(Dec. 12, 2016 - by Ralph Kurtenbach)  Arriving in Warsaw, Rita Whaley felt that she possessed excellent language fluency; her understanding of the culture seemed adequate. Yet she struggled to adjust, longing for the familiar environment she had left behind. Sadness and sentiments of loss clouded her days. It grew worse when her longtime companion, a cat named Olivia, got sick. The stress nearly overwhelmed her.

Whaley’s locale, Warsaw, was not in Poland, but instead in her home state of Indiana. After 28 years in Ecuador, she returned in 2014 to live and work in the U.S. This was her homeland—at least according to her passport. It was where she had grown up, graduated from college and found a church where she was growing and learning. In the 1980s she left for Ecuador to serve as an evangelical missionary.

Her nursing degree and a certificate from Fort Wayne Bible School had prepared her to serve at Hospital Vozandes-Quito (HVQ), a hospital owned by Reach Beyond in Ecuador. She often left Quito to assist physicians doing primary care medical work in remote regions of the country, staying for days at a time in the jungle or highlands.

Whaley’s work as a floor nurse at the modern HVQ may have resembled hospital work in Indiana, but when helping with medical caravans her nights were spent sleeping beneath a mosquito net on a community school floor.

In her spare time, she regularly spent time within the thick walls of the former Penal García Moreno (García Moreno Penitentiary, now closed). In the notoriously dangerous and overcrowded prison, she ministered to English-speaking prisoners, including some from Poland.

When her ministry became known to Poland’s embassy in Quito, staff there awarded her a diplomatic pass to use in entering the facility. This helped shape Whaley as a person. She was different than when she left Indiana nearly three decades earlier.

After all of that, efforts at finding a job and fitting in as an expatriate may have looked easy to the untrained eye, but according to Dr. Dorris “Dottie” Schulz of the Texas-based Missionary Resources Network (MRN), reentry takes real work and emotional toil.

It’s a view echoed by DeNise Love, Reach Beyond’s missionary personnel director for Latin America, who during a 2015 trip to the U.S. visited some of Whaley’s colleagues who had also settled in the U.S. after years in Ecuador. She found that “the statement was almost across the board that it’s way more difficult coming back home than it was coming to the field.”

Many of the same hurdles to cross-cultural living greet those who return home. Expecting this “helps you know that you’re not crazy and that what you’re going through is normal,” added Schulz. “Your feelings are normalized.”
This doesn’t sidestep the experience of “mourning and going through what you have to go through in order to come out on the other side of the transition,” she cautioned, adding that “knowing all of that in your head does not remove the experience.”

Schulz and her husband, Tom (now deceased), served as evangelical missionaries in the Netherlands. Returning to the U.S., they both began doctoral studies, Dottie investigating problems of reentry for missionary families and Tom focusing his efforts on special challenges faced by expatriate children of missionaries, sometimes referred to as “third culture kids.”

In research predating the term “reentry,” she surveyed and/or interviewed 177 missionaries with Churches of Christ, autonomous evangelical congregations in North America that are associated through common beliefs and practices with an emphasis on establishing churches that follow New Testament traditions.

Her dissertation was “The Study of Third Culture Experience in Relation to the Psycho-Social Adjustment of Returned Church of Christ Missionary Families.” Coincidentally, it was published when Whaley was beginning her Ecuador experience in 1986.

Among Schulz’s findings was the notion that “going to the [mission] field changes a person in such a way that it’s hard to come back home again.”

Meaningful Work and Identity a Quest of Returning Expatriates

Working overseas is more than a job for expatriates; it is a lifestyle. For some—especially for those in ministry or missions—it is a vocation, a calling that follows lengthy preparation. Theological and professional education can take years before ever setting foot on a foreign shore to share the gospel. When on the mission field, though the work may be hard at times and frustrating at others, there is fulfillment in seeing fruits of the gospel in people’s lives.

Upon reentering their passport countries, returning missionaries suffer a lost identity, according to Dr. Richard “Dick” Douce, a physician and former medical director at HVQ.

“Even though you’ve got this rich past where God has blessed you and you’re thankful, it’s like a clean slate with other people,” said Douce, who now works at a hospital in St. Joseph, Mich. “They [medical colleagues] just assume that you can’t do this or don’t know how to do that. And sometimes you start to believe it as you go through the crisis.”

An infectious diseases specialist, Douce was told at HVQ that “nobody has your clinical eye,” speaking to his diagnostic savvy. He was involved in helping to start Ecuador’s first HIV/AIDS clinic and was a frequent conference speaker on the management of HIV and other infectious diseases in Ecuador.

Residents and interns he has taught at HVQ have gone on to serve in the nation’s Ministry of Health as well as in other high-profile positions. With his wife, Marian, fulfilling internet technology roles at the mission, the Douces spent 23 years as missionaries in Ecuador. After returning to the U.S., Dick began a study with other men in the community and with an expat colleague, Dr. Roy Ringenberg. The study was on Bible references about a person’s identity—apart from their work—in Jesus Christ.

An early assignment for many returning missionaries, according to Schulz, is to find meaningful work. Her job puts her in contact with many such returnees. With it “in their DNA” to help others, many find fulfillment in beginning or furthering their studies in marital and family therapy.

When circumstances moved Darrel and Mandy Klassen from Ecuador to Kelowna, B.C., Canada, in 2012, it was for Darrel a transition to a country he had known only for several years of his life. He had grown up in Ecuador as a child of missionaries during the 1950s and 60s, then lived in Canada as a young adult. In 1985 the Klassens and their three children moved to Ecuador where he “loved the Quichua [people] passionately and they loved him,” according to fellow Avant missionary Dick Grover.

“I’ve spent maybe 35 years of my life in Ecuador. I’m a Canadian citizen, but I feel much more comfortable down there than I do up here,” Darrel told a North American congregation just a few years before his family’s return to Canada in 2012.

Within months of the intercontinental move, “Darrel was having difficulty transitioning between a very active ministry in Ecuador and what future ministry was going to be,” observed Grant Morrison, vice president and executive director of Avant Canada.

Family and friends were shocked to learn that on Aug. 28, 2012, at the age of 62, Darrel died by his own hand. While other returnees may not plummet to such levels of depression, Schulz cited a study by the business sector that found returning expatriates felt flat and unfulfilled after career endeavors abroad. Their reentries were marked by transitions into other lines of work. The search for meaningful work becomes a quest, according to Schulz.

“I’ve been trying to tell people that we have the world at our feet right now. I mean in the [Dallas-Fort Worth] metroplex right here, there are 270 different language groups,” she said, adding that “over 30 are in Houston and that doesn’t hold a candle to Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago. So there are ways of still working with the world in the U.S.”

For Whaley the challenge became that of finding work, period. During 28 years of service in Ecuador, she had only been in the U.S. for visits, so a new job at a hospital there brought to her a steep learning curve and stress. An email note to friends told of being “out of work and job hunting again” after a trial period at the hospital.

Another note requested that friends “pray I can have confidence and not be afraid and can earn and remember the things I need to.” Prayers were answered, she said, when “the medical director with whom I spoke said that my cultural experience and language—all the experience I had had with so many different types of people and areas of work—were just what they needed.” Now employed at an Indiana clinic, Whaley uses her Spanish-language abilities daily in her work.

Search for Church, Friends a Tough Assignment for Returning Expatriates

Returning home as a missionary may bring with it an unpleasant surprise—the difficulty in finding a church to fit into after having lived abroad. In fact, this may prove as the hardest part of a cross-continental transition, according to Schulz, who readily offers suggestions for local congregations that want to ease a missionary’s reentry.

“The church that prepares can help alleviate a lot of stress,” offered Schulz, listing the tasks in which a returning mission worker might need assistance—“buy a car, get a driver’s license, purchase insurance, get help with grocery shopping.”

Beyond the start-up tasks of beginning a new life, the missionary should be offered “honor to whom honor is due,” said Schulz. “Have a dinner for them, give them a plaque, a homecoming shower of gifts needed to repatriate, career counseling, help children with school entrance [or] prepare the Bible classes to receive the children well.” Needs will differ with different families.

Church friends of the Douces greeted them at the airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., and squired them to a clean home with much of their furniture already unpacked and food in the fridge. They said they felt fortunate to have been greeted by folk who had visited them in Quito and witnessed the medical missions work done by Reach Beyond in Latin America. This higher level of understanding and rapport with the Douces helped ease their transition to a culture that had been home decades before.

One of Dick’s colleagues, Dr. Jeff Maudlin, returned with his wife, Elsa, and their four children to Nogales, Ariz., after serving in Ecuador. Even with returning to the medical practice where he had served before and to their home church, the Maudlins “found that the biggest issue is that people don’t understand what being a missionary is,” according to Jeff.

As with the Douces, U.S.-based friends who had visited Ecuador and saw the family in the Latin American context had less difficulty understanding a missionary’s life. The Maudlins found it “very important to reestablish old friendships, particularly through the church.”

Schulz described a likely scenario for those entering or reentering their home country [such as the U.S.] in which “they are immediately brought into a certain kind of relationship with people. You feel like you’re in … except when it comes to the nitty-gritty. You find out you’re not, because you’re not in that hard inner circle.”

The hard inner circle she referred to comes from research by journalist/author Boyé Lafayette De Mente, whose comparison of Western and Eastern societal norms on friendship is illustrated by two concentric circles. In the West, the outer circle is porous, represented by a dotted line, whereas in the East the outer circle is harder to break into—a solid line. Deep friendship and intimacy are found in the inner circle in both East and West.

A missionary may have invested decades abroad in efforts to penetrate a culture and influence a circle of friends to consider the claims of Jesus Christ upon their lives. Longtime missionaries “have finally made it into the inner circle of people who have that hard outer circle that they [initially] present to them” according to Schulz. “They’ve made it inside. And they have had very intimate, close relationships with these people that they have converted, and know and have been there for them.”

In some cases, a multigenerational missionary family steadily and effectively builds rapport with those they live with. Such was the case for Darrel Klassen whose parents’ work among the highland Quichua people of Ecuador paved the way for confidence and trust as Darrel later ministered there.

Reentry means attempting to reach people’s inner circle in their home cultures, whereas Schulz observed, “It takes so long to break the inner circle in America, [just] as it did to break that outer circle with the foreigner.” Returnees—already misunderstood as to the work they did abroad—often do not understand the difficulty of finding friendships; nor do they anticipate it.

“As a tendency then,” Schulz explained, “missionaries tend to think that people in the U.S. are shallow and that conversations are not deep. And if you know anything about missionaries, they go deep very quickly, especially ‘third culture kids’ who go deep immediately, [and this is] really is scary to American teenagers. Americans don’t want to be that intimate that quickly.”

As a result, the most likely connection points for returnees would be to reach out to other returned expatriates, foreigners or perhaps minority groups. “There they feel comfortable,” she said, “but with fellow church members they can’t quite get that feeling that they had. They can’t get that closeness that they had with [missionary] teammates. They don’t have the connections and so as a result they feel less spiritual.”

For Jeff and Elsa Maudlin, it helped that the Nogales church where they had formerly attended invited them to the pulpit to give a presentation on the medical missions work that they had done for several years in Ecuador.

Reentry Assignment: Begin before Leaving the Host Country

Thomas and Annekäthi Büchi are Swiss, but to their three children Switzerland is a place to go and visit. When the Büchi family moved from Ecuador to Switzerland, it was to Thomas and Annekäthi a reentry. To their children—all under age 12 and two of whom hold both Swiss and Ecuadorian passports—the transition was to a foreign country.

The family began their steps toward Switzerland while still living in Ecuador. “We read one book about transitions and I attended some seminars here,” said Thomas. While still serving with Reach Beyond’s Latin America Region as missionaries, the Büchis in 2014 decided to forego a home ministry assignment in 2014. Saving what they would have spent on flight costs, they applied it toward covering costs of their permanent return to Switzerland.

This also freed them up for Ecuador-based family vacations—a critical step to healthy departures, according to Schulz. “Say farewell; say goodbye to things, to people. That’s goodbye to the snakes, the roaches, the dirt, the place where you spent a romantic evening with your spouse,” she suggested. “Or your kids with camping or the game park or whatever has been important in your life, say goodbye to that.”

For the Büchis, it meant one final vacation on the shores of Ecuador’s coastal province of Esmeraldas and another at a favorite mountain getaway in Papallacta, high in the Andes. The cathedrals and cobblestone streets of Cuenca were where Thomas and Annekäthi had learned Spanish; they returned one last time.

Farewell also meant selling off possessions, a course of action in which Thomas and Annekäthi involved the children. Yet, as household goods and furnishings were parceled out to neighbors and friends, little Eva cried to find something missing—the plant that had always stood beside the Büchis’ front door. Annekäthi asked the buyer for the plant back until their final day in Ecuador.

In timing their intercontinental move, Thomas explained that “in Switzerland the change from primary to secondary is after the sixth grade, so it’s easy to do before adolescence for the first child or at the end of the last child.” They left in the summer of 2015 in time for their oldest, Lukas, to begin sixth grade in Switzerland and continue on to secondary school. His younger sisters will continue elementary school there.

Upon returning to Switzerland where Thomas had worked before as a systems team leader at a university, they plan to live temporarily with Annekäthi’s parents. “For the first time we will be a three-generation household,” Thomas said, outlining how their plans also included time at a missionary reentry seminar in Zurich (in October 2015).

Farewell is just one of the departing expatriate’s task, according to Schulz. She credits author David C. Pollack with creating the acronym RAFT to spell out needs for a) reconciliation, b) affirmation, c) farewell and d) thinking of the future. Pollack is a consultant and authored Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds.

For the Douces, reentry began in Ecuador in 2010 with thinking about and planning an exit. When “garage sales and giving stuff away” followed, it all became real. Once in the U.S. in 2012, they followed suggestions of their mission agency, Reach Beyond, and attended several days of debriefing by the Colorado-based Missionary Training Institute (MTI). Guided by MTI reentry discussion facilitators, the Douces and other expatriates explored and illustrated different phases of reentry.

Reentry’s middle phase—deemed chaos—seems appropriate to the Douces. “You don’t have any of the landmarks to orient yourself and you feel like you’re a ship drifting around,” he recounted. “And you start to question why you were on the mission field and ‘what did we get done?’” Accompanying it were nagging doubts about whether their choice to return to the country once known as home was a good one.

“We changed obviously,” Dick reflected. “We had crossed multiple cultural barriers, and we learned Spanish—we’re still learning it—even as we now have to learn English again. What’s a ‘hashtag’ anyway?” (Hashtags are used to title topics or themes in communiques or posts in social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram. For instance, this story could be tagged, #Expat_reentry.)

Marian, an IT specialist with Reach Beyond, already understood internet technologies upon their return to the U.S., and both she and Dick are well acquainted with social media. Dick found North American face-to-face friendship another matter, however, as “you think you have friends and you say ‘Hi!’ but they don’t stop typing on the computer; they say ‘Oh, hello,’ and they just go on.” In stark contrast, Latinos are accustomed to greetings that ask about one’s wellbeing as well as that of family members.

A few years after reentry, Dick could say that “finally you get a physical place to live. The last couple of phases can last for years as you try to figure out the value system of the people you live with.”

Ralph Kurtenbach thanks those expatriates who shared their stories. He and his wife, Kathy, have lived in Quito for over 20 years, serving with Reach Beyond. Their four children--all born in Ecuador—are on two continents. One is in Ecuador; another attends a U.S. college. Two have found jobs in the U.S. after college graduation. Ralph and Kathy are thinking about reentry and how to get ready for it.

Source: Reach Beyond