Greetings! I've followed the Fanda website for a while, as it concerns a subject near and dear to my heart. I grew up as an NTM MK in Colombia (and I have noticed the absence of Colombian MKs here) and now I am raising MKs myself. I have been somewhat reluctant to join the forum as I still have many friends and family members in NTM and I want to be wise with what I say and not needlessly hurt people. On the other hand, I have a story to tell and God has been leading me to tell it more and more. Besides, as has been mentioned often here, it feels good to 'have a voice'.
My parents were very naive when I was young and allowed me to play unsupervised for many hours with local children at one of the places where we lived. During the year that I was 5 and 6, I was repeatedly involved in sexual activity by the local children, who I'm sure had either been abused themselves or had been observing such things. This was my secret for decades, literally, and I have just been dealing with the effects of this and other abuse in the last few years. I was in denial that this was sexual abuse and I blamed myself for having 'made the choice' to participate. But the more I learned about sexual abuse and the kind of abuse that I went through, I was able to come out of denial and began to face it and process it.
Colombia did have a boarding school, called La Finca Esperanza, and I spent 7 years in the dorm there. I can't really share other people's stories if they are not willing to do so themselves, but I do know of some issues that happened. Speaking for myself, I had always considered that I had an idyllic childhood because I could not weigh the good and the bad together, as it were...I only focused on the good. In my 30s when I began to 'crash' I began to realize that I needed to grieve my losses. I was in a study where they encouraged me to make a list of my losses, a 'grief inventory' of sorts, I was staggered at the results! I had so much more to grieve about than I ever thought possible and it was really overwhelming at first. But as I began to work through the losses and the grief, it began to explain what I had sensed as being the deep wells of sadness inside that had contributed to my depression and anxiety. There was a lot of good in my growing up years as an MK and a lot of good people, it's important for me to take that into account, but not at the expense of denying the bad. The atmosphere at the school was similar to what has been described elsewhere, kids were on the low end of the totem pole, our lives were regulated by bells (I recently watched All God's Children and it was eerie to see some of the similarities to my experience, although without the severity of abuse, probably) and I lived in fear of being shamed by an adult. There was tremendous pressure to conform and not to be 'needy', therefore requiring extra attention on the part of the staff or whatever.
I married a wonderful guy in the NTM national training center in Colombia who is Latino and after I finished college, we went back to NTM. We were members for abou 7-8 years and ended up having quite the negative experience. Some of it was due to personal issues, things from our past that we hadn't dealt with, but a lot of it was the leadership style and the fact that my husband was not really accepted as a full and equal member of the fields where we worked. Later, he was not accepted because he refused to conform to the culture and leadership style of NTM (he was eventually deemed as 'rebellious' and 'not a team player', sound familiar?!)...we saw other similar cases.
We were still NTM members when I first heard about the Fanda report and I was very interested because I was just beginning to come out of denial about my own abuse and experiences as an MK. I followed the investigation closely and when the report came out I read it several times. I knew at least one MK from Fanda and my heart really went out to all of those involved. What really stood out to me at that point, however, was the description of the leadership style and how that contributed to an environment of abuse, particularly the spiritual abuse. It was at that point that I began to realize that was exactly what we had experienced on both fields where we served and it was the GRACE report that gave us the courage to speak up and move out. I realized that NTM had become my entire world, but that it was really just a very small part, there is a much bigger world out here where we are now thriving. It turned out that my husband had wanted to leave sooner, but was hanging in there for my sake...I wish I'd listened sooner!
I think I had a somewhat codependent relationship with NTM that needed to be broken. It was a tough go of it and we went through a pretty bad time when we did speak up. We experienced a leadership team taking action to discredit and disqualify us for service on a different field and another leadership team to who met to discuss our 'case' without our knowledge and without asking us for our side of the story. We heard about this after the fact and also learned that this 'report' was in our file at HQ and we didn't know a thing about it. HQ didn't want to hear about it and also informed us that leadership is not required to include the individual member in such communications, although they usually do. That right there is leadership abuse, pure and simple, and we realized that we would never again be able to trust a leadership who would operate in that way. The only thing HQ did was to refer us back to the 'offending' leadership who denied that their 'report' was negative in the first place (this is where the 'rebellious' and 'not a team player' issue came up). It is really quite impossible to resolve an issue like that when one side refuses to admit there is a problem in the first place and so we have not been able to resolve it as yet, but we hope that someday we will be able to do so.
So we moved to a different mission agency after much research and prayer...God has led us, not to the perfect organization, but to one whose leadership style is vastly different than NTM. They call it more 'flat'. We arrived feeling a bit like puppies with our tails between our legs, but have found an environment of grace and empowerment that we didn't think was possible to find. Not every area may be like that, but what we have experienced has been life-changing and affirming and we are able to carry out God's call on our lives. In this environment, we've also been free to work on our own issues, to grow in grace and to not perpetuate the ministry style that I was brought up in. Which is a whole other issue, but I thank God for leading us out of rules and legalism and into grace.
I continue to process and heal, which seems to be a bit like layers, once I deal with one layer then God takes me down to the next. But the important thing is that I am not stalled in my walk with God as I was for so many years, I'm moving forward and growing and learning.
Just to throw this out, I follow a blog called A Life Overseas. They recently posted about sexual abuse on the mission field (at
http://www.alifeoverseas.com/sexual-abu ... ion-field/) and the comment section is pretty interesting as well. I know that not all here are that into missions, but it's a pretty amazing story of abuse and healing. It is so encouraging to see that this topic is now more freely discussed, not just in mission circles, but anywhere. It is also a great discussion on how to prepare kids to face the issue of sexual abuse and how to protect them from being so vulnerable to abuse of any kind, really. Such as learning that it's ok to say no, even to someone in authority, if boundaries are being violated.
All right, that's about it for now. Blessings!
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
)