How We Care for Our Missionaries, Part Two
Juli Duvall-Jones, our Director of Missionary Care and Development, shares how focusing on the care of missionary kids (also known at Third Culture Kids, or TCKs) has been instrumental in increasing wellness among our missionaries and their families.
Kait Cody Jones is a former CMF missionary to Ethiopia and has been working as our TCK Care Associate the last 3.5 years. She has done a great job supporting our kids and their parents through times of transition, homeschooling challenges, and those complicated preteen years.
She has also built deep community among our TCKs, which I feel has added great value to the care we offer our families, because when kids are doing well, parents can direct more of their energy towards ministry. Kait has provided support for new mothers who are away from the support of their extended families, homeschooling parents who are learning how to be both parent and teacher, and championed our child protection policies both as an organization and on individual teams. She meets with some of our children regularly as they transition to a new country, a new school or a new phase of life providing them with a safe space to share their experiences and receive tips on how to transition well. Mostly though, Kait provides our children with the gift of being seen by someone who knows and loves them well.
Although there are many ways that we support our TCKs of all ages, I want to share a couple of unique ways that we have done so with our older missionary kids.
Our high school and college-aged TCKs (both past and present) are connected in ways they never have been before. One great way to keep them connected and to pour into younger TCKs, is to have them serve as staff at the children’s programs at our various events throughout the year. We find that having these events staffed by our older TCKs provides a level of continuity and understanding that is rarely present in the lives of our younger TCKs who live lives of transition and rarely feel “completely” understood anywhere, even by their own parents. No one gets a TCK like another TCK.
These high school and college-aged TCKs have gathered over the winter break the past three years for a retreat in Southern Indiana. This has created community among them in ways I haven’t seen before in my 33 years with CMF. The ways they understand, support, and encourage one other through things like their group chat, visits to one another on their university campuses, and a collective journal they write in and mail back and forth to one another are beautiful. They have dubbed themselves the International Delights and there may or may not be a tattoo on many of them to prove it!
They have found healing and support in their unique little global community, and they are determined to pass that sense of belonging on to our younger TCKs. I wholeheartedly believe that this makes CMF a healthier and more effective organization.