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Happiness is the goal for which I aim.
Until the age of eleven, I grew up in West Africa; my parents were missionaries, so my brother, sister and I were drug along with them—if called, to the ends of the earth.
My father likes to refer to my childhood as “an enrichment.” He argues that I received training in areas most American children never could or, in there adult lives ever will.
I can’t dispute this. I learned many languages at an early age: English, French and the local languages spoken wherever we happened to be at that point in our mission appointment.
I travelled all over the world to more countries that can be numbered on my two hands.
I witnessed the multitude of the heavens that only a sky without light pollution can provide and the most glorious sunsets and rises the desert has to offer.
But in my father’s statement about an enriched childhood, sarcasm abounds.
There where many differences to simply living and staying alive in a third-world country.
We had to make all our food from scratch, which included washing all the vegetables in bleach water to disinfect and cooking all meat very well-done for safety.
My mother haggling with vendors at la marche, an open-air market, instead of paying for fixed-price items at the local Kroger, just to get a fair price on this or that fly-covered item.
We hung out our laundry to dry in the Sahara’s heat and on the very rare rainy day, jimmy-rigged a clothes-line in the house.
And I can’t forget the bitter taste of the malaria pill we all took each Sunday.
There, too, were many things I missed out on as a missionary’s daughter, things that are almost a given in the U.S.
Going to the movies, talking on the phone, having friends that lived closer than four hours away, losing electricity for days on end with no explanation, Trick-or-Treating and cold weather at Christmas pop into my head right away.
The most blatant of these oddities was that I never experienced Public Education until returning to the U.S. in the seventh grade. Oh, what an eye-opener that first day was!
But I digress.
Despite the many complexities of my childhood, I must, dismayingly, agree with my father.
My childhood was enriching, but not solely because of the world surrounding me, but because of the people around me, my family.
A missionaries life is no easy path to take. Often sent to the most desperate places on earth, they are frequently ill-accepted. The physical and emotional tole of living in virtual isolation is extraordinary. And the compensation, monetary wise, is a hardship in itself.
Yet my parents were happy. Yes, they fought; yes, they tired; yes, they rejoiced when they visited back home, but they for the most part were happy.
Parents impart many things upon their children, some good, some bad. The most vital lesson my parents taught me was that being happy in life isn’t about where you are, how easy your life is or how much you have.
It’s about loving the ones around you and receiving love back. It’s about laughing when most things say you should cry. It’s about defying they odds of this world by being happy.
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