Cultural Awareness

When Family Grows

When my family doubled from 4 members to 8 members by welcoming teenage boys from Zambia into our lives when I was 11 years old, I could not have begun to imagine the ways I would begin to view the world around me. To this day, the way that I think, the values that matter to me, and the personal and professional goals that I continue to develop all come back to the day Jeff (18), Yona (11), Fred (17), and Kelvin (11) entered our home and opened my eyes to a whole new world. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were victims of human trafficking in an era where no words such as ‘modern day slavery’ existed to describe what had happened to my new brothers. There weren’t laws to punish their handlers or ways to legally redeem their stories. What we could do was lean in and listen. I learned to appreciate the beauty of what made the six of us kids different from each other while uniting together as a family. I knew nothing about soccer, and they knew nothing about basketball. We traded skills and practice tips in the backyard, especially my little brother (10), a well rounded athlete. I learned the value of permanency and roots-those of my own and others, especially in the context of how poverty is the biggest cause of separation between parents and children. We discussed extended family members and shared stories of great-grandparents who were all farmers but in very different contexts. I learned how to navigate a different culture under my own roof while falling crazy in love with it too. In Zambia, traditional foods are eaten with the hands, and the boys came to love Thanksgiving as their favorite holiday. Pumpkin pie is a favorite in both cultures. Mostly, I learned to anticipate the unexpected and to embrace whatever comes next, as I have been made aware time and again as I have moved from full time teaching to being on the board of directors for Alliance for Children Everywhere to being in grad school at the Bush School.

A New Path

My newly expanded family planted seeds in me to help others see the world in unique ways. My dad traveled extensively for work early in his career, and I was always fascinated by his stories of life in other parts of the world. When Jeff, Yona, Fred, and Kelvin joined our home and brought their world with them, I was thrilled to experience first hand what it meant to adapt to a new culture for myself, even without leaving home. It was exciting to understand the dynamics that made my new brothers who they were, and we worked hard as a family to honor their experiences. It didn’t take long for me to scrap my plans of becoming a marine biologist (who wants that much science, anyway?), and put energy in high school into pre-teacher courses as my desire to bring the world to others began to grow. I pursued an education degree at Texas A&M, and upon graduation began my career in sharing the thrill of cultures and human geography with secondary students. My students might not have the experience of having siblings from another part of the world, but together we could learn, grow, and explore the world in all of its wonder.

Going Home

My brothers’ stories and lives put a longing in my soul to have my own feet covered in the copper red dirt of Zambia. As wonderful as teaching has still continued to be, I quickly realized that teaching secondary students wasn’t enough to satisfy my desires. I wanted to see their first home for myself, but due to some health issues, opportunities kept slipping past me. In 2010, a friend introduced me to Alliance for Children Everywhere, a family preservation ministry in Lusaka, Zambia. I was invited to visit them for 3 weeks to gain a first hand look at how their schools operate, how they support families struggling with abject poverty, and how they work to provide a permanent family to children who have lost theirs. Speaking with our Zambian staff helped me understand that my brothers’ human trafficking story was due to the material poverty of the nation. Families are desperate for their children to survive and often abandon them or trust the wrong people with them as false promises are made for a better future. ACE does the work to empower and support families so that these choices do not have to be made. During my stay, I was also able to meet some of my brothers’ extended family and see one of my brothers who had moved back to Zambia as an adult. Zambian culture had been so ingrained into me that my visit felt like going home. The work I was seeing ACE accomplish was astonishing and energizing. I didn’t want to leave, but I had a life waiting for me in Texas.

A New Focus

My focus began to shift upon returning to Texas as I took the time to process all I had experienced in Zambia. I knew I wouldn’t be content with ‘just’ being a world cultures teacher any longer. I had been introduced to fabulous work and made deep friendships half a world away. My husband traveled with me on my next trip, and he fell in love with ACE, the purpose of family empowerment, and my new friends too. In Texas, my teaching became infused with sharing my brothers’ story of human trafficking and the ever growing global fight to combat it. In Zambia, I began partnering with ACE’s teachers to bring them culturally appropriate teaching methods to more deeply engage their students. We began taking friends with us to Zambia to lead science and art camps while allowing them to see the community work happening with ACE too. In 2017, I was asked to join the board of directors for ACE, and I quickly realized how much I didn’t know about the managerial side of the nonprofit world. I had recently left public education to spend more time with my own children and to teach music, missions, and chapel at their preschool. As hard as it was to leave secondary teaching, the time felt right, and I later saw it as the open door to begin studying for my EMPSA in nonprofit management at The Bush School. My goal upon graduation is to work to further develop family empowerment programs, including family based care for orphans, in Zambia and beyond, as we’ve seen them as key factors in stopping human trafficking from ever beginning and to keeping local communities strong and healthy.