I was born to American missionary parents in 1980 in a small Baptist hospital in Côte d’Ivoire, where I spent my childhood. I was a city missionary kid (MK) who, for some reason, envied village MKs for their exotic multilingual, real deal experience off the beaten path. Sunday mornings, our family went to one of the local churches my dad worked with. But on Sunday evenings, Mom took my brother and I to an English international church, which quickly became the source of many friendships. At my international school across town, the other TCKs, diplomat and international business kids, still seemed different than me, though more accessible than local kids. Socially, their families’ higher income level and different religious culture created distance. Now I realize the high diversity of my school friends then. Most of my birthday parties included some Finnish, British, Nigerian, and Brazilian classmates, a certain Sudanese classmate whose mother made excellent sambusas, and some American business and embassy kids who also came to English Sunday night church. My lifelong best friend was a fellow MK who lived down the street and went to school and church with me. After my third-grade year, her family moved back to the States. After that, everything else changed, too, as my family took a year-long furlough where I went to public school for fourth grade.

School and belonging

After that furlough, school changed for my brother and me. My parents moved four hours north to a village for an obligatory year to study an additional language. We attended a Christian MK boarding school during my fifth-grade year as day students, living with our parents in the village just fifteen minutes away. 
 
I remember how close my family got that year in our village house, and how our attitude toward the idea of eventually boarding for high school softened as we met the people there. The summer before sixth grade, my parents moved back to their former coastal city while my brother and I continued as boarding students. I remember begging my reluctant parents to let me board at the tender age of eleven to avoid the sure and difficult isolation I faced in the only remaining educational option for me in our city: homeschooling. In retrospect, I’m proud of the degree to which I already knew that about myself—isolation has never boded well for me—and proud of my parents who also knew me, and overcame their own fears for something I needed, requested, and discussed with them. My dad highly valued education and critical thinking, whichever school system we ended up in. He sent us to school every day with a send-off that stuck with me: “Learn all you can that’s worth learning.” Only as an adult did I recognize the wisdom in this and my parents’ great trust in God with their kids, our faith, and our futures.
 
I find myself often in conversations about my experience in boarding school. Counselors, of course, pause, wide-eyed, to weed out any traumatic back stories. Curious non-TCKs don’t quite know what to do with it, approaching it as anywhere from quaint to evil. Mostly, I share it with parents of TCKs, in increasingly careful ways, who are weighing difficult schooling options. In recent years as a culture and language coach to new cross-cultural workers in the Middle East, I found myself often in the thick of schooling conversations with families and leadership. As an adult, I recognize the significance of this one issue. MK boarding school is perhaps strange, but not to me, and it definitely beat homeschool. It fit me like a glove, and for once I felt normal. My eight years there provided thriving friendships, Christian discipleship, a good education, and even the opportunity to hone my piano skills, all which positioned me well to succeed as a music major, and as a Christian tween in the US, far from home.

Between home and host worlds

Our boarding school trimester system gave us school breaks every December, most of April, and six weeks of July and August. I remember my mom always turning down other opportunities when we were home from school to prioritize time with us, which assured me of her attention and love. It’s true, though, that family time for me, since age eleven, has been spent on vacation mode and not normal life. Even in pre-internet days, I made better efforts to keep up with my parents than most of my friends did with theirs, and my family remains quite close today, despite distance. But it still created a strange dynamic for us that persists. As stabilizing as boarding school was for me, my eight missed years of daily life in my parents’ home took an untold toll. 
 
Boarding school aside, when I think about my MK childhood, I love the wide diversity of people I got to know, and how uncomfortable I get now without cultural diversity. I also most remember the struggle to navigate my language and cultural worlds on the field. Two Beckys emerged in my daily life as I straddled my two worlds: my mostly white TCK world and my mostly black host world. Life in my African host world was harder. I understood most of the French I heard, and I got good at intuiting other local languages when I had to. Host world was hot and often without fan or air conditioning; it was humid, hopelessly frizzing up my curly hair, and came with malaria, water filters, and tummy trouble. Distance from home to the African neighborhoods my parents often worked prevented a lot of meaningful connection for me. So, Becky in host world often withdrew, stayed safe, and let her older brother speak for her. 
 
Anyone who knows me in English experiences a different Becky: quite vivacious, talkative, and very present in the room. I’d later discover my introverted (or “othered”) Becky often interacted with my normal extroverted self as I ventured out internationally on my own in North Africa and the Middle East. I’d withdraw inward in the high learning curves of cultural newness to a degree that contrasted starkly with normal me. My experiences have exponentially increased my natural adaptiveness, making me an efficient language learner, able to feel my way around market shopping, home visits, cooking, and finding my way in any of the 40+ countries I’ve visited or lived in. But it takes a strong sense of belonging, usually to an English or Christian group, to infuse “othered” Becky with the necessary confidence and gumption to push through to greater integration of the two sides of me.

Christians as kingdom of God TCKs

As an MK, I came from stepped-up Christianity growing up. I met God personally in the mix, chose to go with the grain of the Christian experiences my life provided for me, and grew in my ability to critically evaluate them as I matured. My TCK experience made primary citizenship in the Kingdom of God over any other, which stabilized me as I moved around. As a teen, I was called to facilitate worship in the nations. While enraptured with the grandeur of the moment, it also didn’t feel as inaccessibly mysterious to me as perhaps to others without my experience. In fact, my MK-ness factored into my life purpose as a key ingredient I’ve drawn from everywhere I’ve lived. 
 
In my recent move to the US to finish doctoral work and begin my new equipping role, I’m moving through my transition with a good bit of introspection. As I look back, it’s hard to separate my personality from my experiences, and hard to acknowledge the effects of the good and hard parts of them all. My adult academic mind recoils at some of the glaring mistakes I witness people making, and made myself, in crossing culture with the gospel. The uncertainty of constant change and attachment loss in my childhood have forced me to deal honestly and painfully with the personal costs of the childhood I cherish for all it has given to me. Evaluating the historical slice of mission history that I lived as a child also certainly feels theologically complicated and geopolitically charged. 
 
But for whatever reasons, as people move around the world, as increasingly happens these days, it strikes me that moving provides Christians in new places the keen opportunities to live out many Biblical themes: faith within the unknown, perseverance, being in-not-of (John 17:19) the world or any particular country. Each Christian is a TCK in their belonging to both heaven and earth and growing into their place in and contribution to both.