Lands of Tea & Opportunity: Part 1

Clarity in Chaos

Kristi finished her fourth cup of tea with Jamila just as Jamila’s children arrived home from school and the small apartment descended into mayhem. Jamila and her seven kids—including two sets of twins—had recently immigrated to the U.S. from South Asia. They and several other Kaumi families lived in Kristi’s apartment complex. Kristi stopped by a few times a week to tutor Jamila in English, and it almost always ended in chaos.

When the kids arrived, they knocked over teacups, crunched the last of the cookies into the rug and scattered their mom’s language notes. English class was over. But as Kristi stood up to say goodbye that afternoon, Jamila grabbed her arm. Her headscarf slipped down onto her shoulders and her eyes filled with tears. “Kristi,” she said, “I’m so scared.”

Shocked by Jamila’s sudden intensity, Kristi asked, “What’s going on?”

“I’m so afraid of going to hell. I think about it all the time and I can’t sleep at night.”

Right there, with one set of twins jumping on the couch and the other practicing martial arts on each other, Kristi had a chance to share her testimony and pray for her friend. She says Jamila was ready to hear some parts of the gospel and not others. They would have many more conversations about spiritual things in the future, but that chaotic afternoon proved pivotal for Kristi. She looked into Jamila’s eyes and thought, We’re so different in almost every way. We follow different religions. She’s married with seven kids. I’m single. She’s way outside her home country. I’ve lived here my entire life. And yet we have feared some of the same things.

That day, Kristi realized that her Kaumi neighbors had become real people to her—actual friends, not just “people over there who don’t know Jesus.” It was also the day she started to seriously consider whether God might want her, specifically, to take the gospel to Kaumi women. He used me in this situation, she marveled to herself, God coordinated this moment and gave me something to share.

Who, Me?

Kristi grew up with a very specific and very scary image of missions. Missionaries were called by God to go somewhere unreached and far away and stayed there until they died. Kristi respected them for it, but she didn’t identify with them. In her mind, long-term missions meant forever, and as a self-described homebody, she wasn’t interested in leaving home forever.

Kristi also wasn’t interested in raising support. Ask people for money? Are you kidding? She doesn’t consider herself adventurous and is not the kind of person she thought missionaries were like. I’m not a Bible teacher. Or a businessperson. I’m not super outgoing or charismatic or a natural leader. What on earth do I have to offer? Moving away from family was probably her biggest barrier. Kristi is very close with her parents and sisters. She wrestled with God for months before finally accepting, You know what? God can take care of my family without me. And He can take care of me without my family, too.

Kristi was a teacher by profession, although she preferred tutoring to classroom instruction. Even before she became interested in missions, she thought she might teach English for a few years overseas and pictured herself being an intentional witness for Christ while getting paid to do a job she enjoyed. To prepare for the possibility, she signed up for a cross-cultural training program that placed her in Jamila’s neighborhood. Part-way through the program, Kristi’s conversation with Jamila about fear helped her realize that she didn’t just want to spend a few years teaching English. She wanted to bring the gospel to Kaumi people, maybe not forever, but for the long haul.

Kristi’s decision to dedicate herself to ministry in South Asia elicited a lot of crazy looks. Most of her friends didn’t know any missionaries and her church didn’t talk about it much. “It was a huge privilege to get to be the one to open people’s eyes to what God is doing around the world,” she remembers, “but it was not normal.” A lot of people were concerned about her, asking, “Are you going to be safe? There’s no one to take care of you.” Some people’s very first response when she shared her desire to be a missionary was “I’ll pray for a spouse for you.” Kristi had mixed feelings about that. “Half of me was like, Yes, please do pray. The other half wondered, What’s wrong with going like I am?”

Kristi didn’t initially think that pursuing missions meant she was giving up on marriage. Once she learned that single women outnumber single men on the mission field about five to one, however, she realized, Maybe I kind of am. She describes it as “a moment of surrender for me to decide that finding a spouse was not the priority. It might happen, but everything else couldn’t wait. I knew God was calling me to explore going with Him to a different part of the world. I couldn’t spend time and energy on finding a relationship and pursuing missions at the same time.”

Not the Only Crazy One

Kristi’s decision to leave marriage up to God and become a missionary still didn’t make it easy to think about moving across the world alone. Some people voiced legitimate concerns about her ability to minister effectively to conservative Muslim people. “There’s no place for single women in Islam,” Kristi explains. People warned her, “They won’t understand you. You should go somewhere you can do more as a single woman.”

That’s one reason she felt such relief when she came to Pioneers orientation. She says she approached the week “scared, but serious. As soon as I got into the missions bubble, though, everybody understood. I wasn’t weird anymore. I might still be crazy, but at least I’m not the only one.” Meeting people further along on the journey and discovering the resources available to help calmed her heart. These are my people! she thought. She met other singles who had served among unreached people groups all over the world. Best of all, Kristi enjoyed having people respond to her story with, “I think God is speaking to you” rather than, “Are you crazy? Are you sure?”

Keeping Options Open

When it came right down to it, Kristi wasn’t sure about serving God long-term in South Asia. The calling she felt was to the Kaumi people, not a particular location. But to minister effectively, she knew she needed to dive deep into the Kaumi language and culture. The best place to do that was in their homeland, even though it was a hard place to live and security risks were high. Meeting other people on a similar journey helped Kristi feel a little less crazy for pursuing that dream. But she also knew it might not work out.

After orientation, Kristi connected with Theresa, a leader who oversaw teams across several countries in South Asia. Theresa tried to coordinate a survey trip for Kristi, but months ticked by as she waited for a time when the team working among the Kaumi had the capacity to host her and the security situation was calm enough for visitors. As Kristi waited, she started raising her financial support and considered backup options. “Both my pre-field coach and the team in South Asia were very cautious. They didn’t say no, but made it clear, ‘This is a very hard part of the world. You might not be able to stay.’”

Kristi started contacting teams working with Kaumi people in other places, including U.S. cities, and had a video call with the Goodmans in Europe. She still wanted to start in South Asia, but followed the advice she kept hearing: “Consider all your options so that if you can’t go or you get kicked out, you’ll know people in other places.” The wisdom of that strategy became clear when the COVID-19 pandemic stranded many missionaries in places they hadn’t expected to be and kept missionaries-in-process, like Kristi, from going to their intended destinations as planned. Her survey trip to South Asia was postponed indefinitely.

Theresa and Kristi’s pre-field coach at Pioneers helped her work out an arrangement with a team ministering to South Asian immigrants in the U.S. They welcomed Kristi to join them temporarily. “God had many lessons to teach me during that time,” Kristi remembers. “Unknowns are not the easiest for me. There was a lot to learn.” Everyone involved accepted the open-ended, unpredictable situation. The team connected Kristi with Kaumi people in the city and with missionaries who had experience in the Indo-Persian world.

Kristi participated in some of the team’s ministries, including teaching several Kaumi women to drive, which she describes as both terrifying and rewarding. But she spent the majority of her time studying the language. Her friendship with Jamila the year before had been based in English. Now it was time to learn Kaumi. “It’s so hard to learn a language in an English-speaking place,” Kristi says with a grimace, “and I didn’t have a trained teacher.”

Her temporary team connected her with Taara, a lovely Kaumi woman who spoke no English. Kristi spoke no Kaumi. That made communication hard even before Kristi discovered that Taara had never learned to read in any language. “Interacting with anything on paper was difficult,” Kristi explains. Her curriculum used line drawings to learn basic vocabulary, but Taara wasn’t used to interpreting pictures. She recognized objects in realistic photos printed in color, but the black-and-white images on Kristi’s worksheets were just scribbles to her. So, Kristi had to switch to three-dimensional props. One day she brought a bag of fruits and vegetables to Taara’s house and spent an afternoon pointing at them and repeating their names.

Kristi studied with Taara for about a year, never knowing how long she would stay or what she should commit to. “Learning Kaumi was slow going,” Kristi recalls, “but it was still a really good thing. I wouldn’t change it even if I could because of the opportunity to build a relationship with Taara and her family.”

Let’s Do This!

The in-between state did eventually come to an end and Kristi was able to take the long-awaited survey trip to the city of Iman, in the heartland of Kaumi society. She was surprised that, even with a head start in language, she couldn’t do anything on her own. As a woman, she could only ride with certain taxi drivers who were known to be reliable, meaning she had to arrange her trips on the phone, which she found was beyond her limited language ability. People navigated by landmarks and area names that weren’t on maps, so she also had to know where she wanted to go and communicate how to get there. “That scared me a little bit,” Kristi admits. “I’m quite directionally challenged. It was a shock to realize, Wow, it’s going to be a big learning curve to figure out how to live here.”

But mostly, Kristi was grateful to finally connect face-to-face with potential teammates. She says, “We had some really sweet times of prayer, and it was such a privilege to pray and worship God in that place after praying for the Kaumi for so long and imagining what it would be like to be in their homeland.” Kristi ended the trip with the attitude, Let’s do this! and officially joined the team working in Iman.

Then the implications sank in—How am I going to tell everybody? Many of her friends and supporters had hoped she would settle down in the U.S. and continue working with Kaumi refugees. Kristi was grateful for the experience gained with her temporary team but firmly believed Iman was the right place to lay the groundwork for a ministry career that might take her almost anywhere in the world.

Now What?

A few months after her survey trip, Kristi landed back in Iman with the expectation that she would live there for 18-24 months, although she was open to staying longer. She recognized the cue that she was entering a new world: As the plane landed, she donned the culturally mandated headscarf. For as long as she stayed in the country, she would need to cover her hair whenever she stepped outside her home, and that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Kaumi women seemed to keep their head scarves in place with an elusive combination of practice, friction and willpower. Kristi found herself worrying constantly about the scarf: Is it slipping? How do I take my purse strap on and off my shoulder without bumping it? What if it falls off?

For her first month in Iman, Kristi lived with a single teammate. Haley taught her practical tips, like keeping a headscarf by the door so she could grab it quickly if someone stopped by. Haley also arranged for two language teachers to come to the house on alternating days, and she introduced Kristi to other missionaries in the city. Kristi’s first six months were set aside for adjustment and language learning. Then she would start working on a humanitarian project. Kristi visited the group’s office and met some of the staff, but she was happy for the chance to focus on learning Kaumi and figuring out how to live in Iman.

In less than a month, Kristi’s initial attitude of, I can’t believe I’m finally here! morphed into, What on earth am I doing here? Her first moment of panic came when she woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a flying cockroach trapped in a plastic bag. She gathered her courage and smashed it with her shoe, thinking, This is ridiculous!

But worse than cockroaches was the feeling of being stuck. Every morning, Kristi had a two- or three-hour language lesson at Haley’s house. She tried to be a good hostess by serving tea and treats, and after class, she put on her sweater and scarf and walked her tutor to the gate. Then she would stand in the yard surrounded by concrete walls and wonder, Now what? Haley and her other teammates were working on development projects, but Kristi didn’t yet have the language skills to contribute. She couldn’t leave the house alone because she couldn’t call a taxi driver and didn’t have anywhere to go. As a woman, she couldn’t wander the streets by herself and didn’t have any friends to visit.

About three weeks in, the isolation and helplessness hit full force. What did I think I could do here? I’m never going to be able to talk. I’m never going to be able to leave. I’m never going to be able to do anything. Kristi couldn’t even give up and go back to America because she couldn’t get herself to the airport. Feeling stuck and helpless, she followed the common practice of generations of faithful missionaries in overwhelming situations: She cried about it. “I had a meltdown. And when I finished, I asked myself, What can I do?”

Kristi knew Haley sometimes sent the security guard out to buy street food, so she decided to try it. The guard spent his time in a little room by the front gate, and that day he happened to be napping. Kristi didn’t know how to say, “I’m so sorry to disturb your nap, but would you please go buy me some lunch?” So, she just called out tentatively, “Hello?” until he roused himself. Then she said “beans, tomatoes,” offered him a handful of cash and an empty bowl and waited to see what would happen.

The guard, who was familiar with the ways and limitations of foreigners, disappeared out the gate. In a few minutes, he returned and handed Kristi back the bowl, now full of black beans and diced tomatoes. It was exactly what she had hoped for—a single serving of lunch from a street vendor. That small victory pulled Kristi out of her slump, at least for the day.

A New Normal

A lot of Kristi’s new life felt strange and uncomfortable at the beginning. For example, the humanitarian project manager occasionally sent security alerts to the staff. On any given day, Kristi might wake up to a text about a road closure or fighting outside the city. “I guess I trusted my team a lot,” Kristi explains. “I told them, ‘I’m going to assume all this is normal unless you tell me differently.’”

Gradually the strangeness morphed into a sense of normalcy. Kristi started going on outings with other women. She found the central market loud and colorful and a welcome contrast after weeks of quiet, lonely afternoons at Haley’s house. “You touch people the whole time and haggle for everything,” Kristi remembers. A single missionary invited her over one evening to watch the pigeons, doves and kites from her roof. “We were above all the walls, and we could see the neighbors in their yards or coming home from shopping. For once I didn’t feel enclosed. I just felt so privileged to pray for the Kaumi in their homeland. How many people get to do that?” Praying on that roof, Kristi finally thought, I know why I’m here.

After about a month in Iman, Kristi’s team started talking about how things weren’t quite normal. A rebel group was gradually taking control of villages in other parts of the country. Iman had been a very stable town. Chaos and violence simmered in other regions, but Iman itself always stayed relatively calm. Kristi adopted the mindset of her teammates: This is a tense time, but it’ll pass. Besides, she was distracted by the opportunity to move into a house of her own. Two single women missionaries lived in separate houses with a shared yard, and Kristi had been invited to house-sit for one of them for a year. The property featured a giant tree with a trunk too wide to wrap her arms around and the shade and flowers provided a pleasant distraction from the cement walls. Kristi was thrilled with her new setup. This is the beginning! I have my own place! Haley’s hospitality had been a gift, but she felt ready to start functioning more independently.

Kristi shared the compound not only with another missionary woman but also with a dog. He was a large, Rottweiler-esque creature who served as backup to the security guard. One of the first things Kristi heard about him was that he had recently bitten someone. Kristi wasn’t a dog person, but she told herself, I need to make friends with this dog. I have to be able to walk around the yard. She didn’t have enough language to befriend very many people yet, but she set about winning over the dog with food. One morning, he sauntered up to the porch where Kristi was sitting, casually sniffed her hand and then wandered off. “I was very proud of myself that we were friends,” Kristi remembers.

The next morning, her time in Iman came to an abrupt end.

No More Normal

Kristi’s day started as usual with breakfast, quiet time and a language class. She prayed about the unrest brewing in other parts of the country but says she was “bopping along” thinking, I live near a conflict zone. Things happen. My team will tell me if it’s not fine anymore. When the office manager announced a meeting for all the foreign staff that afternoon, her main concern was how to get there. Oh no! I have to make it to the office all by myself! But she managed it and joined about a dozen other foreign workers in a meeting room equipped with two couches and a few stray chairs. Someone had ordered lunch for the group, and Kristi fixed herself a plate of rice and chicken.

Once everyone assembled, the manager came straight to the point: “I’m sorry, guys. The powers that be decided we all have to leave.” His phrasing stuck in Kristi’s memory: the powers that be. The decision to evacuate had been made by the humanitarian group’s leaders outside the country. Their main concern was the airport. While there had been no sustained fighting in the area, rebels had gradually taken control of the roads out of the city. If they advanced on the airport, the staff would be trapped. No matter how much humanitarian good they were doing, Westerners would not be looked on favorably by Muslim extremists. Iman was still technically peaceful, but it was a menacing peace. The “powers that be” gave their personnel two weeks to close out and evacuate. No one in Iman believed it was necessary.

Kristi describes the feeling in the room as “a very quiet swirl.” A few people cried softly. Others seemed lost in thought. Some went straight to the details: What do we do with our projects? What about our Kaumi co-workers? How do we say goodbye? In a country known for unrest, everyone knew that evacuation could theoretically be necessary, but foreigners had never evacuated from Iman. They were in shock that it was happening now.

For Kristi, being in a room of strangers all processing a lot of emotion felt very uncomfortable. “I’d only been there a month. I wasn’t attached to anyone in Iman yet. I wasn’t in charge of anything. So, I didn’t feel like I had anything to say.” After a while, people started drifting away and she made her way home in a sort of daze.

While Kristi and her team worked for the humanitarian group in Iman, they also kept in close touch with Theresa, their Pioneers leader. On a Zoom call that night, Theresa helped them think through a basic plan. Frank and Eileen Goodman in Europe had extended a standing invitation to displaced workers from South Asia. The Iman team had designated their city on the Mediterranean as a “strategic waiting place” should it become necessary to evacuate.

Mission teams establish contingency plans in case they have to suddenly change locations for any number of reasons, but few expect to use them. Talking with Theresa, it suddenly became very real to the team: We actually have to go to this strategic waiting place. How will we get there? At the time, much of Europe still had COVID travel restrictions and quarantine requirements. Securing PCR tests in Iman that would be accepted at a European airport would not have been easy during a peaceful period, let alone when social and political upheaval was flaring up.

Kristi didn’t realize how complicated getting out of Iman was until much later. Theresa took over the planning process. “You focus on getting ready to leave,” she told the team, “and I’ll work out the logistics.” She researched airlines, COVID testing and quarantine requirements for a few days and then texted, “I’m going to meet you for a two-week debrief in Romania. I just booked your flights.” Romania isn’t an obvious stop-over point on the way from South Asia to Mediterranean Europe and neither Theresa nor anyone on the Iman team had ever been there. But Romania would allow them all to enter the country right away, and after two weeks they would be able to travel freely in Europe.

Slow-Motion Evacuation

Kristi doesn’t remember a lot of details from her final days in Iman. Two weeks is an awkward amount of time to close down your life. For the missionaries who had been in the country for years, it was not long enough. But two weeks was still a long time, especially for Kristi, who didn’t have a household to pack up, friends to say goodbye to or a ministry to hand off. She moved back in with Haley because there was no point continuing to set up her own home.

Even though she continued language classes until a few days before the departure deadline, time dragged for Kristi. All the foreigners in Iman were grieving, but they weren’t grieving the same things she was. Her losses were intangible—the ministry she had waited for and worked toward for more than two years, the relationships she longed to build with local women and the impact she hoped for through the humanitarian project she planned to join. Haley, on the other hand, was grieving the impending loss of people and places she had invested years in, at great personal risk and cost. And she had to pack, store or dispose of nearly all her physical possessions.

With virtually all of the foreigners in Iman leaving at once, Haley expected their homes would be looted. Kristi helped her choose one of her beautiful silk rugs and a few other souvenirs to keep and took pictures of all her piano music so she could replace it later. They gave a lot of things away and packed the rest neatly in the house. They knew it was wishful thinking to expect it would stay that way.

Haley and Kristi had some items too sensitive to risk falling into the hands of rebels or curious neighbors. Disposing of them is what Kristi describes as “the fun part of evacuating.” Iman doesn’t have the kind of trash system where you throw things away and no one ever sees them again. People sort through the trash by hand, looking for anything that can be reused. Kristi and her teammates also wanted to get rid of things that could not be easily burned. So, a few days before the departure deadline, they packed up a car and drove into the countryside. They found a dry, deserted well and took turns throwing things down it.

Kristi’s computer had broken beyond repair during her brief time in Iman, but theoretically, someone might be able to recover sensitive information about her or about others and their work. So, she dropped it down the well. Her teammates threw in ministry materials, keys and books—anything they didn’t want their neighbors or rebel fighters to find. There was a sense of relief and finality watching things disappear into the darkness. Each item took a full four seconds to hit bottom.

The Familiar Unknown

Two weeks after the evacuation mandate was announced, Kristi and Haley drove to the airport with one suitcase each. Checkpoints had sprung up all over the city, many of them manned by armed men. But Haley and Kristi had no trouble getting through. Aside from the checkpoints, the city didn’t feel different. Even the rebels were courteous, “Hi! How are you doing? Can we check out your car?” Everything seemed very normal except for the fact that nothing was normal.

For Kristi, leaving Iman felt like a return to the uncertainty of the past two years. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Unsettledness had become such a familiar feeling to her that it didn’t seem strange anymore. More like, Here we go again.