I am pleased to introduce Apricot Irving, award winning author of The Gospel of Trees, and one of her teachers Suzette Goff-Geffrard. Apricot grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti – where Suzette was her teacher – during a time of social and political upheaval. Suzette has worked for many years in educational, organizational and development-related programs here in the US as well as in two African countries, Haiti and France.
While Apricot and Suzette applaud the good intentions of those who serve, they also compassionately and honestly expose the too-often unspoken dark underbelly of service and good works.
Help – Don’t Hurt!
You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:
You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:
The following is a taste of my conversation with Suzette and Apricot.
Q: Suzette, how did you think of mission work when you were in Haiti with Apricot, both your own work, and other’s like the missionaries at the hospital compound in Haiti?
Suzette: Our approach was a combination of being Christian professionals who have something to give and to gain.
Q: Apricot, you are 9 years old, you’ve got crazy wild red hair, and you are on this compound in Haiti. How do you, as a kid, not the adult Apricot but the kid, make sense of the social and economic divides that we’re talking about?
Apricot: I remember distinctly that sense of being on display, of having to model something for people, and yet knowing, when I was at home, I was the one pulling my sister’s hair or kicking or like just being a kid, obnoxious, starved for attention, wanting to like fight back. So that bizarre gap between what I was supposed to be and who I was, which is a messy ordinary kid.
Q: Apricot and Suzette, as ‘third culture kids,’ you both shared my own confusion about where I really belonged. How did you sort this out in your lives?
Suzette: My parents taught me that home is the place wherever we are all together. That is our home.
Apricot: I think it took me longer to find an answer to that. When we were in Haiti flying back into the U.S., and I felt like I was leaving a home, leaving Haiti, and not fully coming home re-entering the U.S. even, you know, in my 40s. And I realized, for me, my answer is I belong to this earth. I belong to all the trees and all the rivers, and all this natural world that we all belong to together.
Q: Apricot, a former missionary from the ag center in Haiti said to you, “The whole mystique of missionary service, the more you sacrificed, the more you destroyed your family, meant that you were even more respected for what you’d done for God. It proved you were unafraid. You didn’t count the cost.” Would you comment on this, and your experience of that?
Apricot: There was that echo in his words in my body of, “Oh, I remember that ache of feeling like, ‘Do I matter? Is my parents cause more important to them than my sisters and I?'” And I think that’s a common thread in all the interviews that I’ve done with missionary kids that that question is a haunted one for many of us.
When asked if there’s one last thing they’d like our listeners to hear, Suzette says, “Be your authentic self, be you.”
And Apricot says, “If we move towards the things that we’re afraid of, then we will very often find them changed, and ourselves changed in the process.”
About Suzette:
Suzette is the current Haiti Partnership Director at Bright Hope International with over 20 years of U.S. and international experience working in educational, organizational and development-related programs. International experiences include service in two African countries, Haiti, and France. Her goal is to help expand international experience in development related programs in Haiti via humanitarian efforts. You can find more information on Bright Hope International below.
Bright Hope unites Christ-followers from around the world to bring Hope and help to those living in some of the poorest places on Earth. Through their Hope for Today, Hope for Tomorrow, and Hope for Eternity ministry model, they can break the grip of generational poverty, and as they do, see lives changed and our own hearts grow.
Bright Hope International Website
About Apricot:
Apricot Irving is the author of The Gospel of Trees, a lyrical meditation on ecology, loss, and the tangled history of missions in Haiti, winner of the 2019 Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and Literary Arts Creative Nonfiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, On Being, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Portland Monthly, Topic Magazine and Best American Science & Nature Writing. Raised a missionary’s daughter in Haiti, Irving has taught literature and writing to students in Indonesia, China, the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland. She reported on post-earthquake recovery efforts in the north of Haiti for the radio program This American Life and is the founder and director of the Boise Voices Oral History Project, a collaboration between youth and elders to record the stories of a rapidly changing neighborhood in N/NE Portland, which was honored at City Hall for civic engagement and innovative storytelling. She currently lives in the Columbia River Gorge with her partner and two wildly imaginative boys.
Find Apricot on Social Media:
https://www.apricotirving.com/ (Website)
https://www.instagram.com/apricot.irving/ (Instagram)
Apricot’s Book:
Books Mentioned in the Interview:
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence: A Practical Guide to Walking with Low-Income People, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken.
About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.
Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
Podcast Transcript:
Interviewer: Apricot and Suzette, welcome. It’s good to have you both on the show.
Apricot: Thank you so much for having us.
Interviewer: Apricot, I’d like for you to begin by giving our listeners a brief overview of what led you to Haiti, and then a bit about your time there.
Apricot: Yeah. So I was 6 years old when my parents moved to Haiti to be volunteer missionaries with the American Baptist. They had never intended to be missionaries. My dad was a forest ranger and grew organic vegetables in the desert California. He got recruited though to run an agricultural center in the north of Haiti for a year. So he was gonna be teaching horticulture classes and working with reforestation projects.
And we went for a year just kind of to see what it was like. My dad loves trees, his first language is trees. Still to this day, he is almost 70 and his hands are always stained with berries and dirt, he’s collecting seeds, he’s processing seeds, he’s planting seeds. And so he wanted to share some of what he knew. And then what followed were two more years and a different part of Haiti, also in the north, and that’s where I met Suzette. She was my teacher when I was 7 to 9 at this little missionary school on what was then a hospital compound.
And we returned to the U.S. after those 3 years in Haiti in the early ’80s. And we didn’t come back again until the 1990s when my father was still planting trees, we we’re trying to live outside of the missionary bubble, off the compound. Although, we ended up for a variety of reasons -political instability, our teenage desire to be among the other missionary kids – moving back on to that little hospital compound. And that was 1990 and 1991.
Interviewer: So Suzette, you were her teacher from the age of 7 to 9. What was your role in Haiti at that time?
Suzette: Well, I was, actually, initially, I came a couple of summers before and ran a Vacation Bible School for the missionary kids. And the missionary kids at that compound were kind of a combination of American children that had come with their parents and Haitian children that have been adopted by some of these missionaries, and so it’s kind of a real mixed bag. And I had come just to provide that summer Vacation Bible School experience only to discover that they had a small child that they didn’t really understand what was happening with him. And so my background is in speech pathology and audiology, and they had this nonverbal child that they didn’t know if he was intellectually disabled or if he was autistic, they just didn’t understand what was going on.
So while I was invited to run a Vacation Bible School, I really was invited to do some hands-on therapy in teaching and training with this little boy Johnny and his family. And I just developed some relationships. And so a couple of years later, when they really desperately needed a teacher, because the population of the school-aged children had changed so drastically, they asked me if I’d consider coming back. And I did, and that ended up being my opportunity to teach Apricot.
All I can remember is she always had a book in her hand and she went through all of “My Little House on the Prairie” books, practically, you know, swallowed them whole. So we had lots and lots of discussions about the frontier days and, you know, I was given an opportunity to be as creative as I wanted to be with teaching these children. And so we did all kinds of things, and it was a wonderful and liberating teaching experience.
Interviewer: That’s so good.
Apricot: It was an unforgettable childhood. Those two years having Suzette as my teacher, it changed my life. She was the first person to tell me at, what, 8 years old probably that I was a writer. Those words like were buzzing around my head from then until now. I can’t tell you how many dark moments when I thought, “I really want to be a writer someday.” And I thought, “Oh, but if Suzette saw it in me at 8 years old, maybe there’s something to it.”
Interviewer: And just for our listeners, Apricot’s new book “The Gospel of Trees,” was recently released, and she dedicated the book to Suzette. Suzette, in fact, you’ve spent over 20 years working in various mission environments, would you share some of your larger service journey with our listeners?
Suzette: Oh, certainly. And I want to also say that I actually own Apricot’s first book. It was the visual ABCs, and I still have the autographed copy amongst my teaching scrapbook materials.
Interviewer: That’s great, that’s great. I love it.
Suzette: Actually, yes, that experience, you know, I went on to spend two years there. After that, I was myself searching. That experience changed my life as well. And I then went to seminary and met my husband while at seminary, who was doing a background in international development, third world economic development. And we teamed up and both of us wanted to go to Africa. He’s actually of a Haitian background. I’m African American, and he’s Haitian American.
And we just decided that it would be great for us to begin our service life as well as our marriage in Africa and be in a neutral culture. Because I understood, by this time, quite a bit about cross-cultural living, and recognized that if we spent our initial time in Haiti, he would have a distinct advantage, and I would be at a disadvantage. And if we began our marriage in the United States, it would be the reverse, he would be at a disadvantage and I would have an advantage.
And it wouldn’t be something that you would consciously do, but it would be difficult to establish our own family culture and traditions and whatever. So we just decided, with the help of some of our friends, that it would be best for us to build our family first in a neutral culture, for at least the first five years of our marriage. And so we went to what’s now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, at that time it was Zaire.
And on our way, I did a one-year training learning French in France. We spent a year there, or nearly a year there, and academic year. My husband did an internship with the Tearfund, the French version called SEL. And I learned or relearned to speak French. And then we headed to Zaire, and began our service life together. But my experiences in Haiti really informed me quite a bit, because we did have to live on a mission compound. And so I was fortunate that I’ve had that experience as a single person, but nevertheless, have the experience of living in a missionary community, which I don’t think I would have survived had I not had that previous experience.
Interviewer: The word missionary originates all the way back to the 1500s when the Jesuits sent their members abroad to save the heathens. I think they were thought of as heathens. The word derives from Latin, and it literally means sent ones. My parents were sent as missionaries to Paraguay. Apricot, your parents were sent to Haiti. How did your parents think of themselves and their mission when they first landed in Haiti?
Apricot: Well, I think my parents not having had the ambition of becoming missionaries that sort of being talked into it as farmers, it was a slightly more haphazard sense of calling. They really wanted to work in horticulture, do something to do with gardens. Dad really found a rhythm that he found really enjoyable for him to be able to talk with farmers about what they’re growing in their fields.
People are really generous and encouraging him in assembling creoles. It’s a place where a lot of thought, a lot of conversation is around the seasons and the rain and the lack of rain and what’s growing. And so I think he found a real sense of kinship and rapport with people when he was able to have those conversations with people for whom it mattered profoundly what could grow and what could be done to enhance the health of the crop.
Interviewer: Suzette, how did you think of mission work at the time, both your own work, and other’s like the missionaries at the hospital compound in Haiti?
Suzette: Well, because I approached it from a skills, a professional point of view, I did not have a very positive view of the missionary enterprise historically. That was not something that… In the churches that I grew up in, a missionary was considered someone who responded to local needs. It wasn’t seen as an international venture. And the international ventures, with the exception of some, you know, black mission sending organizations, it was really not seen very positively, especially not by my generation.
So I did not ever seek to become a missionary. It was simply by connection, a need was shared that they needed a teacher, and especially a special ed teacher, and in the summer, they need a speech pathologist. And I saw that as providing, you know, I have a skill, and I’m a Christian who has a skill. I probably would have been more appropriate to come at it sort of from a tentmaker, sort of point of view, but I had the opportunity through my church, and through… My church belong to the American Baptist churches, so their mission sending organization had already kind of become sort of a professional organization. In fact, you had to have a master’s degree to actually go into full-time mission with them.
I went as a volunteer initially, but because I had the required educational background, they asked me if I would consider professional service. Again, I approached it more like I have some skills that can be shared in an international context. And the same with my husband, because his view of development was more of a community development, building communities, building other people’s skills to, you know, take over their own lives into. So, we kind of didn’t come from a very old-fashioned model, even though, you know, we experienced it and certainly my husband grew up in a community dominated by missionaries, but he had learned a lot of the positives but also some of the negatives of that as well.
So our approach was one much more of a combination of we are Christian professionals who have something to give and to gain. And we kind of really thought of it as an adventure that we could live in a community, we could live in another culture. And we could be effective and we could learn a whole lot that would make us even more effective by having that kind of experience. So, we didn’t go into it with a very traditional view, and that whole business of work yourselves out of a job was very prominent. I mean, we didn’t see ourselves as a lifetime of service in one place or doing one thing. But that we should be training other people, you know, to do whatever was lacking or whatever they were asking for. And so I think I came at it probably in a very nontraditional way.
Interviewer: I love what you say about going with the mindset of giving and gaining. And it leads to an issue I’d like us to talk about for a bit. Apricot writes that her father and also Dr. Hodges at the missionary hospital compound suffered from a savior complex. And I quote from Apricot’s book, “So many saviors ready to die for their causes.” They wanted their lives to count for something significant, and that’s a really great thing, but she also refers to them as privileged oppressors.
So, Suzette, clearly, white privilege and white supremacy are once again at the forefront of our hearts and our minds at this moment in history. And just to orient our listeners, this interview is taking place in mid-June of 2020. I wonder if you would speak about the issue of the great white savior complex as it related to the missions in Haiti when you were there.
Suzette: Well, Apricot was quite young. I think she probably remembers some heated discussions or clashes. Because I did not accept that, and I challenged both, you know, Dr. Hodges and John, and anyone else who when they would make statements that, you know, we’re so, I mean, for me, they were just so clearly out of pockets, you know, or racist. And I would just say to them that was a very racist thing to say. They never liked that of course and I would tease them, you know, and I would, you know, say all kinds of things to just provoke conversation. And they would say things to you as well.
They would say things like Dr. Hodges used to say, “Well, you might be sitting there as someone of African descent, but you’re the one of the whitest people I’ve ever known.” And I said, “No, you’re just talking about my education and my manner of speaking, but I am not exempt from, you know, the paternalistic racist treatment.” And I have encountered lots of that, or I have things like one missionary on the compound that said, “I don’t even see color and I wish you would stop teaching our children about that. I think you’re the one who’s prejudiced and racist.” And I said, “No, it’s not that I’m teaching them anything negative. I’m just preparing them. You grew up in mid America as a privileged white woman who is now raising two black children.”
And this is a reality that they need to be prepared for, and they need to be prepared for it in a way that doesn’t undermine their self-esteem. And the other children that are of white descent need to understand that everyone lives and experiences the world differently. And sometimes, because of the color of your skin or the language you speak or for some other reason, you may experience a much harsher reality than others. And they need to be aware of that. And I think it’s only fair for me to share that. But I didn’t, I tried at least not to do it in a negative way.
But there were times and moments, you know, when, you know, I had to say that, “Listen, if we were living in the United States right now, we would not be friends. We would not be members of the same church. Our churches are segregated, and our churches are… You know, we would not be experiencing this. So let’s take this as an opportunity to really be the people of God. And, you know, because that is more clearly, you know, what we have the opportunity to do here and we don’t become the people of God by you forcing me to behave like you all because you have accepted me that somehow I have to act like you, or think like you. And I’m not forcing you to act or think like me either.”
We have to, at some point, accept one another and recognize that we’re all made in the image of God and that image is very, very colorful. And many of your church members at home are gonna be surprised to get to heaven and find out that there are awful lot of black and brown people there.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. And that savior complex also, it seems to me, it didn’t involve gaining, it involved giving. And you used the words give and to gain, and it seems to me that it was mostly a very one-sided… We are here to give those poor impoverished people. Yeah.
Suzette: Well, I try to make it clear to them that you’ve gained an awful lot. Number one, you’ve gained a lot of power. I mean, you already had power when you can, but you have absolute power in this context. You had given or dug wells for all these people. They are beholden to you for the services you provide, you remind them all the time, you know, that you have superior position in God’s eye because the God that you know and the Christianity that you’re sharing with them. But you fail to realize that they have made you rich in experiences. They have made you rich even monetarily sometimes.
So you are gaining and you need to recognize that you would not be the famous doctor or the famous whatever without your experiences here in Haiti. You would just be an ordinary church member, you know, a bookkeeper, or a nurse in any hospital in America. And so you need to recognize that, you know, you’re gaining a whole lot more than you’re giving. At least, I always saw myself in that way. I learned and gained a whole lot more than I gave in that situation. And I think we have to approach it that way. I think that’s the blessing.
Interviewer: Absolutely. And I’m gonna pick up on something you said about being beholden to my parents. As I mentioned earlier, my parents were missionaries in Paraguay, and we were constantly shown deference even though by American standards we were quite poor, but compared to the poverty around us, we had so much. And then at the other extreme, there were the really wealthy Paraguayans. And I felt like such a backwards hick around them.
And so the, you know, the divide gets really complicated by all of these social and cultural issues. I’m wondering, Suzette, just to take this a little further, how have you helped short-term mission groups? And I would say particularly rich white people, who wanna serve the poor, rethink their assumptions about themselves in relation to those they serve. What that you’ve done that has broken through some of those false assumptions?
Suzette: Well, we have some really good resources now. Things that I was saying and sharing and experiencing way back when people had the smarts to begin to write down and document those experiences. And so we have some really good resources if people are willing to use them. Unfortunately, because of Haiti’s proximity to the United States, people just usually buy their plane tickets, order their t-shirts and just hop on the plane and go once they have a contact.
But, you know, when I was approached through the organizations that I worked with, I always had some extensive time of interviewing and talking with the leadership. And one of the things I would recommend, recently, is a book, you know, “When Helping Hurts” or for mission groups, there’s a book, a follow up to that called, “Helping Without Hurting,” which actually does some very basic sort of cultural and cross-cultural understandings of different world views, which is very, very helpful. And I think they even have, you know, workbooks.
So I would number one suggest that. The second thing I would suggest to them as I would ask them about where they live and what kind of cross-cultural experiences they’d had, didn’t have to be with Haitians. But one group I remember contacted me and they wanted to come three months later, they didn’t even have their passports because none of them had ever traveled outside of the country. In fact, many of them had not even been outside the state that they lived in. And so one of the things I explained to them is that the very experience of traveling internationally gives you skills that you really need.
So one, they didn’t have passports and two, I asked them if they lived in a city that had people of other backgrounds, and they did. I can’t remember now the city, it was, or the town, it was a small town near a large city, or mid-sized city. But they had a Spanish-speaking population, they had a black population. And then I said, “Are there black members or brown members of your church?” He said, “No.” I said, “Is there a neighboring ethnic church?” “Well, yeah.” I said, “Do you do anything even once a year with that church, or do you have after school programs that include those children. Do you have a high school ministry?” “Yes.” I said, “Well, do you have any black or brown children in your high school group?” “No.”
I said, “So basically all of your interactions for the most part, most of your life, and I’m not even concerned about the past, but right now are with other people just like you?” “Yes.” And I said, “But you want to come to Haiti and experience for your first time being in a group of people who are the different background, racial, language, everything?” I said even if you had ever been in a Spanish-speaking sermon or service, I said give me something. I said, “Do you ever go to a homeless shelter and share, do you?” “No, no, no.” And I said, “I’m gonna just say there are some work that you need to do before you consider coming to Haiti.” So, I said, “Go back to your group. Why don’t you take a look at this book first? And well, first apply for your passports, and then please do that ‘When Helping Hurts’ study and then contact me.”
And about a month later, the leader called me back and she said, “Suzette, I think you’re right, I don’t think we’re ready yet. We’re gonna do… There is a homeless shelter not far from us,” and something else you mentioned about a camp or something like that. She said, “I think we need to give ourselves more experiences, more cross-cultural experiences.” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” I said, “Because the skills whether you’re crossing, you know, a language barrier, whether you’re crossing, you know, economic differences, you know, you learned certain skills. And I hope that you have learned from that book some of the things that we bring with us that we need to lay down, and the things that we need to be open to learning about other people. It’s not just a matter of ‘I’m superior, I’m going, I’m gonna give. I would have more money.'” And so I really had a great deal of respect for them. Now there are other groups that just decide they know better than I do, when they come here. [Inaudible 00:23:46]
Interviewer: There will always be those. Just so our listeners know, the two books will be referenced in the show notes, so we will make it available for people to order them who are interested.
Suzette: Wonderful.
Interviewer: So, Apricot, you are 9 years old, you’ve got crazy wild red hair, and you are on this compound in Haiti, how do you, as a kid, not the adult Apricot but the kid, makes sense of the social and economic divides that we’re talking about?
Apricot: Well, I think one of the things that I’m learning even now in this conversation is the kind of conversations that we’re happening at the adult level that I simply wasn’t aware as a kid. What I do remember is the way Suzette would take us outside the walls of the compound to see and experience things in Haiti, that it was not a relationship of us coming and with our benevolence to give in any sort of condescending way. It was going out as students to learn from our community.
I remember, Suzette, you took us to see a place in town where they’re making aluminum pots. And they would make the mold in the sand and then pour the steaming molten metal in, and watch it form, and harden, and then dump it out. We went and visited the Coca Cola factory on the side of [inaudible 00:25:17] where they’re taking sugar cane and the sugar factory. And I remember that, like, now, I’m looking back, and then I can see how it was helping in these unspoken but really hugely foundational ways to help us understand how much we had to learn from the place we were in, and trying to get us outside of the walls. These really narrow walls behind which we did tend to posture ourselves as having superior knowledge, superior resources.
And I think that there is a way that even as a child 7 to 9, in those early years, there is a discomfort at having to step into that role of your little golden crown, the benevolence that you have to wear balanced on your head and that sense of being, of performing for an outside audience. And there’s a lot of moments where, even as a kid, as a missionary kid, I remember feeling that dissonance between how I was supposed to portray myself, and who I actually knew myself to be. Because we were supposed to be modeling Christianity for people, which is such an absurd idea, because really, we were modeling in the context of the Haitian Baptist Church, which we would walk through once a week on Sundays, among other fellow Christians.
But, yeah, I remember distinctly that sense of being on display, of having to model something for people, and yet knowing, when I was at home, I was the one pulling my sister’s hair or kicking or like just being a kid, obnoxious, starved for attention, wanting to like fight back. So that bizarre, again, gap between what I was supposed to be and who I was, which is a messy ordinary kid.
Interviewer: Yeah. And you speak of yourself as unmistakably a missionary’s daughter and a recovering missionary’s daughter.
Apricot: Yes, I know.
Interviewer: So what are some of the most important legacies of having been in MK, a missionary kid, for you?
Apricot: I think a positive legacy and Suzette and I talked about this. Because Suzette grew up as a military kid moving from place to place and just landing in one culture, a different language suddenly seeing the world from a different angle is just how very complex the world is. And I think that’s a great gift to be given as a kid. It can be difficult to navigate, but I do really value and appreciate that multiple perspectives is my assumption about the world that we can look through things from many angles and learn a different truth depending on whatever angle we’re looking through to see a situation or a story.
And I think the more negative side of the legacy of missionary though that I feel like I’m recovering from is that sense of taking responsibility for things that are not mine to be responsible for. And, you know, we centered ourselves as the heroes of the story in our newsletters, in the stories we tell to our supporters back in the states, as if it was our destiny to save Haiti. And I really deeply believe now and understand that a place like Haiti, any community, it doesn’t need a rescue mission. It needs respect, collaboration, what can we learn from each other. But I think that recovery aspect for me is to clearly distinguish between mistaken certainties of my childhood where I thought that there was a burden on me to be a hero. And now, thankfully, learning more and more each year, the humility with which I can move through the world instead which is how much I have to learn.
Interviewer: And how freeing is that, right?
Apricot: Oh, it’s so freeing, and much better.
Suzette: And much better.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Apricot and Suzette, you both share my own confusion about where I really belonged if you as kids of missionaries or military were really third culture kids. There’s a book by Pollock and Van Reken. And you’ve read it? Okay. So the book is “Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds.” And basically, third culture kids are kids who grew up living outside of their parents’ home culture, and often experiencing a lot of moves. And there’s a lot of good that goes with that as you just said, Apricot, but there’s also a rootlessness and restlessness. A home is everywhere, but it’s also nowhere. So maybe each of you could speak briefly about that experience of rootlessness.
Suzette: I am Suzette growing up in a military family. I was in the sixth grade before I ever spent one complete academic year in one school. That’s how much we moved. Sometimes, it was moving from state-to-state and once you got there you were in temporary housing and then you went to where you were gonna spend the rest of the time you were there, or father’s assignment changed. But at any rate, my parents gave me a great gift that prepared me for life and it helped me with our children and our moves.
They define home as, and this is what they said, home is the place wherever we are all together. That is our home. Our home is where we are all together and as a unit. And that was really, really important. And I remember the first move that was really negative about. We were gonna be moving from Colorado to California. And I had a deep set of friends and, you know, things were settled and it’s like, you know, “Oh, finally.” And I remember complaining to my mom and saying, “You know, I don’t wanna move. I don’t wanna leave all my friends.” And my mom says, “Well, how many bestest friends do you have now?” And I said,” I have three really, really best friends. Well, there’s more, but at least three of my very, very best.”
And she said, “Okay, that’s great.” She said, “Do you think, they’ll stay your best friends and as good friends?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “Well, okay, if we moved to California, do you think you’ll make at least three new friends?” And I said, “Sure.” And she said, “Well, in that case then you’ll have three that you left behind that you’ll remain friends with, and you’ll have three new ones. Three plus three is six. If we stay in Colorado, you’ll just have three. If you’ll move to Colorado, you’ll get six.”
And so that made a lot of sense to me at the time, but my parents who are very good at… And I think some of that is the insulation that you have to have as a not only were we in the military, but my father was a black man in the military, in a computer field which was dominated by whites. And so, you know, there was…we were in one culture and then there was a sub-culture. My parents always made sure that we found a black church. They really worked hard at creating family wherever we were, and then reinforcing that idea. If all of us are together, we were home, we’re just, we’re home. And so that became my definition, and it has served me very, very well.
Interviewer: Yeah, and it’s amazing. What about you Apricot?
Apricot: I think it took me longer to find an answer to that. I love the statement that your parents gave you, Suzette. I think that’s really beautiful, and I think I’ll want to use that on my boys. I think, for me, I moved schools 10 times before I graduate from high school. So, that was also very itinerant jumping around from place to place. And I think, you know, I went back to Haiti a few years ago with my sons and I think even at that time, I felt like I didn’t have a clear answer for myself of where is home. It’s strange watching them go through the world with such clarity around it.
We have lived in Oregon for most of their lives even though we lived outside of the U.S., Oregon to them is home. And I felt such, maybe envy, maybe dislocation sadness. When we were in Haiti flying back into the U.S., and I felt like I was leaving a home, leaving Haiti, and not fully coming home re-entering the U.S. even, you know, in my 40s. And then it was some months later, I was with a friend and I was thinking about where do I belong? And I realized, for me, my answer is I belong to this earth. I belong to all the trees and all the rivers, and all this natural world that we all belong to together.
I mean, it’s a deeper sense of belonging for me than a nation state or with a boundary, and require passport to move across it. And my personal story is fairly migratory. But I did the DNA test in the last couple years, and realized that going back through the matrilineal line, my ancestors have always been quite migratory for the last 10,000 years beginning in Africa, and then moving up into Europe, and then across the Scandinavian countries, and now into this continent. And so, it kind of helps ground it for me to reach way back in time, and realize that my people are the same as all of us, that we all belong to this earth and that’s enough of an answer for me now, I think.
Interviewer: Well, that’s some pretty strong rootedness. That’s wonderful. So my mother published a happy family journal very much like yours, Apricot.
Apricot: Interesting.
Interviewer: We took happy family photos like you did. We were paraded on to stages to sing happy songs. And it’s just amazing how many similarities there were. And then that whole thing about underneath all of that happy veneer there was often so much sorrow and anger. And my question, Apricot is, why do you think this sort of positive veneer, I know it exists elsewhere, but why does it seem more prevalent in missionary families? Do you have thoughts about that?
Apricot: I remember 20 years ago when I was first studying to research and write this book, talking with a friend about missionary newsletters, and that strangeness of needing to present oneself, tell the glory story to keep the funding coming. And she had not grown up in any sort of background similar to that and so she was really startled by it. Now, jump forward now to the present, social media, we’re all presenting ourselves in this kind of glory light, able to change the filter, able to tell a story about ourselves. It’s very curated, very careful, and that can be very misleading. So I think that missionaries had access to that kind of, like, self-presentation 20 years ago that most ordinary people didn’t, but now we all have a [inaudible 00:37:30].
Interviewer: Ahead of the curve, right?
Apricot: And we’re all doing it. And I feel that self-consciousness in myself now in regards to social media. I never want to give the impression that I have it all together, because it places a ridiculous burden on everyone around me, as well as myself, to compare, to contrast, to feel either envy or contempt. And none of those are helpful emotions to really become better humans. So it could be make the world more just and more beautiful. And I think that it can be hard when you’re trying to summarize yourself in any context to add enough dimensions, enough complexity to it, to balance the positive and negative. It’s hard to tell those stories about ourselves. It’s far easier to leave the complicated things out, and maybe, if someone were telling a story about someone we don’t like, to leave the positive thing is out, to really craft those story.
Suzette: I think it was really important that, you know, my husband and I went at a time when the whole enterprise was professionalizing. Because we had a very realistic view that those stories and those, all of that was an effort to raise money. There’s a business aspect of it, it was financial. And there is the need for many in the early days, it was to tell the story and to touch people’s hearts to get more people involved. But again, it was for fundraising purposes. But I think, it was so important to the missionary to have the spiritual dynamic of it that it wasn’t a mission that they were doing or we were doing something, you know, above and beyond.
It wasn’t just an ordinary enterprise, because it had this Godly aspect. But it was about raising money. I mean, you know, by the time, we came along and came into it, it was very clear that, you know, it had a financial component. And without that financial component, you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t do these things. But the stories of the early missionaries that actually, you know, were giving up their lives, they would go and they would live there, you know, for the rest of their lives. There wasn’t a back and forth kind of thing. So I agree with Apricot that, you know, having access to almost your own sort of social media at the time was there. But I never lost sight of the fact that there was a financial component to it. And without that, you were not gonna be in that position.
Interviewer: I love the two perspectives that you’re raising, each of you. One of you, that we were really ahead of the curve in terms of social media, and then the perspective of, it was all about raising money. It was a business. I mean, it’s wonderful. Apricot, you were going to say something.
Apricot: Yeah. So for part of my research, I read through all the newsletters that my parents had collected over the years from all the people that came to the compound and our own newsletters, other people’s. And I remember, Suzette, you didn’t go for the typical narrative arc. I mean, there were beautiful stories that you told like getting [inaudible 00:40:55] to go with you for Christmas I think it was, with your family, and the last-minute passport. But there wasn’t that note of the savior complex in quite the same way which really changed it.
Suzette: I saw myself as there to tell stories of the people who live there like it’s to tell our story, it’s this person’s story. You know, it’s the child in the hospital. You know, that I wasn’t there to tell my stories, you know, because, you know, whether it was people in Haiti or whether it was people in the Congo or whether it’s people in Haiti again now or in Mali where I live. I always wrote about the Malian people, you know, and I usually talk to them or it was usually an experience I had with them. And they gave me perspective on something that, you know, was really important and I was sharing that perspective with people, you know, that were following me or that were supporting me.
Because I never got the idea that, well, I guess, I just didn’t ever feel like a savior, I never got the idea that people wanted to hear about me. I mean, because I thought they wanted to hear about the Malian people. Because they couldn’t see what I could see and so I was their eyes, and I was sharing with them, you know, or I was sharing, you know, what Nema [SP] was explaining about being a woman in Mali or being a handicapped girl in Haiti, what that meant to have one eye, one arm, one leg. So that was, again that perspective, you know, I think I was blessed to already live in a world that had many different points of view. So I always kind of look at the world that way, it’s, you know, I’m not experiencing it the same way as this other person is. So that was kind of, yeah, my thing, I think most of mine are stories about other people.
Apricot: Even in recent years, I remember, it stands out how you’ll talk about after a flood or hurricane in Haiti or after the earthquake. The stories of people that you know that are reaching out to care for their neighbors or just quiet ordinary moments, a young man helping elder to cross the flooding streets, like, these are really beautiful moments of pointing us to what you see people doing and demonstrating and living in a way that is alive.
Suzette: Well, yeah, hopefully.
Interviewer: Yeah, let’s take the whole perception of God’s work maybe even a step further. When you interviewed Ken, I believe it was Ken, the former missionary from the ag center? And he said, and I wrote this in the margins, “The whole mystique of missionary service, the more you sacrificed, the more you destroyed your family, meant that you were even more respected for what you’d done for God. It proved you were unafraid. You didn’t count the cost.” I have to tell you that when I read that, it took my breath away. It’s such a critical condemnation of missionaries, but I see some truth in it in retrospect regarding even my own family. I’m wondering, beginning with you, Apricot, could you comment on this, and your experience of that?
Apricot: Yeah. Well, this was an interview I did with someone who is essentially my parent’s age. I knew his son and daughter and this was after he left the mission field, been really broken by that experience. In many ways, he himself had been a missionary kid, and then served as a missionary, an agricultural missionary like my father. And to hear that grief in his voice. He was sent away to boarding school, which is an experience I never had. There were losses that he had experienced that I didn’t know. But there was that echo in his words in my body of, “Oh, I remember that ache of feeling like, ‘Do I matter? Is my parents cause more important to them than my sisters and I?'” And I think that’s a common thread in all the interviews that I’ve done with missionary kids that that question is a haunted one for many of us.
Interviewer: Yeah. My dad’s calling always seemed to come first. In fact, my new book, “Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness” traces the long very bumpy journey toward reconciling with my father. Suzette…
Apricot: Yeah, and I…
Interviewer: Go ahead.
Apricot: If I can just say one more thing, the writing of the book was very much a dialogue with my parents, and particularly with my father. I decided to give him the opportunity to give me feedback along the way and so it really negotiate the exact phrasing of sentences. We didn’t always agree, but I really wanted to make sure that I was representing him accurately as best as I could. And there were moments where I learned things, learned regrets, for example, of his that I’ve never known and probably wouldn’t have known without going through this process of listening to each other.
I was fortunate that he’s still alive and that he was very willing to engage in this process with me. And I remember particularly one paragraph, right, kind of as a joke made a comment about how my father must be so disappointed, none of the three missionary daughters continued the cause, you know, we’re a writer and the chemist, a mathematician, and like now the grandsons of the only hope. And my dad said, “No that’s not true, I was never disappointed in you. I’m very proud of who you each have become, and I never wanted you to become like me.” And I never knew that. So it’s this moment of learning as an adult that I had misunderstood him, and misinterpreted some of those assumptions that I made about him as a father and what he expected of us.
Interviewer: Yeah. And for our listeners, Apricot’s beautiful book moves back and forth between the perspective of herself as a child, and then the point of view of an adult. Why did you choose to write it from both perspectives?
Apricot: Well, I think I wanted to portray the complexity of it all. How it is possible as a little kid to enter a place like Haiti and just be mesmerized by the brightly-colored [inaudible 00:47:59] and the life and vitality in like, “Oh, my gosh, this is the best place on earth. There’s lizards on their ceilings. Like, wow, I love this.” And then to come back to the same place as a teenager, resentful, so angry to be the missionary daughter that’s on display and so much tension with my father, really hating the cause that he devoted himself to, really like just despising the whole thing and, “Why am I even here?” And then, as an adult to come back to the same place in and same father, and same missionary compound and see it in a different light. And hear regrets from people that I would have never guessed that as a teenager.
Interviewer: And the book really captures that complexity. One of the themes that I’d felt ran through the entire book, in fact, you asked several times in different ways in the book, “What’s the point of trying if in the end it will be a losing battle?” Suzette, starting with you, I’d love for each of you to touch on that briefly, what’s the point if in the end it will be a losing battle?
Suzette: Well, the point is the journey, the point is in the try. We are not God, and I think when we only see ourselves in winning and losing and goal and meeting objectives and things like that, we’re missing the whole point. I think a lot of what, or at least for me, my faith, is in the relationship that’s what’s key. I feel like Jesus over, and over, and over stressed relationship. You know, his relationship is walking with his disciples, his being with the people, his beatitudes, all of that isn’t really so much about just that.
I mean, all of the stories were not all about healing and succeeding. The stories are about obedience, or about the walk, or about, you know, the richness of being in relationship with God and also sharing that relationship with other people. And I don’t mean sharing it in terms of you have to believe my way, I mean, just, you know, coming to a place where we can see God in other people, see God in… You know, I think you really miss it if you go and live for years in a place like Haiti, and you don’t see God. Because you don’t see the number of congregants grow, you know, I think you missed the whole point.
And so I think that to me, that’s just the whole thing. So much happens on the way, you know, that we can’t ignore that. Even the stories in the Bible of Jesus so much happens on his way from Jerusalem to Bethany, you know, or many of the other places. So I just have always appreciated the journey, and I don’t know if it’s because…well, I never thought about it in terms of it’s hopeless. I mean, gosh, if I don’t have hope, I mean, to me, there’s no life without hope. So I’ve never been in a hopeless place.
And there are no people that are hopeless or disposable. But I think that’s the difference in coming from a view of power and view of powerlessness. When you already know that you don’t have any power, you know, and that that all you have and everything you are is because of God, you know, because of many forces outside of yourself. I think that helps you to begin to see the beauty in all of the little things and in all of the journey. So to me, it’s not so much, you know, that you’ve arrived, it’s all the things you learned along the way.
Interviewer: Yeah. Apricot, what’s your answer today to that question that you asked?
Apricot: Well, I’m a mother of two boys. And I want so much to be a good mother, and I know that I fail at that every day. And that’s okay, like, I’m still trying to get better at that work of being alongside them, working out conflict together. Yes, I got frustrated and yelled, and they got sad and then there’s the going back in repairing what we broke between us and learning from it. So I think I grew up with this notion of aiming for perfection, and I think I’m trying to set that aside, and saying that there’s so many things that I devote myself to that, maybe, I am doomed to fail to be a really good mom, to love this earth and try my best to protect this planet from destructing, you know, to tell stories about things that are beautiful and complicated and hard. And it’s okay if there is mess along the way, it’s okay if there is imperfection as long as I’m continually learning and continually trying to enjoy it, I guess.
Suzette: Right. Are we really responsible for the outcomes or are we responsible for what we’ve been asked to do?
Interviewer: Right, great question. Great question.
Apricot: Yeah. And Suzette, you had a beautiful answer to the earlier question of yours, Marlena, about sacrificing and maybe your child bearing the brunt of that. As a missionary mother yourself, you answered that question really clearly for your kids.
Suzette: Yes. Well, we just felt like and shared with them that if God indeed called me or my husband knowing we have children or gonna have children, He called them as well. So we were a family, it wasn’t an add-on, they weren’t add-ons. They were an essential part, you know, of what we are doing. And so their wellbeing… And I think, you know, being a teacher on the mission compound, I got to move between the children and their parents, seeing pain on both sides. Because I think many times the parents were horrified that they maybe made a mistake, that maybe I’m asking too much of my children. They lived in fear as well. I mean, I remember having a lot of good discussions with, you know, with parents other than the hardened ones that are like, “You know, just suck up and bear it,” and, you know, that kind of thing.
But, in general, you know, there was fear and misunderstanding sometimes on both sides, and it was great to be able to hear that. And I learned so much from those missionary children, so that by the time we had children on the field, you know, I understood how important to be inclusive. And that it was to be not inclusive in a way that they had to do the horse and pony show and perform, but that they had something…
Interviewer: We’re both laughing.
Suzette: …but that they had some say. In fact, when they were old enough to really participate, we had a vote about, “Should be take this assignment and go to this place?” And what it might mean for them, you know, and, “Are you in, or are you…? You know, what do you say? Because, you know, we’re a family.” And we voted and we went to Mali. And after three years, and the contract was offered again. We sat down with the kids again to have another vote. And one of our middle child said, “I voted to come, I voted yes. And it’s been okay, I made friends, but I don’t like it here, I don’t want to come back. And so I vote no this time.”
And so he said, “I didn’t say anything, because I voted to come.” So basically, he was saying I voted yes, so I made the most of it, but I know what’s in store. I’d do not vote for this again. And we had to honor that. So, you know, we had three yeses and, you know, his no, and we didn’t go back. And he recognized that we heard him, you know, and that was important.
Interviewer: Apricot, that must land someplace interesting for you. Because you had votes but I don’t think that counted as much.
Apricot: It was the opposite ratio. We’ve had the family vote and it’s four against… And my father really, really wanted to go back, so we went back.
Interviewer: Exactly what I was thinking about.
Apricot: I have a 12 and 14-year-old now, and for the last few years, I’ve just been agitating, “Can we please pick up and move again to another country?” And we have long conversations, and we have been fortunate to take short trips to visit friends in other countries and cultures. And I’ve been really, really, really trying to persuade them all. And the family votes are three against and one for. And there is everything in me that wants to just strong arm everyone into going. And then I think I can’t do it. I can’t, you know, repeat that story.
Suzette: Just because you had that experience. You know how that feels.
Apricot: Yeah. So, I’d never do that.
Interviewer: I have to tell you, I have so many questions left that I wanted to ask, but we are running out of time. So I’m going to now ask each of you. Suzette, I’ll start with you, if there were one last thing that you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?
Suzette: Be your authentic self, be you. You don’t have to… When you’re trying to be someone else or live up to someone else’s expectations, you’re gonna run into problems. But if you are your authentic self with all of your glory and warts, and problems, and whatever, people respond to that cross-culturally. It’s only when we’re trying to be something else or, you know, I know sometimes you wanna be our best selves and so we put on airs or we do different things. But if you can remember, I feel to just I want you to know that I’ve always tried to be my authentic self, so that when I have to repent for something or I’m sorry for something, you know, I can show that emotion. And I can go back and try to repair it, or recognize that, oh, I’ve done irreparable damage, you know.
But by being myself and being honest with myself, you know, I’ve been able to grow and learn and heal. Because there are, you know, there’s pain involved. But I think it’s when we are our authentic selves, no matter how we look, if we seem vulnerable, I think we need to take power out of the equation and just be ourselves is the very best advice I can give anyone facing a challenge.
Interviewer: Apricot, any last words.
Apricot: I want to just affirm that I having known Suzette since I was 7 years old, but she has always been that person that I’ve looked to. Like, this is a human being fully alive. I wanna be fully alive in light of the joy that that brings to be just in the presence of someone like that. I think for me, you know, so much of writing this book was moving back towards history, situations, relationships that I felt a lot of fear of to really have these hard conversations with my dad. So many people that as a teenager I had disliked or felt afraid of, older missionaries, even, you know, other missionary kids that I didn’t know how to read what they were going through. And understand what they were…the perspective they were coming from.
And so, what I learned more than anything in the writing of this is that if we move towards the things that we’re afraid of, then we will very often find them changed, and ourselves changed in the process. That what we imagined those things to be, those people to be is different than what they actually are. And that has so many different applications. I mean, I think, right now, as a white woman and just this moment where we’re becoming keenly aware of privilege and the high cost of it society-wise on ourselves, on skin color, that there is a discomfort in facing those realities, that history, that present reality. But, on the other side of that, even if it feels fearful and terrifying and uncomfortable right now, on the other side of that is life, is being able to have relationships that are hopefully more free of some of these hidden deeply unjust dynamics.
And the same with relationships, like with my father, I’m so grateful to have come out the other side of this long journey of writing this book, and facing this history. I did not like him, I did not let him walk me down the aisle when I got married. There was so much tension between us, and that tension isn’t completely gone now. But I feel like I’ve been able to listen and see who he is in a way that I never would have. And the fear that I felt is changed into something far more nuanced and like I feel like I’ve learned to see him and so many others. That’s my hope that we move towards that things we’re afraid of.
Interviewer: Wonderful. This has been such a rich conversation. Suzette and Apricot, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Interesting look at the multiple slides of well-intentioned missionary work.