'Let's see what good we can do'

Former missionary kids reflect on their experiences in dangerous, foreign locales

By: Marieke van der Vaart

Posted: 4/23/09

Sophomore Lee Kauffman was eight years old when he saw his first murder. Straight-faced and curly haired, he describes the experience unblinkingly.

"A guy got shot outside our kitchen window," Kauffman said. "Gang stuff. People got killed all the time."

Kauffman and his family lived in downtown Detroit for 10 years trying to make a difference in the city.

"It's not like a war zone but we would have drug dealers block our driveway and not let us in because they could," Kauffman said.

Missionary kids like Kauffman lived through unusual childhoods in cultural settings that still affect the way they live today.

Born and raised in a house he had to have permission to leave, Kauffman remembers the basement room he and his siblings would go to when there were gunfights in the front yard and the reason why his parents said they chose to raise him in Detroit.

"Just - 'This place is awful: let's see what good we can do.'"

As a missionary kid, Kauffman's childhood affected him ways that normal kids growing up in American suburbia couldn't relate to.

"People think it's really funny when I say I've been shot at - they think 'Oh my gosh,' but it was only normal to me. 'Of course I have, haven't you?'"

Missionary kid senior Isaac Brown also experienced this cultural disconnect, having grown up in northern Yemen where his father worked at a hospital.

"America's just really fast and I've never really adjusted to that," Brown said. "A lot of people missed out on the leisure of the third-world type. That's an experience I really wish more people would get. It's changed how I get about things now. I've picked up some of the joy of Middle Eastern relaxation."

Like Kauffman, Brown didn't fully understand why his family lived in Yemen, even though he lived with the reality of it everyday.

"There were a couple instances of aggression. For some reason one night a bunch of people went marching around our hospital with AK-47s shooting them up in the air," Brown said. "I was never scared, but I remember not really understanding."

For the most part, Brown's life in the compound remained peaceful and the few interactions he had with the hospital stay with him today.

"Every Christmas we'd go down to the hospital and sing Christmas carols - we learned them in Arabic," Brown said. "I remember in Sunday School visiting a woman dying of AIDS. [It gave me] this understanding that death and disease were always close."

Another doctor-missionary's son, associate professor of English John Somerville said his 13 years in South Korea gave him a deep love for Asian culture.

"I love Chinese art and Korean art," Somerville said. "I'm so sorry I lost the language."

Somerville lived on a compound with other international kids and interacted plenty with the American soldiers stationed nearby him. The family's news and TV also came through the US army. But going off-base had benefits, too.

"Outside the army base I could go buy pirated records for 50 cents, like Creedence Clearwater," he said.

When he came back on furloughs, Somerville said his family headed straight for things ultra-American.

"When we came back to the States we went straight to McDonald's and I still love McDonald's," he said. "I was a huge baseball fan - I loved coming back to the States and following baseball not being a day ahead."

Somerville left South Korea for college and has gone back several times. Kauffman and his family left Detroit after receiving death threats from drug lords across their street one day and have yet to return.

"We got death threats and left immediately," Kauffman said. "I've never been back."

Every missionary kid takes something different away from childhood. For Kauffman it was a sense of humor and an appreciation of man's mortality.

"It definitely gave me some graveyard humor," Kauffman said. "You learn to make light of it or you'll go nuts. It's definitely made me more serious. It helps me recognize the seriousness of life. It drives you to do good things while you can."

Brown credits his childhood with inspiring his vocation - he's training as a doctor - and a love for the Arabic people.

"I still have a heart for the Arabic people. There's a hospitality that is for the most part lost in Western culture."

Apart from a love for the Korean culture, Somerville also took many fond memories with him from his life overseas.

"You'd just be driving through the countryside, then we'd stop by the road and we'd eat next to a rice paddy. Good times," he says, pausing to remember. "Yeah."

All three men say they wouldn't trade their experiences for anything.

"When I moved here I had to learn some people could be trusted, Kauffman said. "Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like not to have had those experiences, but I don't regret it. It was all I knew."