I first learned the term “moral injury” in a Plough magazine article by Michael Yallend, Hope in the Void. He quoted authors Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini who say moral injury, “comes from having transgressed one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs…Moral injury destroys meaning and forsakes noble causes. It sinks warriors […]
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by Emily Raan The day started out so normal. The kids even slept in! Leftover-rice porridge for breakfast and then off to town for some quick shopping. “Quick shopping” quickly turned into two hours, while we made connections with our friends around town. One man, in particular, stood out. He somehow had lost, or possibly […]
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by Hannah Edington Marriage of any type comes with difficulties, but intercultural marriage has its own set of unexpected challenges. For single missionaries serving abroad, the possibility of marrying from within their host culture should involve deep considerations. Like Moses and Zipporah coming face to face with his family’s racism, to my experiences with my […]
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Tomorrow we board the first of four planes on our way back home to England for Christmas. I say ‘home’, but like the vast majority of people who live overseas home is a peculiar concept. The concept of home is even more complicated in our little family of four as we span three continents by […]
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by Kate Motaung I was a few weeks shy of twenty-one, and my plan was to stay in South Africa for five months. But just as my childhood stay in a renovated pump house stretched into a decade, what I thought would be a few months overseas morphed into ten and a half years. God’s […]
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I have cancer. The first time I said it out loud, I actually had to shout it into my phone. Like shout. As in, “I HAVE CANCER!!!!!” And since I am anti-exclamation points, let the fact that I just used, like, a bajillion, communicate how loudly I shouted it. I shouted, “I have cancer,” because […]
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I loved growing up overseas. I loved that I knew how to traverse the globe at a young age, that I grew up on curry and hot pakoras, that I could see some of the highest mountains in the world from the grounds of my boarding school. I loved the colorful stamps in my passport – […]
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by Beth Watkins It’s been a little more than a year since my husband, a new immigrant, and I relocated back to the U.S. after I’d been away for more than 6 years. It’s hard being back. They call it re-entry shock – the special kind of culture shock that happens when you’re back in […]
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In my last post, I talked about the cultural mistakes we often make when we move overseas—mistakes that can make us laugh or cringe or even wince in pain or regret. Below is one of my own that I enjoy laughing about. I invite you to laugh with me . . . and maybe cringe a […]
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by Tanya Crossman In part one of this series, I explained the lesson “Everyone leaves.” This is something most TCKs “learn” through their experiences growing up internationally. I chose to leave space at the end of the piece to reflect on how this “lesson” affects TCKs, rather than jump straight to solutions. When we skip straight […]
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by Tanya Crossman The experience of living overseas as a child is very different to the experience of living overseas as an adult. The impact of childhood experiences last a lifetime. They are formative experiences – they teach us how the world works. We all internalise ‘lessons’ from our childhood experiences. TCKs grow up between […]
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#metoo Kavanaugh vs. Blasey Ford Running while Female (aka, living while female) Its time to talk about sexual harassment again. I am not coming at this from a political angle. But recent US political events highlighted, again, that sexual harassment is a very real and present danger and can have long-term consequences, sometimes leading to […]
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