Imagine the following: A major catastrophe has almost completely devastated the infrastructure of your country. The emergency government has decided that the surviving citizens will be best served if they are evacuated to other countries willing to take refugees. You and your immediate family are among the survivors of this catastrophic event. However, you have absolutely no input into the final destination or in any other evacuation details. You are told that your host country’s culture is completely different from your own, and that you might have to stay there permanently. You are further told that, in addition to one change of clothes, you can only take 3 small items with you. You decide to take three items that you hold dear and that represent your family culture. • A description of the three items you would choose: • The first item I would choose is my Parallel Bible with pictures of my children and grandchildren on the front and back pages. The second item would be my coin collections. The third item would be a blanket, the one my oldest son gave me for Christmas several years ago. • For my extra set of clothing would be one my African dresses because it can also work as a cover. Usually the African women wear two “lapas” and a “iriki”. A lapa is the name for skirt that wraps around and the iriki is the top. I would wear a “irikiba”, full dress. I guess the reason I chose the African dress is because of my similar experiences. I had to choose what I wanted to bring home from Africa with me and much of my personal items had to be left in Africa and sold to other missionaries. • How you would explain to others what each of these items means to you: My Bible represents my faith and having the pictures of my family on the inside pages accomplishes two things in one. My coin collection is important because that was a project my youngest son and I worked on after the divorce. I was working retail at a place that had lots of tourists from other countries and was able to collect coins from many of them. The blanket would be to wrap the children if it were to get cold. • Your feelings if, upon arrival, you were told that you could only keep one personal item and have to give up the other two items you brought with you As long as I had my family with me, I would give up everything, except my Bible. The adults are responsible to keep the children warm. And the coin collection is important to me but not so important that would cause a problem. I also know from experience that when they decide to confiscate something it is not worth it to argue. The more you argue, the more they will go through more and take more. Just leave it alone and they will not give as many problems. • Any insights you gained about yourself, your family culture, diversity, and/or cultural differences in general, as a result of this exercise. The most important insight I have gained is that my faith and family are the most important to me. My attitude and acceptance of the situation is that to take what is given to you and see how you can work through it and teach the children in the family to know that whatever comes, God is with them. I would teach the children to stay close to family but not close the people of their hosting country. If this situation were to be real for my family I know that the cultural differences would be testy for my children but I think that they would not be rude, possibly a little standoffish but never rude. I actually lived through this situation with some African families when the Ivory Coast went to civil war. Families were forced into countries that boarded Ivory Coast and left their country with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Some families had to leave their older sons behind as they were forced to be child-soldiers. Many of the families were put into refugee camps and never saw their sons again. The children of the Christian school were preparing to be on holiday when the French soldiers invaded their school and took over the dorms and classrooms as their headquarters. Some of the parents of the missionary older children were in country to bring their children home, “Guinea” for the holiday. The parents were forced to go to a small town nearby and stay there until the French soldiers escorted the school children to be with their parents. The school was permanently closed and the parents had to find another school in another country for their children as Guinea did not have a school for upper class students. This impacted me as a missionary being the teacher of the younger brothers and sisters of the older ones. The stress and fear of these families played hard on them and the fear for their African friends was very deep. As far as the tragedy did not impact me directly but the stories that the children told of seeing friends shot and shooting for their lives sure made an impression.