Culture Shock

Noticing unique differences in children is challenging for most parents. It’s common for parents to wonder if a behavior is just quirky or if there’s more to what they’re seeing, asking themselves, “Is this normal? Or not?”  For example, having a child with food or texture avoidance can be just a normal part of being …

We didn’t have words for TCK loss back then. Not when I left Cameroon at nineteen and stepped onto U.S. soil as a stranger to my own country. But just because there weren’t words doesn’t mean the ache of loss didn’t burrow deep. Nineteen and newly repatriated felt like drowning in a sea of people who looked like me and talked like me but didn’t know the red-earth-Africa that shaped me. 

On my first day as a missionary, while riding from the airport to my new home in the obscurities of East Africa, I suddenly had this overwhelming sense—“What have I gotten myself into?!” Full-blown panic attacks always make me want to run. But in this case I did not run. I did not say anything. I rode in silence, deeply troubled but unable to explain why. 

I pedaled as fast as I could with one hand on the handlebars and the other raised in a fist, yelling in Albanian, “You destroyer of beauty! You destroyer of beauty!” I had just watched a driver throw garbage out of his car window, and my bottled rage exploded – a vivid memory from 15 years ago of culture shock squirting out badly.