I had a friend in Angola.
Her name was Fina.
She was beautiful.
Her smile was pure. Joy overflowing. Her eyes were intelligent. Her voice was quiet and sure.
When we saw each other on Sunday mornings, we embraced, kissed cheeks, and laughed. She never scoffed at my Portuguese or corrected it. She spoke to me as a friend, like I belonged there with her. I knew her before she was married. She and her fiancé came for lunch to have a premarital session with my parents. We ate chicken and potatoes.
She was a beautiful bride.
She had a son, and then a daughter.
And then, in giving birth to her third child, she died.
I was at boarding school and received an email from my dad telling me she had died on the way to the hospital. She was young, but the maternal death rate in Angola was, and is, high. The lack of antenatal care and accessible medical interventions made any complication possibly fatal. I wept in the computer lab of my high school.
Then, I went on with my day of classes, hockey practice, homework, dorm chores, and bed. I didn’t know how to speak about it, because no one at my school knew her. I just carried that grief, and the guilt of being alive, inside.
The grief was too strange, too heavy, and too misplaced for me to carry. Still, the unspoken grief affected me. She made me want to be a midwife, and I pursued a nursing degree partly because of her.
And then, when I was in labour with my own child, I thought about her for hours.
My labour was long and intense, but it was safe. At some point, after contractions and vomiting, I settled into a routine of pain, relief, breathing, and pain. And I thought about Fina and I grieved. I thought about the pain she was feeling before she died, the contractions that broke her body and stole her breath.
I thought about how utterly unfair it was that I was not in labour on the road to a hospital that was ill equipped to help me. I was safe, in a maternity birthing centre, with cosy lighting and more midwives than I needed. I had a doctor who was able to intervene when necessary, and I had a safe, live baby in my arms afterward. I was grateful and I felt immensely guilty.
This was not the first time I had felt guilt about the difference between my life and those I knew on the mission field. I felt it when I went to boarding school and other girls my age in my neighbourhood went to work to help their families, or went to begin families of their own. There was no other way out of our neighbourhood. I felt it when I went to university and walked around a shiny Western Tennessee campus where no one had heard of my home. I felt it when I had a wedding and was asked to share photos from my childhood and I stared into faces I had left and tried to forget.
While this guilt is not uncommon amongst Missionary Kids, it isn’t always addressed in mission circles or in home churches. There is so much focus on the child’s interesting experiences or the parents’ gospel-advancing work, that the exposure to poverty, tragedy, and illness is waved away. There is unspoken guilt across the MK experience, it doesn't always look as extreme as this story and sometimes it looks even more intense. Children are expected to be resilient and let go, but that takes time and intention. And during that time, it’s very common to feel guilt.
As an MK who has gone through this, and continues to go through it, I only have a few pieces of advise for MKs and their families processing this strange, ambiguous ‘guilt of getting out.’ It’s not exactly survivors guilt, it’s not guilt that comes from perpetrating violence or wrongdoing, it’s a guilt that comes from being aware, from being exposed, and from being powerless to change all the wrong in the world.
I simply call it the MK guilt and I spend a lot of time trying to explain it to others.
My first piece of advise - name the guilt and grieve it. Don’t try to pretend it doesn’t exist, or that it shouldn’t exist just because it’s difficult to explain. Others may not understand, they may not even try, and that’s okay. The goal is not to justify the guilt to everyone, but to name it as something felt, something experienced, something real, but perhaps something misplaced.
Second, know that this guilt is a recognition of our broken world. When we see injustice in our lives or in our homes, when we see undue loss of life, when we see horror on our doorstep or on the news, we are able to clearly see how broken and desperate this world is - and how much we need Christ in His wholeness to repair us. Challenging feelings can be used as promptings to pray for Christ to be known, and for His Character of grace and peace to pervade.
Recognising this guilt allows you to rename it properly for what it is - grief. Guilt may not be the right word at all, it is just how it shows up in my body, but grief for the brokenness, grief for the injustice, grief for the forgotten and the lost and the misused.
Grief is something I often think Chrisitians should feel more often. We know the absolute devastation of the world, and yet we don't allow ourselves to grieve. Perhaps we're afraid it's sinful (it's not) or perhaps we just don't know how (but we should). I would say: learn.
Learn how to grieve well, and then allow that grief to increase your capacity for hope.
Third, just as feelings cannot be pushed down forever, the impact our experiences have on us cannot be denied. My exposure to certain things in Angola, in Kenya, in the Middle East, and across the world, have hugely influenced my worldview and my person. They impact the way I vote, the way I interact with policies (lack of proper maternal healthcare is a form of violence against women), the way I care for others, the way I share my faith, the way I see others in pain, the career I chose, the way I parent.
Remembering my experience and integrating it into my whole self gives credence to it, it gives purpose to things I once counted as simply purposeless sorrow.
Lastly, just as we name guilt and grief and all the feelings in between, I encouraged you to name your stories. Share the parts of you that you think others will not understand (within reason and with safe people). Give dignity to those stories, to those people who seem to be from another lifetime, but who have had such a huge influence on you as an individual.
Share them as I shared about my friend.
Her name was Fina.
If you are an MK wrestling with the emotions of growing up on the mission field or adjusting to life off the mission field, you are not alone. There are so many people who would love to connect with you, to hear your story and to help you process it so that you can healthily move forward.
Please look into the resources below if you would like some more support or encouragement.
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