Hopes for the Future Generation

Our daughter at beginning of school (can you find her?)

We have big hopes for change on the islands. The problems there might be big and very apparent, but we know there is a power for good that is bigger and more powerful. Change is possible! This is a sentiment which islanders are often skeptical of, and it is easy, even for us, to put our hope in some unseen future date and give up on the here and now, to give up on the older generation and look to the next generation to bring about change. We fight against that temptation to give up on the here and now, and remind ourselves to pray for and share with older islanders as well as young. At the same time, we acknowledge that the perspective of younger islanders is different.  They have been exposed to more outside ideas and culture, and don’t hold the same prejudices and baggage. [Not that they don’t have their own prejudices and baggage, but it’s different than the older generations.] 

The temptation to give up on or ignore the old and put our hope in the new can be the same for any sort of change.  As moves for racial justice are spreading across the US and internationally, I have wondered and been hopeful for what life will be like a generation from now.  I have hope that the movements happening now will have made an impact. Kids are watching and learning alongside their parents. They won’t have the same baggage nor the same resistance to change. 

I’ve wondered what our kids make of it all.  Our kids are not typical American kids. They have grown up in Africa. They have grown up as racial minorities. On the islands, they are the only white kids in their school and the only white kids in our neighborhood. On our entire island, we can count the other white kids on one hand.  At the same time, they are not an oppressed minority. They are a minority associated with wealth and higher education. They don’t always enjoy the attention they get as the only white kids, but mostly the attention isn’t meant negatively. Growing up on the islands, our kids’ sense of race is also tied up with culture, language and religion in a complicated jumble. Just as they are the only white kids at school, they are the only English-speakers, the only Christians, the only Americans.  How is this unique childhood influencing their experience of race?

Our youngest with his classmates

At school being different can be overwhelming, because there is so much that separates them from the other kids (language, culture and religion). Those things create such a barrier that race doesn’t seem that important. Their whiteness means that kids want to touch their hair or poke at their skin sometimes (island kids don’t understand freckles or sunburns).  But language and culture are the bigger barriers. I have seen how comfortable our kids have been when we’ve gone to places where the kids have believing parents or when we’ve gone to mainland Africa where kids speak English. In those situations, it hasn’t seemed to matter whether the kids were African, Asian, American or European— there was enough in common to make interactions seem easy. 

Sometimes we’ve had to correct islanders who assume all white people are one religion or have the same culture, and we’ve had to correct our kids sometimes too. I remember when our youngest was very little and we realized that he thought we knew all white people. We lived on an island where the only white people we saw were our teammates. On the rare occasion when we encountered a white person outside our team we usually could at least tell him something about them— that they worked for an NGO or the UN or something. So when we went to a big city in mainland Africa and he started asking me, “Who’s that?” whenever he saw a white person, it was with the full expectation that I knew them and could tell him who they were.  I had to explain that there were lots of white people in the world and we didn’t know them all, and also they weren’t all our friends or even necessarily friendly people. (We had gone through a similarly clarifying conversation on the islands about English-speakers, after our son bear-hugged a random black guy who came to our front door speaking English. He assumed anyone who spoke English was our friend!) 

Ultimately we are thankful that our kids are growing up in Africa, that they have learned to make friends with kids of a different race and culture. We are also thankful that we are in the US right now and that our kids can witness some of the struggle and dialogue about racial justice. We know they will have baggage and that even as they see the prejudices of others that they may develop some of their own, but we have hope. At the same time, we aren’t giving up on seeing change and justice in our generation. May we all continue to learn to cross barriers and be challenged by what is happening now and speaking words for truth and justice throughout our lives.

Picnic lunch in CA

PRAYERS ANSWERED

We are adjusting well to California and excited to start connecting this week with our California friends and contacts.  We are also really thankful to see that Megan’s dad’s knee is feeling so much better.  There was a meeting for reconciliation among the brothers and sisters on Clove island that went well.  A follow up meeting also went on and we’re still waiting to hear how it went, but we’re thankful that these meetings are happening and that people are seeking reconciliation and healing.

PRAYERS REQUESTED

There was a meeting about leadership development on the islands this morning. Pray for good wisdom about how to support and equip emerging leaders well and how to partner with other groups that have similar or overlapping visions. We are still praying for more teammates to join us— pray for those preparing to come in these uncertain times and for those that we don’t know about yet that are supposed to come. Our son’s test results weren’t conclusive but the doctor told us to go ahead and treat him. Pray that when we redo his bloodwork later that everything will be normal.  Our computer screen is malfunctioning and we just took it in for repairs and waiting to see how much it will cost. Pray that it could be fixed quickly and that we could do everything we need to do on our tablet (this post took longer than normal to do!). Continue to pray for the islands, for justice, for community in the midst of COVID and for truth to spread!