Missions on the Frontline
a ministry of WorldVenture
Third Culture Kids Unpacked
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SHOW SUMMARY Sheryl O'Bryan TCK Coordinator defines and unpacks the amazing world of the TCK (Third Culture Kids) and why our world is a much better place because of them.SHOW NOTES MOF_2010_03_03_OBryan-web_nvr.mp3 |
TRANSCRIPT |
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SHERYL O'BRYAN: Hi.
HANS FINZEL: Sheryl is with WorldVenture and has been with us since 1988 so she’s a 20-year veteran and Sheryl’s responsibility is the care and feeding and nurturing of our kids, right?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: How many, uh, I didn’t prep you on this but how many kids do we have in the mission?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We have over 500 kids under the age of 24.
HANS FINZEL: Wow! Five hundred kids under the age of 24. So that’s about… We have a little over 500 missionaries so that’s about 1 to 1.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: It kind of evens out, yeah.
HANS FINZEL: Yeah. That’s a lot of kids and what we want to talk about… Uh, Sheryl, what’s your title?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: My title is Third Culture Kid Coordinator. It doesn’t mean I make them dress the same.
HANS FINZEL: And why… Let’s just start… Let’s begin at the beginning. Why do we call our missionary kids Third Culture Kids?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I think the term Third Culture Kids very much describes who they are; not who their parents are. Because they’re not necessarily missionaries, although some of them are great missionaries and are great ambassadors for Christ. Um, they are Third Culture Kids. They are not the product of their passport culture where their parents are from. They are not necessarily uniquely a product of the country they grew up in or the countries they grew up in. You get this interesting meld of cultures and it doesn’t matter if someone is an American passport holder who has grown up in Kenya or a Nigerian passport holder who has grown up in Brazil. They have commonalities that help them create this third culture.
HANS FINZEL: Okay. Very good and we’re going to talk about some of those commonalities in the Third Culture Kids. We at WorldVenture take our kids very seriously and that’s why Sheryl is full-time working with our children because you know we believe happy, well-adjusted families are going to be successful missionaries.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Very much.
HANS FINZEL: Have you done any studies on how many of our missionaries that are adult career, long-termers [who] were…grew up as Third Culture Kids?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I haven’t.
HANS FINZEL: But do you have any feel for that?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I… we have quite a number of our own WorldVenture kids who have grown up and have come back with WorldVenture.
HANS FINZEL: Yeah. And I think across the industry of missions a lot of… Third Culture Kids do make great missionaries because they are trans-cultural.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: They do. They have the skills to move cross-culturally whether it’s going back to their own culture or going to another culture; they know how to adapt, how to observe, how to learn cross-culturally.
HANS FINZEL: Let’s start with your own story. Where did you grow up Sheryl?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I grew up in New York.
HANS FINZEL: New York! A New Yorker.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I’m a New Yorker, yeah.
HANS FINZEL: But you lost the accent.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Aw, yeah, sometimes.
HANS FINZEL: And you joined WorldVenture in 1988 and became part of our cause of sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ around the world. What motivated you to become a missionary yourself?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Well, my parents had brought me up with missionaries in our home all the time. Whenever a missionary came to our church they stayed in our home. And that helped grow a love of cultures and what God was doing in my heart. In fact, um, whenever one of the WorldVenture Church Connections Directors would come to visit, they would always say, “So, where are you going to send Sheryl?” And then after I graduated from college I went to Urbana [Mission Conference] and was really, really impressed with the fact that I had no good reason to stay in America -- that there was nothing tying me; that God couldn’t use me somewhere else. So I started applying and WorldVenture was, of course, one of my first choices for applying to see where God could use me.
HANS FINZEL: And then where did you begin? Even though now you’ve been at the home office for a number of years, you started off as a field missionary in Cote d’Ivoire. What was your ministry assignment there?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I started out teaching high school social studies and that turned into becoming, eventually, the high school english and social studies Chair at a boarding school for missionary kids
HANS FINZEL: And you were there for how long?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I was there just over 10 years.
HANS FINZEL: Yeah, and you know we like to say following God is filled with surprises and you were thrown a pretty major curve while you were happily there at the International Christian Academy. What happened to sort of change everything in your life?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Well, we woke up one morning to gun fire. Um, a [military] coup had started in the country and there were rebels and government forces fighting each other and within about a day they wound up using – both sides – using us as a shield at the school. We were the shield for both forces and there were bullets flying everywhere and eventually the French military came and evacuated us.
HANS FINZEL: So you were evacuated out of there and um, I always say the number one key to being a successful missionary is flexibility. And you all really had to flex. You left but didn’t you go back again? Weren’t you evacuated twice or were you not part of the second evacuation?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We… Actually there were three evacuations.
HANS FINZEL: Oh, okay.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Before the big evacuation seven years ago, we had a smaller evacuation where we shut the school and I was involved in that first one.
HANS FINZEL: Okay.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: By the third one I was already here in Littleton and working with Third Culture Kids around the world, not just in West Africa.
HANS FINZEL: Right. You know that was a traumatic experience for you. What are some take always from living through that experience? We’re going to talk in a moment about grief and loss and that’s one thing missionary kids have to deal with a lot.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Very much.
HANS FINZEL: But for you, you had to deal with the loss of your ministry; your place of assignment.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: It, it was a great loss. I lost my community. I lost my home. I lost everything that I couldn’t carry out in a carry-on bag.
HANS FINZEL: Really? So you lost all your “stuff”?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Yeah, all my “stuff” was gone.
HANS FINZEL: Oh boy.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: But I think one of the big lessons from that is that it is just “stuff”. The people I cared most about were safe and I got to come back to safety. And I did get to go back to Cote d’Ivoire and go through a few of my things that were left and parceled them out to different people who were still there. So there were a lot of lessons learned. Um, I think one of the biggest ones was that you can always be thankful and my International Ministries Director, Glenn Kendall, when I came back, he challenged me to find five things every day to be thankful for.
HANS FINZEL: Wow.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: And I’m still working on that exercise but it does help put life in perspective when you can find things to be thankful for.
HANS FINZEL: Amen. That’s a great spirit to have. Uh, it’s been said that when God closes a door he opens a window and I’m glad that, uh, through that whole experience you were displaced and you came here to the home office. Now you’re involved all over the world, like you said, not just in Africa but working with kids. As I mentioned at the beginning of the program WorldVenture works actually in close to 70 countries now, so we’ve got kids everywhere. Let’s talk about some of the specific issues related to Third Culture Kids. Let’s start with education because there’s still… What are people’s pre-conceived notions about missionary kids being educated?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I think some of the preconceptions are that everybody goes to boarding school. Which is not true. Um, I think another idea that people have if they don’t have the first one is that education around the world is just like it is here in America. And it’s really not.
HANS FINZEL: Yeah, that’s true. It is really not. America has a very unique public education system. What are some of the differences, just between education in America? I know every country is different but what are some of the broad stroke differences?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Some of the broad stroke differences are simply class size. In Africa, for example, it’s not unusual to have a class of 60 or 70.
HANS FINZEL: Wow.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We complain about 35 in a class which can be a legitimate complaint but 60 or 70 kids is a lot to have in one class without any aides or helpers.
HANS FINZEL: And they are also often not just one level, one grade level.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: They’re multi-graded.
HANS FINZEL: Multi-grade levels.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Right. That’s one thing. Another thing, many education systems are shame-based where you’re beaten down because only the cream will rise in that kind of situation. So that can, for some kids that’s… they are fine with that because they rise to the challenge and other children are just defeated by it.
HANS FINZEL: Perhaps some of you are listening to this program and you’re thinking of considering missions in the future and we want to share with you that there’s a wide variety of options. What are some of them?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: There are a huge number of options. There’s missionary boarding school, of course. There are national schools and some of them are great. Um, there’s also cyberschool.
HANS FINZEL: Cyberschool?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Cyberschool.
HANS FINZEL: Hmm.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: There are a number of different schools that are on-line schools. They are usually for upper elementary or junior high and high school. Um, but they allow kids to stay at home to interact with other kids on-line if they can have Internet access. And to learn and to interact with teachers. Some actually do video conferencing so you’re in a classroom and you can see the teacher teaching and you can electronically raise your hand.
HANS FINZEL: Wow.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Others are just… You work at your own pace within a parameter set up by the teacher and you get things done. There are third-country schools so you can be an American living in Europe going to a Japanese school, for example.
HANS FINZEL: There are international schools, too…
SHERYL O'BRYAN: International schools, definitely.
HANS FINZEL: …there are American schools all over the world, British schools. Ah, there’s also homeschooling.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Homeschool is huge.
HANS FINZEL: How many of our missionaries do homeschooling?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: About 30% of our missionaries homeschool or use some component of homeschool. About 30% homeschool exclusively. There are others who homeschool in conjunction with national school or in conjunction with cyberschool or some other option so that their children can learn American history and can learn English well to read and write if their goal is for them is to return to university here in the United States.
HANS FINZEL: And people in America are doing that, too. They’re doing the hybrid homeschooling where their kid might go to an actual brick and mortar school one day a week.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Right.
HANS FINZEL: Also, there have been clusters. I know we have missionaries that actually teach clusters of kids, don’t they?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We do. We have some…
HANS FINZEL: Do you have a name for that model?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Well, there are different models with that. Some of them are satellite schools. For example, Morrison Academy in Taiwan has a number of satellite schools. If they have two families, I believe, they’ll send a teacher and curriculum to that area where those children are and they’ll provide schooling for them. And we have other places where we have a tutor who comes and works with kids and they’ll move on to another area and then come back and work with the students. And then we have one-room school houses.
HANS FINZEL: Wow.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: That we, um, we’ve actually helped develop a training for teachers for one-room school houses.
HANS FINZEL: And you, do you… Part of your job is to work with the parents on all these scenarios and if they are homeschooling, do you help with the curriculum?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I…
HANS FINZEL: Point them in the right direction?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I help… I ask them questions about what they are looking for and then we have experts all over the world and I try to hook them up with those experts to help them make those decisions.
HANS FINZEL: Awesome. In case you are just joining us, this is Hans Finzel at WorldVenture and you’re listening to Missions on the Frontline and I have as my guest today in the studio, Sheryl O’Bryan, who is the TCK Coordinator for WorldVenture – that’s Third Culture Kids. And let’s just put in a plug for recruitment right now because we have some great missionary schools all over the world – Taiwan, Japan, Senegal, Germany – all over…
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Spain.
HANS FINZEL: And we’re always looking for teachers, aren’t we?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We are desperately in need of great teachers.
HANS FINZEL: Okay, what kind of… Let’s unpack that a little bit more. What kind of help do we desperately need?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: We need teachers who are experienced; who know their way around the classroom. Who know classroom discipline; who know their subject and who have a passion for seeing the nations come to Christ. Because when you’re in a classroom you’re not just teaching those students, which is an incredibly important job, but you’re also enabling their parents to plant churches, to work with people, to share the Gospel with them, to provide for people’s medical needs, to provide food for people. You are kind of the foundational piece for the rest of the work that goes on. Because if their parents had to teach their children, they wouldn’t be freed up to do the other things that God has asked them to do; not that parents abdicate to teachers…
HANS FINZEL: Right.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: …but they are freed up to do more of what they are gifted to do.
HANS FINZEL: Yeah. And that’s what you did in your first life with WorldVenture; a very important ministry. Go to our website - WorldVenture.com and look under OPPORTUNTIES and sometimes we’re just desperately looking for somebody who will go for one year to relieve a missionary teacher that needs to come home for a year.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Very much. Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: So it can be short-term so there are all kinds of locations around the world and some of those are paid positions; some are where you have to raise support, correct?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Correct.
HANS FINZEL: Okay, let’s move on to the topic… This is so exciting and, boy, the time is just ticking away. Let’s talk about transitions. Uh, you told me that one of the big things in a missionary kid’s life is transitions. Let’s unpack that a little bit.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Transition. A lot of missionary kids – Third Culture Kids – are transitioning on a regular basis. They transition from life in America to wherever their parents are assigned. And then sometimes from there they transition to boarding school in another country or just school in another country. And then after three or four years they transition back to America for a year and a good transition takes a whole year, at least.
HANS FINZEL: So about the time they are settled here then they are off again.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: It’s time to pick up and go. So they have a very mobile life which leads to a lot of hello’s and a lot of good-bye’s. That’s one thing you learn as a Third Culture Kid is that every hello has a good-by connected to it.
HANS FINZEL: Wow. That’s, that’s tough.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: It is.
HANS FINZEL: So how do you help the kids? We have a lot of young people come through here every summer and I’ve seen you do a lot of very creative things to help them. How do you - how do we help our kids with transitions?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Well transition is nice in that it has very set stages to it and so one of the things that we do in the summer when kids are coming back to the States is we help them learn all the different stages of transition and what they can expect in those different stages. It doesn’t mean that the transition goes away but when you can name something, it makes it less scary and it makes it more manageable.
HANS FINZEL: Can you think of an illustration of a success story or just somebody you really helped with this topic and helped them cope with a transition?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Well we have a student who just started boarding school in Germany this fall. And it was very encouraging to me that his parents went to visit and they were talking to his dorm mom and she said, “Yeah, we were talking about the stages of transition and he knew every single stage and exactly where he was and he could say what he expected to happen next. And he was right on.” That was just really encouraging for me to know that he actually had been paying attention.
HANS FINZEL: That’s neat. One of the biggest transitions in a missionary kids life is when they go away to college, isn’t it?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: That’s a huge transition because some of them have been at boarding school and they are going in with a bunch of freshmen who have never been away from home before so they don’t quite get what the big deal is for college. Others may have been away or they may not have been away from their parents and it’s a transition for the whole family. Having your parents on the other side of the world means that there’s no one to ask for when you’ve overdrawn your checking account. There’s no one to help you decide what classes you should really be taking or if your schedule is too heavy for you or if it’s too light or how to get a job or just even how to have a checking account, let alone how not to overdraw on it.
HANS FINZEL: Now you know we’re sitting here in Littleton, Colorado and my daughter is a missionary in South Africa right now and I’m helping her with her… I’m watching her bank account every week because if she overdrafts it ends up coming back to haunt me. Yeah, I think a lot of the missionary kids, the Third Culture Kids, when they come home, aren’t they just a little afraid of America, because they’ve never really lived here?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I think so. Things are so different and even if they had been here two years ago for a summer, American life changes so rapidly. More rapidly than other places in the world so things have changed tremendously, even if it’s been a year or two since they’ve been here. I worked with a kid from Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) who always told me after she graduated she was on the traveling soccer team at her college and one of the things she was most afraid of were register people.
HANS FINZEL: Register people?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: She hated having to pay for anything because she was still trying to figure out American money.
HANS FINZEL: Oh…
SHERYL O'BRYAN: And we walk into McDonald’s and we think, “Oh I know I get whatever I get…” And she wasn’t used to the menu so she didn’t know what she would get so she would always get at the back of the longest line to try to figure out what she wanted by the time she got up front and then she still wasn’t sure what people were saying to her. Because we tend to talk pretty quickly and when you’re not used to the vocabulary of McDonald’s, or wherever you are, things get pretty frightening.
HANS FINZEL: Some of the simplest things that we don’t even think about…
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Exactly.
HANS FINZEL: …can be terrifying as they are getting used to the American culture. I know that I’m a Baby Boomer and we Boomers who are missionaries, I think we struggle the most as parents when we have to send our kids away to college and they are all of a sudden… We’re over there, in like you said, in Kenya or Thailand, and then our kids are back in America. That’s a real tough time for a whole family.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: I think it is. I think sometimes it’s tougher for the parents than it is for the kids because the kids are on a great adventure and the parent’s life goes on without their child right there. I think for a lot of Third Culture Kids the more crucial time is after they’ve graduated from college.
HANS FINZEL: Really?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Because there is no safety net for them. They are not necessarily welcomed as adults in the country where they grew up, unless they have a skill that is desperately needed.
HANS FINZEL: Right.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Um…
HANS FINZEL: They don’t know where to fit in America…
SHERYL O'BRYAN: They don’t know where to fit in America. If they are not getting married or going to grad school they are totally out on their own.
HANS FINZEL: Wow. I never thought about that. That’s a big, tough transition.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: That’s a huge transition, yes.
HANS FINZEL: Uh, let’s talk on the topic of grief. You told me that was a big thing in a missionary’s life. Grief.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Grief is huge. Part of it is because that you know every hello has a good-bye attached to it. You’re always missing out on someone somewhere. If you can think of your heart being attached to all the places you’ve been and all the people that you’ve been with, your heart gets divided into lots of tiny pieces all over the world. And it’s very exciting when they all come together; they rarely come together though. Um, I think one of the things for those of us who have grown up here in America, grief is an occasional thing. Something big might happen or something small happens and we grieve and we learn to move on. For many Third Culture Kids, grief is more developmental. It’s woven into the fabric of their lives. And they kind of are always waiting for the other shoe to drop because they know there’s going to be another good-bye; they know there’s going to be another loss and it’s not just going to happen somewhere down the road. It’s liable to happen soon.
HANS FINZEL: Wow. Grief. Let’s end on a positive note. I think some of the most successful, well-rounded, intelligent people are missionary kids, Third Culture Kids. For one thing, they have an amazing world view.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: They do. They have…Kind of… We call it a 3-D world view.
HANS FINZEL: Really?
SHERYL O'BRYAN: They see things that are beyond the camera frame. When we look at pictures in newspapers we see what’s in the picture; they see what’s on the outside of the picture. They can look at a picture and they know what that place smells like. They know what the air feels like; they know how humid it is or how dry it is. We just look and go, “Oh! That’s a picture!” or “Oh! Those are houses!” or “Oh! Those are people.” But they can hear the language and they can smell the smells and they can feel the air and it just comes alive for them in ways that those of us who haven’t experienced that, can’t know.
HANS FINZEL: It’s an amazing privilege to be a Third Culture Kid. Trans-cultural; bi-lingual. Just the fact that they usually learn more than two languages.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: Many of them learn many languages.
HANS FINZEL: And that’s such a great asset.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: It is. And they are exposed to so many different things that, um, I remember one time taking a group of students out to the capital city in Cote d’Ivoire and we were trying to decide where to go for dinner. And we had all Americans and one Canadian and they couldn’t decide which was their favorite – Lebanese, Ethiopian, African or French.
HANS FINZEL: Oh, that’s great! Well thank you so much, Sheryl. We appreciate your ministry here at WorldVenture.
SHERYL O'BRYAN: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
HANS FINZEL: Thanks for listening today. This has been Missions on the Frontline. We’re here to expand your vision and make you aware of new and exciting ways you can be involved in missions around the world. Be sure and visit our website, WorldVenture.com. And if you are interested in perhaps a ministry which Third Culture Kids through our educational programs, we desperately need teachers in our schools around the world. Just go to WorldVenture.com and look under the OPPORTUNITIES tab. And don’t forget to drop us a note; we’d love to hear from you. You can write me at Frontline@WorldVenture.com. This has been Hans Finzel. See you next week on Missions on the Frontline.
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