Lands of Tea & Opportunity: Part 2

Who God Still Is

Kristi thinks her departure from Iman would have been harder emotionally if her somewhat nebulous grief had not been dwarfed by the more obvious and concrete losses her teammates were facing. She says, “I felt like my role was to be there for my teammates, and I’m grateful for that. If I was left on my own, I think I really would have been depressed thinking about all my own problems, Woe is me! I have to move again! I’m all by myself. Who’s going to help me figure this out?”

Theresa was there and ready to help. She had booked a hotel in a quaint town in the Carpathian Mountains. It was a weird way to visit Romania, but Kristi did get to tour a castle. Frank Goodman traveled up from the Mediterranean coast to co-lead the debrief with Theresa. Kristi had only met Frank briefly on a video call, but she had heard from other foreigners in Iman about the Goodmans’ unheard-of planned departure. “They decided years in advance when they would leave,” people marveled, “and then they left when they said they would. When does that happen?”

During their two-week debrief, the team worshipped together each day, and Kristi says it was stabilizing to pray for each other and the building tension around Iman. “We focused on God. Who He still is. And we prayed a lot for the people still in the country and for all the people who had to leave.”

Kristi soon realized she had not yet processed a lot of the uncertainty and transitions of the past two years: deciding to move abroad, COVID delays, her time with the temporary team in the U.S., her arrival in Iman and now the sudden departure. During that whole time, she hadn’t had one consistent person in her life. Her family couldn’t fully understand what she had experienced overseas. Her teammates had only known her for a few months. No one had walked through the past decisions with her, and no one was going to live out her next decision with her, either.

Kristi knew she had a lot to sort through emotionally but found it very hard to talk about. Mostly, she just cried, which felt awkward because she didn’t know either Theresa or Frank very well. “I was like, ‘Sorry, guys! I can’t answer your question. I’m just going to cry about it.’ But it was really good to have the space to do that. I found out they are amazing people!”

Knowns and Unknowns

During the debrief, the team discussed how to move forward and whether they would continue to be a team. Each member had different priorities as they considered what to do next. Even if they hoped to return to Iman when the situation stabilized, they all realized it was likely to be a long wait. During their two weeks in Romania, they decided to stay together for six months and help each other discern their next steps—steps which would likely take them in different directions.

Looking back, Kristi is surprised she was so set on continuing in overseas ministry. It would have been understandable to think, I tried foreign missions, and it clearly hasn’t worked. I’m going home. Kristi thinks the reason she didn’t feel a tug back to the U.S. is that it didn’t feel like home. “I didn’t fit in my hometown anymore. I never really settled on my temporary team, so returning there would feel like starting over. Going back to the U.S. didn’t seem easier than any of the other options, honestly.” Even as her emotions swirled in Romania, Kristi remained convinced, I want to work with Kaumi people somewhere. I guess it’s not going to be in their homeland. She realized that as a newbie on the field and a beginning language student, she wouldn’t be among the first missionaries to return to Iman, even when that became possible.

Grieving Together

The two weeks in Romania over, it was time to head to the “strategic waiting place,” the Mediterranean city where the Goodmans lived. Kristi’s first memory of Southern Europe is a wave of relief—They let us in! Part of her brain celebrated, I’m in Europe! I should be excited! Theresa insisted that the team do some sightseeing and enjoy the perks of their unsettled state. A different part of Kristi’s brain ran a constant drumbeat: What am I going to do? How long am I going to be here? Where do I go next? The team settled at an Airbnb in what Kristi describes as “refugee central” downtown. Their apartment overlooked a large square that was a hangout for hundreds of South Asian immigrants, including many Kaumi families. Kristi got the sense that local people in that part of town were cautious, but for her, the presence of the Kaumi was comforting; they were the one consistent thread through the last two years. This is great! she thought, I know how to dress and what to do. At the same time, she enjoyed the freedom of not having to meet all the Kaumi cultural expectations. The refugees were also foreigners learning the ropes in a new place.

On her first night there, Kristi remembers looking out the window and seeing Frank and Eileen crossing the square to bring a hot dinner for the whole team. “They were very welcoming,” she says, “and they made the transition so much easier.” Haley had worked with the Goodmans years before when they still lived in Iman. Kristi considered any like-minded person who worked with the Kaumi to be an automatic friend.

A few days later, about three weeks after the team left South Asia, the building tension between the government, rebel forces and Islamic extremists erupted on a scale few people other than maybe “the powers that be” had anticipated. The city of Iman disintegrated into chaos. Armed fighters patrolled the streets and harassed civilians. Schools and businesses shut down, and hospitals scrambled to treat the wounded. Hundreds of Kaumi families fled in fear, clogging the airport and roads as they sought to escape the violence. Kristi’s team and the Goodmans watched Kaumi-language news and social media posts with horror. The desperate scenes weren’t just images on a screen—their friends’ lives were in danger. They were shocked at the speed and brutality of the destruction.

The situation in Iman eventually grew so desperate that it attracted the attention of the international news media. When stories appeared in U.S. outlets, emails started pouring into Kristi’s inbox from relieved friends and supporters. “Thank the Lord you’re safe and out of the country!” many wrote. But Kristi wasn’t thankful—she was grieving. In a theoretical sense, she was grateful that God had given foresight to the “powers that be” and spared her from the violence or a more chaotic evacuation, but her overwhelming emotion was loss. “My American friends’ perspective felt very one-sided,” she explains. “It’s understandable because they knew me and cared about me, but it was hard to interact with people at the time. Think of all the people who were still in Iman!”

One thing Kristi did feel thankful for at the time was her relationship with the Goodmans. Frank and Eileen are not counselors, but they are, in Eileen’s words, “Let’s-eat-food-and-take-walks-and-talk kind of people.” Kristi remembers, “They understood what was going on and talked things through with us. They kept us sane.” And the feeling was mutual. Eileen wrote to friends in the U.S., “A sweet gift for us, personally, has been that our old team from Iman decided to evacuate here. Although the situation is grim, it is a blessing to have friends to grieve and process with on a level that we couldn’t with others.”

Waiting Strategically

The displaced Iman team took the “strategic” in “strategic waiting place” to heart. Even as the situation in their former home disintegrated, they were looking for the next place they could serve Kaumi people who had been—or were about to be—displaced. They started by determining the major centers of the Kaumi diaspora, besides their anchor city on the Mediterranean coast. Mostly, they found them through word of mouth. The mission world runs on relationships. The refugee community is tied together through family connections. “Kaumi people have been fleeing South Asia for years,” Kristi explains, “It’s not a new thing.”

It didn’t take Kristi and her teammates long to get a general sense of where the Kaumi population centers were, and then they could do more specific research about those cities and the missionaries serving there. The team was based in the city for five months while they made survey trips to other locations. Kristi was glad to have teammates to compare notes and commiserate with and to once again be in a country where she could go to a park or coffee shop on her own to think and pray.

Exploring

The team started by exploring options in southern Europe. But while there was a lot to love about life and ministry on the Mediterranean, it didn’t take long for Kristi to realize it wasn’t a good fit for her at that point. Her first priority was still language learning, and while she did get some tutoring from a Kaumi refugee, she found it very hard to learn Kaumi in a context where so many people spoke English and other European languages. “I’m not an amazing language learner,” she says, “I’m an average language learner, so I need significant immersion to really learn it.”

Kristi started exploring options farther afield, returning to the Goodmans on the coast to rest and process in between. Those early visits helped crystallize her priorities: I need to learn Kaumi or at least some form of Indo-Persian. And I’m too new on the field to start a ministry from scratch. I need to join someone I can learn from.

With those parameters in mind, Kristi quickly narrowed her options. A predominantly Muslim Central Asian country kept rising to the top of her possibilities list, so she packed up again and headed out to explore. She found that a lot of missionaries had transitioned from South Asia to the country’s capital, Lotfan, and that would provide some built-in community. The biggest draw was a language commonality. The national language shares a common Indo-Persian heritage with Kaumi. The basic grammatical structure was the same as Kaumi, and some vocabulary was the same. Kristi was pleased to find she could communicate, at least on a surface level, using the bits of Kaumi she had learned in the U.S., Iman and Europe.

The national government wanted to boost tourism and foreign investment, so Kristi anticipated that getting a visa would be relatively simple. The welcoming attitude toward foreigners, however, did not extend to Kaumi refugees. They were only allowed to live in a designated area just outside Lotfan. And there weren’t as many Kaumi people as there were near the Goodmans or some of the other cities Kristi had researched. Based on the ratio of missionaries to refugees, the need was greater elsewhere. However, Lotfan provided the team structure Kristi had been looking for, with experienced missionaries focused on reaching the Kaumi. “Between that and the language overlap,” Kristi explains, “it all clicked.”

Keeping on Going

After her trip to Lotfan, Kristi returned to the U.S. to spend Christmas with her family. As she began explaining her new plans to friends and supporters, she started to realize just how bizarre it all sounded. “The general feeling was confusion. Half of my conversations were just, ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing? And why?’” The connecting thread between South Asia, Romania, southern Europe and Central Asia was not obvious. “I’m so thankful I could explain it in person,” Kristi says, “rather than doing it from afar.” She found some confirmation in repeating the story over and over. Her chain of decisions made sense with a little context, and her church affirmed her planned transition to Lotfan.

Kristi returned to the Mediterranean coast briefly and said goodbye to her Iman teammates before traveling on to Lotfan. The Goodmans weren’t surprised that Kristi decided not to stay in their city. “I just respected her tenacity,” Eileen says, “She spent years trying to get to the field, and then couldn’t stay. She could have thrown it in and said, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’ But she went on to Lotfan to learn from seasoned missionaries. She’s a good example. If God calls you, keep on going. Don’t let up.”

Diving in Deep

In the lead-up to her arrival in Central Asia, Kristi dreaded starting over. New city. New team. New culture. A new variation of a language. It was her fourth ministry location in 12 months. But once she arrived in Lotfan, a sort of euphoria kicked in. “I was so excited to have a place to be for a while that I found it pretty easy to reinvest.”

The day after she landed in Central Asia, Kristi moved in with a local family for a four-month home stay. She was excited to learn a language by total immersion. While it wasn’t a Kaumi family, she knew she had a lot to learn about how the majority people of Lotfan live daily life. She couldn’t wait to jump in.

Kristi was hosted by a woman in her fifties who lived with her college-aged daughter, adult son, his wife and their two young children. The house itself was tiny, with a small cement yard and a pit toilet outside. Kristi’s room was connected by interior windows to the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other, so she essentially lived in a fishbowl in the center of the house. Her windows had curtains, but the walls were very thin. “I felt like I knew everything that went on in the house, and they knew everything I was doing all the time too.” Immersion was, after all, the purpose of the homestay.

For the first two weeks, Kristi never saw the adult son, Aizat. Does he even live here? she wondered. She soon learned that men typically spent their time outside the house, especially if the family had a female visitor. “They didn’t know what to do with me because usually if a single woman was a guest in their house, Aizat wouldn’t interact with her. With me it was confusing—She lives in our house, so she’s kind of part of the family, but she’s still a guest and a single lady.” After two weeks, the women in the family awkwardly introduced Kristi and Aizat. She didn’t know what to say other than, “Hi! Nice to meet you. Thank you for letting me stay in your house.” After that, the whole family treated her like another sister or cousin, and everything felt more normal.

One afternoon, Aizat came home from work unusually early and decided that they should all have a water fight. It was over 100 degrees outside that summer, and although the family had three air conditioning units, they never turned them on. They didn’t use fans, either, so a water fight seemed like an excellent idea. Aizat ran around the house spraying a hose at the women through the windows, and they splashed him back with buckets from the inside. Kristi never expected to have so much fun in a conservative Muslim household. What is going on? she asked herself in shock, This is not the image I had of them!

But life was generally much more sedate than that. A lot of value in the homestay for Kristi was learning the mundane rhythms of life she would never see if she only visited local homes. She discovered, for example, that her host culture had a very different philosophy of sleep than she was used to. They had no concept of bedtime and did not value uninterrupted sleep. Instead, they dozed when they were tired. The kids roused the adults at will, and the lights in the kitchen came on whenever someone was hungry. Kristi soon realized she couldn’t cope with their schedule. “For my sanity, we set the expectation, Kristi locks her door at 10 or 11 at night and goes to bed, and she doesn’t come out until 7 a.m.” She learned to sleep wearing an eye mask and headphones.

One cultural stress point that never really went away was how to respond to the restrictions on Aizat’s wife, Alena, as a young mom in a conservative family. She had to stay in the house with the curtains drawn unless she gained permission to go out from both her husband and her mother-in-law. Sometimes she complained to Kristi, “I want to go outside and play with the kids, but Aizat said no,” or “I just want to go on a walk, but my mother-in-law said no.” Alena’s restrictions contrasted sharply with Kristi’s freedom. It almost felt mean for Kristi to talk about her outings in front of Alena, knowing that she wished for the same opportunities.

But overall, Kristi learned a lot about navigating everyday life in a culturally appropriate way. For example, something as simple as refusing food felt very stressful at first. Her hosts always urged her, “Eat more! Eat more! Do you not like my food?” even though Kristi felt like she’d eaten enough for two people. By watching the family members interact, she learned it was completely acceptable to say, “Oh, thank you, I’ll take some,” and then not take anything. “They are my people now, and as long as I can verbalize my questions, they are the ones who help me figure things out.”

And the learning wasn’t all one-sided. Kristi’s host family also got to observe her lifestyle, including her spiritual practices. “They know my teammates, but it’s a different kind of knowing because I lived with them.” The first time Kristi offered to pray for her host mom, “She didn’t even know what to say because young people don’t pray out loud here. That’s not a thing, I came to find out.” One of Kristi’s favorite spiritual conversations came about because of a cultural blunder. Kristi forget that Muslims consider pigs unclean and showed Alena a cute photo of a litter of piglets born at her sister’s farm. The significance didn’t sink in until Alena asked, “Do you eat pork?”

Kristi answered honestly, “I do. What about you?”

“Oh no,” Alena responded, “Our Holy Book says it’s not allowed and it’s dirty.”

Kristi decided to make the most of the opportunity since she had already gone that far. “That’s interesting. In my Holy Book, it says it’s not what you eat that makes you clean or unclean, it’s what’s in your heart.” Kristi was still an early language learner at that stage, and the conversation stretched the limits of her vocabulary and grammar. Alena listened, but Kristi wasn’t sure she understood.

A few days later, as the family ate dinner around a tablecloth on the floor, Kristi suddenly realized Alena was describing their conversation: “Kristi eats pork because her Holy Book says our sins make us clean or unclean, not the food we eat.” Kristi was amazed. “She was retelling the whole thing way better than I ever could.” Alena told the story again a few days later to a group of guests. “My language wasn’t great,” Kristi acknowledges. “Yet I was able to share a short, little truth because of a photo I never would have shown Alena if I had thought about it. But what a great conversation to have! It opened the door later to more questions once the family realized that I do things differently for a reason. Most of them have never interacted with a believer.”

Coming Up for Air

While Kristi enjoyed her homestay experience, after four months she realized it was time to move out of the fishbowl and get a place of her own. Leaving was harder than she expected. “Because I so quickly jumped into deeply investing, it was hard on my heart.” For the first few weeks, she struggled with guilt. “Alena couldn’t do anything for herself. While I lived with her, I could be her advocate. Now I can’t.” At the same time, Kristi received frequent text messages from Alena and her mother-in-law, Why haven’t you come to visit us? You’ve been gone for so long! Do you not like my food? The kids cry when you’re not here in the morning. She remembers, “It didn’t help in the transition when I was already in a fragile place emotionally.” Kristi’s team leaders helped her see that what sounded to her American ears like a guilt trip was the Central Asian way of saying, “I miss you.” She learned to interpret the messages as something more along the lines of, We love it when you visit. Please come back soon.

Variations on a Theme

Ever since joining her temporary team in the U.S., Kristi had been trying to learn the Kaumi language. The challenge in Lotfan was that the majority of the population spoke an Indo-Persian dialect, but it wasn’t exactly Kaumi. Kristi didn’t have to learn a separate language for everyday interactions with locals like her homestay family, but she had to learn variations on a theme. She explains, “There are literary words that align more closely with Kaumi, and then there are street words that people use every day, and there are loan words from other nearby languages. If I just learn the street language, I won’t understand or be understood by Kaumi speakers very well. Sometimes I have to learn four words for one thing so that I can communicate with everyone.”

Even as Kristi settled into a more normal rhythm of life in Lotfan, questions lingered about what exactly she was doing there. Her goal had always been to work with Kaumi refugees, but she didn’t interact with any during her homestay. She began to wonder, God, are You going to take Kaumi people out of the picture? Am I doing the right thing?

God answered her questions in part through another foreign student at Kristi’s language school who had also worked in Iman. Soon after Kristi moved out of her homestay, this friend pulled her aside. “I’ve been asked to teach English in the Kaumi refugee settlement,” she said. “I’d feel more confident doing it with someone else. Do you want to join me?”

Kristi jumped at the chance and started teaching English a few hours a week to Kaumi women. “The opportunity came in the perfect timing,” she says. “I wasn’t in my homestay anymore, so I was more in control of my time and I didn’t have to go home to a cross-cultural situation every night. Why was I so worried about ministry opportunities? God had it covered the whole time.”

Kristi found that even just six weeks in Iman gave her a measure of common ground with the Kaumi women who came to her English classes. “I know some of the places they talk about. I keep up with the news. I’m learning Kaumi words, not just the local street language, and I dress like them. I think they realize, Oh, she does understand some things, and they’re more ready to open their hearts a little bit and let me in.”

Just as Faithful, Less Sure

Even before going to the field, Kristi had heard enough stories to know that missionaries didn’t always stay forever. But that still seemed like the goal. You go and you stay. That means you’re being faithful. That means you heard God right. Over the last few years, Kristi has developed a richer and less rigid understanding of faithfulness. She has no idea how long she’ll be in Lotfan. She hopes to have another 12-18 months. But she thought the same thing about Iman. Undoubtedly, God has more surprises ahead for her. “All I can do is be faithful where I am,” she says, “and bring lots of people in to help me discern when it’s time to take another step. I’m quicker to ask people to discern with me now than I used to be because I’m not quite as sure what it means to be faithful right this moment. And that’s a good thing.”

Ministry to Kaumi women took Kristi to four countries in her first 12 months on the field. And yet, in some ways, not that much has changed since she stood in Jamila’s living room, trying to explain the gospel in simple words with seven kids under 10 bouncing off the walls. Life is still chaotic. Language is still a challenge. Ministry still involves copious amounts of tea. And every once in a while, Kristi is still amazed to realize, God coordinated this moment and gave me something to share. And she’s relieved, too, to remember that Jamila couldn’t always keep her headscarf on either.