shrieks after we had successfully completed our mission, and I still felt that it had been worth it. Yes, the night of the cane toads had been most definitely worth it.

To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Seven Days on Crab Island

In the summer before 12th grade, a group of us high school friends decided to camp out on a small uninhabited island for one week. This island was just off the coast of the Melanesian mainland and was reachable by a short ride on a banana boat, which is a narrow fiberglass boat propelled by a rear outboard motor, and usually featuring a few planks for seating. The family of one of my classmates – who was also a trip member – lived in the nearby coastal town, and they had agreed to arrange the transport for us.

The seven of us who had decided to come agreed ahead of time to bring no food with us, other than a one kilogram bag of rice for each person. The plan was to live off the land, supplementing our rice with only what we could catch or find on the island, or in the surrounding ocean. We didn’t have very much experience hunting for our protein like this, but we were sure it couldn’t be that hard. We brought plenty of fresh water, however, along with hammocks to sleep in and supplies for island camping such as machetes, homemade spear guns, fishing line, and camping pots.

Our crew of brave campers numbered seven. Five of us missionary kids (MKs) were from the same class, just about enter our senior year (we were three Americans, one Canadian, and one Belgian). Calvin, my close friend and theological inquiry partner-in-crime, was one of these. One of my older brothers also accompanied us, since he was back in Melanesia visiting us for the summer. The final member of our crew was Philip, a local orphan who had practically been adopted by my family when I was in junior high. Philip did not go to our MK school, but worked and lived at the gas station across the street as he saved up money to try to return to school (which he later did, with great distinction). During these years, Philip was a regular fixture in our home and joined us for many adventures, including the Easter camp fiasco where I ended up unknowingly dating several local girls at once. A generous soul and hard worker, Philip also had a quiet playful side to him, and had decided to bring a dreadlocks wig with him in his pack, just for kicks. He seemed to have found this in a tote we had of costumes and dress-up clothing.

The drive down from the highlands took about five hours. After an hour and a half we were stopped by other drivers and warned of a criminal roadblock just up ahead. Deciding to try and run it (what could go wrong?), my brother drove up the hill as fast as he could, up toward the crest of the slope, where just beyond the robbers were said to lurk, allegedly with bows and arrows and a couple home-made shotguns. Thankfully, we never saw any sign of the criminals as we nervously flew over the summit and around the curves in our Nissan Patrol SUV. Perhaps we were going too fast and they opted to hide out for an easier victim? We didn’t stop to find out. After two more hours we reached the pass, where by a series of slow hairpin turns we descended several thousand feet in a matter of minutes, leaving the cooler highlands weather for the heavy humidity of the tropical lowlands. An hour of driving through sugarcane fields brought us to another set of smaller mountains, and just on the other side was our destination, a lovely coastal town that had once served as a Japanese base during World War II.

We spent some time buying supplies in town and enjoyed some fast food, our last kitchen-cooked meal for a while, and were off to the island by early afternoon. One of the adult missionaries, the dad of one of the campers, accompanied us to the dock and to the island drop-off. As our banana boat sped over the waves we passed other similar craft that carried village fishermen, the occasional wooden outrigger canoe, and several larger islands on our right. Before long we saw it, a small, flat island with a dense cover of palm and coconut trees and a sandy lagoon facing the mainland. Under the transparent water, coral reefs spread out in their dull purple clusters, flecked with bright colors here and there from darting fish or waving anemones.

In all, the island was probably several acres in size, a place too small for a village. Its only structure was a thatched-roof, open-walled hut close to the lagoon. This pavilion of sorts would become our campsite. It was sheltered from the strong sea breezes, which we thought would make for better sleep since our hammock sides wouldn’t be whipping around loudly. And it would have, had it not been for the mosquitoes. These attacked certain members of our group so intensely that they even overwhelmed my brother’s anti-malarial meds, meaning he later traveled back to the US with a bad case of malaria.

A short walk through the palm trunks and dry leaves led to the back side of the island, which looked out on the endless Pacific. Large trees grew out horizontally over the water, giving shade to the shoreline of razor-sharp coral rock. There was no sand on this side of the island, just rock that was ceaselessly beaten by the incoming waves into little sharp craters and ridges that bordered tidal pools. Back here the sea breeze was always blowing, swaying the palms as it smashed wave after wave against the coral rock.

We set up camp and decided to get hunting. Unfortunately, we found fishing with our homemade spear guns quite a bit harder than we’d expected. Even when we could get close to a fish, they would often casually slip aside a centimeter just as the spear shot toward them, seeming to mock us as we swam past them to try to save our spear from getting lost in the depths. I remember one clown fish in particular that liked to look straight at me as I repeatedly tried and failed to shoot him. I eventually gave up and left him to gloat in his smug little orange and white way. That first afternoon we caught nothing, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that at least crab meat would be easier to come by once the darkness came.

Darkness fell, our stomachs rumbled, and five of us set out with flashlights and our metal spear-darts, which had proven pretty useless for securing us any fish. But Calvin and I had learned how to hunt crab from a previous trip the year before. At night, hundreds of crabs will emerge from their little caves in the rocky shoreline and come into the island interior to hunt. As they move, they rustle the dry leaves on the island floor. So, lights off we would walk slowly into the trees, waiting for any rustling noise. When we heard one, we would quickly shine a flashlight at it. And if it was a crab that was moving, the light would paralyze it. We could then simply walk up to it, assess if it were big enough to eat, and then skewer it on a spear. Within a half hour we had two spears’ worth of skewered crab, most still moving, some about the size of a palm, but most sadly a good deal smaller.

Returning to camp, we found an unpleasant surprise. The two who had not come with us to hunt crab (an American and the Belgian) were sitting by the fire, eating hot beef stew out of cans. They looked a little guilty as we approached with the still-clawing spoils of our hunt.

“I thought we agreed to not bring any food other than one kilo of rice per person?” we asked, confronting them.

“Well,” spoke up the Belgian, “We decided we didn’t want to do that, since our parents didn’t think it was wise, so we brought ourselves some food.”

The rest of us were hardly satisfied by this response, and somehow felt this would be a damper on the whole trip. But what was to be done? Frowning, some got to work boiling rice and others tore off crab legs to be boiled in a separate pot.

The end result of the crab boil left much to be desired. The legs were so small that it took quite a long time to finagle the meat out of the little armored appendages. And then once it was in your mouth it wasn’t even enough to chew. Still, it had good flavor. However, our appetites passed long before we had even a portion of what we’d normally eat. When we were finished we sat around a pile of mangled crab parts, shooting glances at our two renegade friends who were now eating chocolate bars and drinking tea, looking very satisfied that that they had made the right decision. This might be a long week, we thought to ourselves. Still, it was only the beginning, and we had barely begun to explore our various food options on what we were sure was an island of plenty.

We had a decent night’s sleep and woke up, as planned, to go watch the sunrise on the back side of the island. This morning practice became one of my favorite parts of the trip. Every morning we would all manage to roll out of our hammocks just a few minutes before the sun came up. We would then shuffle through the small palm forest to the ocean-facing side of the island, and watch the sun come up out of the Pacific ocean. The wind seemed to pick up and shift as the hint of a red disk crept out, becoming an orange orb just barely kissing the horizon. Then it launched up into the sky, growing smaller with increased height, brighter and more yellow. We never spoke while we sat and watched this island sunrise. There seemed no need to.

After this, we would split up with our Bibles and find secluded places around the island to read and pray. I picked the fat trunk of a tree that grew out horizontally over the water before it arched up into a crown of broad and glossy green leaves. The trunk was huge, wide enough for me to sit comfortably cross-legged on it. It faced East, so I could continue watching the sunrise as I read my Bible, prayed, and chewed on the day’s devotional from My Utmost For His Highest. As far as idyllic places to have a quiet time, I don’t think I’ve ever found one that tops that tree leaning out over the waves, stretching out toward the morning sun.

Breakfast, however, was an increasingly sad affair as the trip went on. There was cold leftover rice, perhaps some cold crab meat if you could be bothered to pick at the shells, but not much else – at least until we scored some coconuts. Green coconuts, the ones still on the tree, are not good for eating. They are good for drinking, if you fancy some clear warm liquid that tastes somewhat fermented, mildly sweet with just a hint of old sock. But at this drinking stage the coconut flesh is mushy and not ready to eat. No, the good coconuts for eating are those that fall from the tree and hit the forest floor with a thud.

As the week went on, Philip took to sitting in the camp with a dazed look on his face and the dreadlocks wig on his head, head cocked for any cracking and thudding noises that might indicate a dry coconut had fallen. When he heard a thud in the jungle, he would bolt up, grab a machete, and run into the trees shouting, “Dry one! Dry one! Dry one!” When it actually was a dry coconut, the camp would be filled with much rejoicing at Philip’s return and we’d eagerly pull off the thick bark, crack the inner nut itself, and distribute the sweet flesh, broken into triangle-shaped portions. Fresh coconut made a good breakfast. Though coconut boiled in rice didn’t really work out. Coconut roasted on the fire turned out to be a wonderful surprise, tasting of butter and toasted marshmallow.

As far as other edible fruits on the island, we only managed to find one unripe papaya, which we ate anyway. And while our two friends continue to eat their meals in what seemed ever-growing extravagance (canned fruit in syrup?), we sought out other sources of meat. Fishing continued to prove elusive, though I did manage to spear a small bottom-feeding fish the size of a banana which had a large underbite full of sharp teeth. He had been lounging on the sand, quite still, and I mercilessly shot him from a very near distance above. Nevertheless, after all the clown fish mockery, this felt like a great victory.

Then there were the eels. The island crabs liked to lounge in the warm tidal pools of the late afternoon, and muscular brown eels liked to hunt them there. The eels would ride in on a wave, plopping into a tidal pool and begin their hunt. If there were no crabs there for the taking, the eel would leap and slither over the rocks to the nearest pool, and keep hunting. Armed with machetes and our short metal spears, we learned to spot these eels on the hunt, rushing one when spotted and attempting to pin it down with a machete while others tried to spear it. Eel skin is amazingly slippery and tough, and they wriggled and writhed something awful, but we managed to eventually get a couple. We then proceeded to chop them into segments that resembled sushi. Our pot of boiled eel caused much excitement in the camp, although the experience of eating it was rather anticlimactic. Very mushy, very fishy, and lots of little bones.

Ultimately, our best haul of protein came from some locals that visited the island to fish, felt sorry for us, and left us with five big plump reef fish. This was four days in or so, and it was a Godsend.

Other than hunting for food, we spent our days snorkeling in the lagoon, finding brightly colored starfish, reading in our hammocks, and goofing off with our cameras. We had brought a video camera with us and used it to make a mock preview for a scary movie, based on our island experience. “Stay out of the water,” the trailer began, with a shot of my brother swimming into the lagoon and suddenly being pulled under. “Stay out of the jungle,” it continued, with shots of Calvin running scared among the coconut trees, looking over his shoulder. “Stay out of the dark,” it went on, as a dry coconut resembling a head was rolled into a circle of firelight and MKs went scurrying and screaming. A montage of several other cliche thriller scenes followed, with the final shot being of Philip, in his dreadlocks wig, emerging out of the darkness to take a swing at the camera with his machete. Alas, this visionary film never made it to a public viewing.

The only actual creepy thing we experienced happened late one night as we sat around the fire. In the midst of the rhythmic sounds of the waves, somebody heard the sound of a human cough come from down near the beach. As we were all sitting around the campfire, it couldn’t have been one of us. A nervous search in the dark didn’t yield any results, and we all tried to reassure ourselves the one who heard it must have been mistaken. It wasn’t quite as easy falling asleep that night.

However, apart from the creepiness of that one night, most of our nights there were wonderful. I remember laying out on the beach, staring up together at the night sky, where the southern cross and countless other stars shone brilliantly, and the pinkish-purple band of the milky way was visible to the naked eye. It was one of the clearest night skies I have ever seen. But it wasn’t the only thing shining. The waves themselves would flash with a neon green color when they crashed, evidence of tiny bioluminescent algae that had flowed into the lagoon. It was too good to pass up the chance to swim in glowing sea water, and soon we had all jumped in, laughing and splashing around in the lagoon, hardly able to believe we got to experience such beauty. As I recall, the conversation that night turned easily toward spiritual things. How could it not when we were surrounded by such lights and colors of creation?

At last, the final morning of our island stay dawned. We were very crusty by this point. Layers of sunscreen, sunburn, bug spray, salt, and dirt had left splotchy patterns on our backs – maps of strange continents as it were. There was a thick crust of salt on all of our scalps. Saltwater dips can be refreshing, but they don’t necessarily leave you clean. So we were looking forward to some hot showers – and some good, hot food.

The five of us who went through with the food challenge had made it. We had survived on rice and what we could wrest from the island alone, with only a little bit of help. Hungry and sugar-starved though we were, it felt good to have done it. For boys trying to become men, it was an experience that built some tenacity and gritty creativity. And now we knew of the glories of fresh coconut roasted on the fire, and the not-quite-glories of boiled eel and island crab.

And though our bodies had been somewhat deprived, our souls left that island full. Consecutive mornings of communing with God as the sun rose over the ocean. Days and nights spent talking with brothers in Christ about things that truly mattered as the ocean wind blew and the stars shone. It was a week I am still very grateful for having experienced. For I was not just alone with God in a beautiful place, but alone there together with this group of friends. Such places of easy communion with God and with others are not always easy to come by. A week like the one we spent on Crab Island drove home to us the privilege of being raised on the mission field, one not earned by us at all, but enjoyed because of the sacrifices of others.

At last the banana boat and my friend’s dad pulled into the harbor. We took some final pictures, clambered aboard, and started bouncing away on the waves. One of the moms had sent a cooler of ice-cold Cokes, (manufactured in that country with cane sugar and thus superior to the US flavor). I cracked open one of them and took a sip of sweet bliss. After having no sugar for the entire week, it tasted incredible. Calvin was giddy with the anticipation of hotel pizza for supper. My brother sat next to me on the side of the boat, happy and thoughtful, not yet aware of the malaria pumping through his veins. Philip still had on his dreadlocks wig, now blowing in the wind as if he were some farsighted Melanesian pirate.

The sky was a rich blue and cottony clouds floated past us as we made our way through the spray of the waves. Behind us Crab Island slowly drifted out of sight.

Do I Have a Problem With What Now?

“Don’t laugh too much at me!” I have sometimes warned our team overseas, while chuckling with them about yet another piece of American culture I’ve somehow never known until that point. “I am a vision of your children in the future! Teach them well… or else!” At this point our teammates who are parents usually laugh a little less heartily and shoot nervous glances at their kids, knowing that what I am saying is only too true.

When you are raised between two cultures – your parents’ and the foreign country’s where you are living – there are bound to be important things that you miss. Returning to your family’s homeland can be fun, but it’s also always loaded with potentially embarrassing exposure of these inevitable knowledge gaps. A third-culture kid (TCK) must do his best to plug these gaps in ways that lead to as little red-facedness as possible. Learning to laugh at yourself is key, the only real path for survival.

When I was sixteen I believed that spaghetti was grown on large watery farms, similar to rice. Thankfully, this emerged around my family’s dinner table, and not while on a youth group outing on a furlough. As I recall, it took quite some time for my family to convince me that spaghetti was indeed made in factories, and not in some kind of noodle paddy.

Then there was the time as a new college freshman where I ate at a Subway for the first time, freezing like a deer in the headlights when the man behind the counter asked me what kind of bread I wanted for my sandwich. And it wasn’t just the bread, but the meat, the cheese, everything. Even though he was the one who worked at the restaurant, he demanded that I choose item after item for my sandwich. A snickering classmate bailed me out of that one.

Then later in college, I joked around with my fiance’s dad that we might need a shotgun wedding – not actually knowing what a shotgun wedding was for. “What?!” I remember saying, mortified. “That doesn’t just mean like a quick wedding?”

Be kind to those TCKs that you know. It’s a steep learning curve. Culture is usually learned by absorbing it over many years, in a kind of relational osmosis. But when you have been living in another culture, you end up absorbing different things. Sure, those things are very important for that culture, but they don’t always equip you to navigate the cultural waters of the passport country.

To this day, I rely heavily on my patient wife to debrief social situations. “Wait, do we say that in America?” “Do you think I used that phrase right? They looked at me a little funny.” But now that we’ve been seven years overseas – and are now heavily shaped by Central Asian culture – even she’s starting to experience similar dynamics. Admittedly, I don’t always successfully hide my joy at now having a companion in my cultural perplexity.

One more story from college stands out as an illustration how local use of vocab can lead to profound, and humorous, confusion for a TCK who is scrambling to try to figure things out. I offer it as a lesson to all those parents and “aunts and uncles” of TCKs out there. You’ve got quite the job on your hands. To any TCKs out there, may God help you.

For a couple of years I worked doing furniture delivery two days a week. It was a great job for a college student. I could take classes the other three days in the week, and work long days twice a week for good pay.

But it was hard work, arguably the most physically demanding job I’ve ever had. Lugging reclining sofas or king mattresses up multiple stories or jamming them through narrow basement doors is no joke. Most customers failed to measure their door frames and hallways to make sure the new furniture they had bought would actually fit. The two of us manning the delivery truck would do our best to put up with customers’ foibles, but sometimes things would tend to build up.

One day my boss and I were sitting in the truck on a nice suburban street. He was fuming. We had a heavy day of deliveries, all carefully planned out, and the next customer was not home when he said he would be. I could see my boss’s jaw clenching as he sat and stewed, periodically spitting his chewing tobacco juice into a bottle unfortunately placed on the console between us.

At last, the customer’s car pulled up behind us. It was a police car.

“You go out and talk to him,” my boss said, staring straight ahead. “I need a few minutes to cool down.”

“Uh… OK,” I said, putting on my smelly rubber work gloves.

As I stepped down from the cab of the box truck, the customer walked toward me. He was a very tall, well-built, African American man, probably in his forties. He was wearing his police uniform, but even without this, he had a commanding, stern presence. “Like a drill seargant,” I thought to myself.

“Hi!” I ventured, showing some friendliness that I hoped would counteract my boss’s angry words earlier on the phone, “We’ve got your furniture. You can show me where you’d like us to take it.”

The officer did not acknowledge my greeting. Instead, he walked up, put his hands on his hips, and stared down at me. I waited, unsure of what was coming next.

“D’yall have a problem with booties?” he asked.

I stared at the officer, not understanding at all why that particular combination of words had just come out of his mouth.

“Um… sorry… what?” Surely I had misheard something.

“D’yall have a problem with booties?” he asked again, stern and commanding.

I continued staring at him, confused. An internal monologue started running through my brain, flashing through in a matter of seconds. It went something like this,

“Once again, an American has completely ignored giving a greeting, which always throws me off. No matter. Time to figure out what’s going on. What is this? Some kind of attempt to get a laugh? Some weird way to connect? There’s no hint of a smile on the officer’s chiseled face. No, he isn’t joking, unless he has an amazing deadpan. What am I missing? Something inside me is starting to panic. There’s got to be some meaning to his strange question I’m missing. I mean, I know that booty can be used for pirates, and well, for human anatomy, but neither meaning is fitting this context at all. Maybe some kind of cultural reference? American culture? Black culture? Police culture? Furniture delivery culture? Is there even such a thing? You’re running out of time! Oh look. There’s his gun.”

The officer had cocked his head at me now, still staring.

“He’s on to me,” the internal dialogue continued, “He knows I’m a fraud, not really from around here at all. Booties? Why booties? Why now? Someone help! I’m just a kid from Melanesia. How did I end up here, on this suburban street, trapped between this imposing officer and an angry boss, trying to untangle the semantic range of the word booty?”

I simply had nothing to say in return. My brain had run its form and meaning programs through all the archives and had come back with absolutely zero results. So I stood there, mouth half open, having no idea what to do next.

“C’mere,” said the officer in his booming voice, shaking his head at me, and motioning for me to follow him into his garage.

We walked into the garage and he stooped down to pick up a small box. He pulled something out of it. It was some kind of opaque white fabric thing, which he put on one of his hands and stretched open with his fingers.

“Booties. For your feet.” He said to me, measured and slow, as if bearing with a very slow student.

Suddenly it dawned on me. Booties must be some kind of fabric thing you put over your shoes in order to protect the carpet when walking in and out. Booties as in boots! Things for your boots. A rush of relief washed over me. Form and meaning had come together at last.

“Right! Booties. For our feet. Sure. That’s, uh, that’s fine,” I said, trying to smile.

The officer was still looking at me, seeming concerned. Thankfully my boss just then walked into the garage, his face back to a normal shade of pink. He grabbed a pair of booties from the officer, apparently knowing full well what they were, and went inside to see where the furniture was to be placed.

I was left alone in the garage with my thoughts. “Man, how have I never heard about booties? Oh well,” I shrugged, “TCK issues.” And I went to begin unloading the truck.

Photo by Wise Move SA on Unsplash

To Reach the Unreached, Start More Schools

A Christian leader was once asked by a ruler of one of the Arab gulf states what his government should do in order to help expats stay longer in his country. The answer this Christian leader gave was threefold: churches, schools, and hospitals. If this infrastructure were in place, the leader explained, expats would be able to remain in that country for the long-term.

What is true of expats in general is also true of missionaries. We like to romanticize missionaries as rugged frontier types who have the secret spiritual gift of being able to function as a healthy church with their lone family or small team, who treat all their medical needs with a dog-eared copy of Where There Is No Doctor, and who can homeschool their kids on the back of a camel – all while learning language and planting churches. But missionaries are mostly ordinary people with ordinary needs. They need healthy churches, decent medical care, and schooling options that will work for their kids. The lack of this kind of infrastructure is a major factor in missionary attrition, one reason why people can’t stay on the field long enough to reach the remaining unengaged people groups.

Infrastructure isn’t everything, but neither is it nothing. As has been said among those who study combat, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. Even the best soldiers on the front lines will ultimately have to retreat if the supply and logistics system backing them up fails.

In this post, I want to highlight the vital missions infrastructure of workable schooling options for missionary kids. During our time on the field we’ve seen over and over again how deeply impacted families are when they can’t figure out good enough education options for their offspring – and the twin problem of their kids struggling to have a healthy peer group, or any peer group at all. Many of these families end up leaving the field, or relocating to other countries where there is a MK school. They were able to work through the elementary years with a year-at-a-time cocktail approach of homeschool, internet school, local government school, and maybe a local private school. But the junior high and high school years start exposing some very concerning dynamics among their kids. Academically, they’re falling seriously behind, or they’re struggling and depressed because they have so few friends their own age. Suddenly it becomes clear that the options that worked out for younger kids are no longer workable for teens. This often occurs just as the parents are really hitting their stride in language, culture, and ministry.

Why not just send kids to boarding schools, the classic missionary response to the education problem? Well, without discussing the pros and cons of this option, there seems to be a clear shift where missionary families are simply less and less willing to go this route. At the boarding school where I attended – not as a dorm kid myself, since my mom was a teacher so we lived near the school – my class was the last one to have kids arrive in the dorms as young as 1st grade. We noticed in the 2000s that classes were getting smaller, largely because families were choosing to keep their kids at home longer. I don’t sense this trend turning around any time soon. What may have been expected of earlier generations – sending the kids to a boarding school – is among younger generations of parents becoming at least undesirable, and for others, even unthinkable. Some will continue to pursue this option, but it will likely be a shrinking minority. I say this with much love for the school that I attended, and with great respect for all the families that have sacrificed to make this option work.

Is homeschooling not the obvious answer then? Not necessarily. While homeschooling continues to grow in popularity and accessibility, there is one wildcard factor involved that can sink this otherwise good option – the wiring of the child themself. I loved the years we were homeschooled while growing up, but had siblings that struggled with it. It’s the same with my own kids. We are coming to understand that at least one of our kiddos is flat out incompatible with the homeschooling environment, despite the valiant efforts of her mother, herself a gifted teacher. No matter what homeschool advocates claim, not everyone can homeschool, and homeschool may not be a good fit for every child.

Local schools might be great for language acquisition and making friends, but the academics can mean hours of remedial work once school is over, which still may not prove to be enough. School online brings better academics, but can isolate the child or leave them with only a digital group of peers.

Missionaries might be some of the most adaptable people on the planet, yet in spite of this the dual goal of a good enough education and healthy group of peers for teens continues to be a very thorny and elusive thing. So what should be done so that missionary families can have better options for their kids’ education and remain on the field longer? I would contend that sending churches and agencies need to help start dozens of new small or mid-sized Christian international schools. These schools should be placed in strategic cities or towns where there is still access to unreached or unengaged people groups. Priority should be placed upon high school grades, and then middle school, as the ages most difficult for homeshchool and most in need of strong peer friendships.

What if there are not that many missionary families in the area? Well, to quote a classic baseball movie, “if you build it they will come.” The presence of a trustworthy school will automatically draw other missionary families to that area. One of the cities we used to live in just got a new school, one that’s beginning as a robust co-op for elementary students that plans to become a full blown school in coming years. They were worried they might not have enough interested families. As it turned out, all of their available spots were snatched up right away. There are many families out there that would happily move to an unreached city, if only the schooling piece made sense. Find me a global city with good schooling options for MKs and TCKs, and I will show you a city with dramatically-improved longevity among the missionaries – and a ton of missionaries who have relocated there. For any colleagues reading this in Central Asia, one or two of these specific cities should immediately come to mind.

But it takes a whole lot of investment to start a school! Yes, it does. As the son of a MK teacher, I grew up with an inside view of how hard it was just to keep a school staffed and running, never mind the trouble of starting one from scratch. But we must wrestle with the tremendous costs of not having this kind of infrastructure more available for missionaries serving in hard places. Given the rate of turnover and attrition, it may in the end prove to be less costly to go big from the beginning and just start a school. And there is always the option of ramping up, starting with sending homeschool teachers, transitioning to launching a co-op, and finally launching a full-blown school.

Along with the cost, the potential reward also needs to be kept in mind. Let’s say long-term missionaries – who currently average around ten years on the field with some orgs – are able to double their years on the field, returning to the home country after twenty years instead. Think of the impact these second decade veterans could make in the lives of the locals and their colleagues, think of the wisdom and experience that they would bring to the table. Our region of Central Asia has very few who have made it to their second decade. Often, this is due to the fact that the first decade concludes with kids struggling in their teenage years. But if we can serve these families through starting schools, we just may be able to double missionary longevity in strategic areas. What an outcome.

The key is for gifted Christians with a passion for education to understand the great need and to embrace this kind of vision. And then for sending churches and agencies to fully back their risky goal. Previous generations of missionaries started schools like it was as easy as keeping tequila plants alive (which is shockingly easy, even for bad gardeners like myself). It almost seems second nature to them when you read about how often Christians and missionaries invested in starting educational institutions in the 1800s. Perhaps our contemporary fears of mission drift and “colonial” missions have kept us from investing in the very supply lines the mission truly needs.

Years ago I heard Tim Keller make a similar point about cities and schools when discussing how Catholic and Jewish communities had been able to thrive in American cities when evangelicals largely hadn’t. He also pointed to infrastructure, noting that Jewish and Catholic families with children have stayed in the cities when there have been schools, community centers, and hospitals accessible to their distinct community. If the infrastructure is lacking and it’s been hard for evangelical families to remain in American cities, how much more so when it comes to the cities and towns where the world’s hardest to reach people groups live? This will require some serious vision, investment, and commitment.

Christians and churches who are passionate about education may never have considered the vital role they could play in reaching the world’s unreached people groups. Their experience, their connections, even their classroom management skills, these are as valuable as gold, and could be the crucial piece that allows missionaries to remain on the field – and new peoples and tribes to have the chance to follow Jesus. We should challenge them to use these precious gifts for the sake of the nations.

If we want to reach the unreached, we’ve got to start more schools. To keep the front lines strong, we’ve got to strengthen our supply lines.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

A Proverb On Proximity and Affections

The one before the eyes is the one upon the heart.
Local Oral Tradition

This Central Asian proverb speaks to the effect proximity and distance have upon our affections. We have a similar saying in English, though it focuses on the inverse of this idea – “Out of sight, out of mind.” As humans, we seem to be hard-wired to prioritize the relationships that are immediately in front of us, and we struggle to maintain those relationships that are long-distance. We quickly give resources to the needs that we are faced with, and have trouble feeling the weight of those needs that we don’t ourselves physically interact with.

A wise person will therefore do what they can to to be reminded of those important people and needs in ways their eyes can see and body can sense. This is particularly important for those who have grown up with a lot of transition and goodbyes, as missionary kids have. The temptation after a move is to cut off contact completely and to only focus on those relationships right in front of us. This is because continued contact reminds us of the distance and the change, and therefore the loss. But the seemingly easy way is not really the healthy way here. MKs and others like us need to learn to be present friends, even from a distance. I still have a long way to go on this front.

This is also why daily spiritual disciplines and corporate worship are also so crucial. We do not physically interact with Jesus in the ways his first disciples did. Instead, we interact with him by spirit, through faith, in the realm of the unseen. Our affections for him will fade and we will largely forget him if we do not have ways in which we are reminded regularly of his friendship for us. Hence Bible study which engages our eyes and hands, prayer which engages our lips and ears, and tangible reminders like the Lord’s Supper that engage our taste buds. In fact, Christians should be known as those whose deepest love is for the one not before our eyes, the one we can’t yet see and touch.

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and full of glory.” – 1st Peter 1:8

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

A Tale of Two Pythons

If you happen to be growing up in a place like Melanesia, then you want to have a mother as adventurous as mine. My mom allowed us to have all kinds of unique pets over the years, and enjoyed them right along with us. In addition to seasons with dogs and cats, we also at times cared for snakes, tree frogs, owls, parrots, tree kangaroos, rabbits, lizards, turtles, praying mantises, and a baby bat. I would bring my pets proudly to school for show and tell, where they would wow my classmates and inevitably manage to relieve themselves on the classroom floor. Only one pet (a tree kangaroo) ever bit a classmate. Poor guy’s parents made him get a rabies shot. Do tree kangaroos even get rabies? Anyway, I digress.

When I was in junior high we purchased* our first emerald tree python from a local who was selling him on the street of the small government town nearby our missionary compound. These snakes are beautiful creatures, sporting bright yellow scales when they are young, which fade to a bright emerald green as they mature. They are small to medium constrictor snakes that like to eat birds and small mammals when they are in the wild. While newspaper flashbacks to the mid-twentieth century regularly included reports of giant pythons dropping out of the trees to attack an unsuspecting villager, we never saw any get to that size – with the exception of one terrifying carcass I saw at the river where we regularly swam. But the pythons that we owned were still adolescents, so only about a meter long, with a body diameter about the size of the hole made by a finger and thumb making the OK sign.

The first snake was as friendly and gentle as you could hope for. He never tried to bite us, and he enjoyed coiling up on my oldest brother’s laptop or on our shoulders, nestling in to get access to body heat. I have no idea what happened to him earlier in his serpentine life to give him such a pleasant disposition, but he was great, a true pal. Unfortunately, he managed to escape one day. An enterprising local caught him nearby our property and tried to resell him to us, in spite of our insistance that we were the rightful owners. But finders-keepers prevailed and we decided on principle not to buy him back. This was probably the wrong decision.

Some time later we saw another similar-sized python for sale for a good price. Fresh off such a positive experience with our first snake, we decided to get him. Unfortunately, while the first snake was a kindly soul, the second python proved to be very mean and aggressive. I remember staring through the glass terrarium walls with my brothers as the angry thing repeatedly lunged at the glass, trying to bite our faces. He would even snap at us when we attempted to feed him. Whatever we had named him in the beginning, we began to call him Demon Snake. Needless to say, Demon Snake did not get any snuggle time on our shoulders. He did, however, also manage to escape.

In the end, this was probably the best outcome for all parties. Like many pets taken from the jungle after a certain age, our second snake was wild and unlikely to get accustomed to relationships with humans. He needed his freedom where he could live out his grumpy ways in peace. But it seemed he didn’t desire complete independence from humans. One day my mom walked out onto our downstairs patio area where we had clotheslines hung under the roof for when it rained. Above the lines on the wooden rafters lounged the python, snoozing and looking fatter than usual.

Our former pet had managed to find himself a pretty good living situation. The rafters from the patio disappeared into a gap in between the upper and lower floors – a gap that apparently made for nice snake lodging, and one where big rats also lived. It seemed that he had learned to spend his days hunting the scratching rodents in between the floors and then lounging on the patio rafters where he could soak up the heat from the corrugated metal roof directly above him. Not a bad gig.

We developed quite the complementary relationship in the end. We let him be, and attracted the rats – presumably just by living normal life and eating delicious food, like fried and salted Asian sweet potatoes. He in turn hunted and ate the ROUS’s* which we had been until that point largely unable to trap or catch. We actually grew quite comfortable seeing him up above our heads taking his naps, and just had to make sure he wasn’t around to create any surprise appearances when we were hosting locals, most of whom were completely petrified of snakes.

We moved on from snakes after this experience, purchasing instead a gorgeous green and red Eclectus parrot who was one of our longer-lasting pets, managing in the end to very effectively confuse passersby with the whistles and unique phrases he had learned in the voice of each member of the family.

I’m not sure what became of the Demon Snake python in the end. We came back to the US for furlough for my eight grade year and never heard of him again. But I am grateful for all those rats he ate. Melanesian rats are no joke. I hope he lived out the remainder of his snake days a happier serpent than he had been, full of rodent, warm from corrugated metal roofing, and free from any more missionary kids hoping to snuggle with him.

*Correction: My mom has informed me that we did not actually buy the first snake. He was given to us as a gift from a colleague who heard that our dad had wanted to get us one before he passed away. This then was a very kind gift of a very kind snake.

*For those who haven’t seen The Princess Bride, ROUS stands for Rodent of Unusual Size, which inhabit the Fire Swamp, as well as the walls of my childhood in Melanesia.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash