Third culture kids hold first reunion

Several generations of TCKs represented among the 50 participants.

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For most people, home is where they were born and raised. However, a third culture kid (TCK)—someone who has spent significant time living in two or more cultural worlds —usually finds that the answer to this question is complicated.

TCKs who grew up in Congo and Botswana with parents working with Congo Inland Mission/ Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission, gathered June 26-28 for the first AIMM Missionary Kids’ Reunion at Grace Church, Morton, Ill. 


From left: Lee Rocke, Judy Schwartz Good and Carolyn Harder Voth converse at the reunion. Photo provided.

Tim Bertsche—a TCK who grew up in Congo and later served as a missionary with his wife and children in Botswana—organized the event.

Several generations of TCKs were represented among the 50 participants, who traveled from places as diverse as Midland, Texas; Apple Valley, Calif.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., and various midwestern locations.  

Exchanges took place in small gatherings around tables during the weekend. On June 27, participants joined in a group reflection about how TCKs who left Africa and settled in North America experienced this transition. Comments revealed the depth of struggle in the search for belonging. 

“For many years I never felt at home anywhere,” said one participant. “I lived with anguish and hopelessness.” Another participant, after nine years of teaching in the United States, still struggles to belong.

Several TCKs related their experiences as they discovered ways to cope. Some emphasized the need to return to their African roots as adults, to revisit people and places as a way to find healing and to better integrate the “African part” of themselves. 

Others have found that continued involvement in mission, including international living or significant contact with people from other countries, allows TCKs to stay in touch with parts of themselves that were nourished on African soil. 

Part of home for many TCKs includes living deeply held values, such as welcoming the stranger, and consistently working in church and community to cross racial and cultural divides.  

One participant, having moved to North America, started to raise a family and embarked on a teaching career. One day, while cleaning up the house, he came across a trunk full of precious objects brought from his boyhood Congolese home. 

The sight of those objects opened up something that had been buried deep within his soul, he said. He went to his wife and family and said, “It’s time.” The family ended up spending seven years in southern Africa serving African Independent Churches. 

Issues of home remained the focus as Jim Bertsche, longtime mission worker in Congo and then home office executive secretary with CIM/AIMM, spoke to the group. 

Acting as the voice for many missionary parents, he acknowledged the pain TCKs felt as the parents sent them off at a young age to boarding schools in order to provide them with as good an education as possible. 

“We know this was difficult and caused the stress and anxiety of separation for you,” he said. “I just want you to know that though we did what was required of us as missionary parents in our era of mission work in rural Congo, it was extremely difficult for us—your parents—as well.” 

As he spoke, there were few dry eyes left in the room, though for most people present it had been decades since they had lived these experiences.

“We want to express our profound gratitude to you for enduring those early periods of separation from your parents and persevering until you adapted to your host family,” Bertsche said. “In this way you enabled your parents to pursue their missionary calling and the mission to carry out its purpose in Africa.”

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