Jenny and Marty's Story

I was extremely challenged and inspired by this story... It's always good to find an article, book, etc. that you find a connection with...

Jenny and Marty and their two sons (then aged seven and five) moved to a Central Asian country in 1994. After completing his MBA at Boston University in 1988, Marty had worked in manufacturing and then as the head of the finance and administration for the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada. Jenny was a family doctor in a successful and highly satisfying medical practice in Ontario, Canada. Marty takes up the story:

'We both greatly enjoyed our work and felt our gifts and skills were used well. Job satisfaction for both of us was high. We had always intended to go overseas at some point and realized that as our children got older, it was not going to get easier and that the sense of call was now. We were accepted for service with Interserve - Canada, and now work with IFES as "tent-makers" in Central Asia.

'One of the greatest shocks to us - and one that we had not anticipated - was that job satisfaction simply disappeared. We felt discouraged in our language learning, and chores for daily living took up most of the rest of our time. Then suddenly I had to take over a business that was on the verge of failure. It got difficult for the boys too. After a couple of "easy and fun" months, our elder son experienced a high dose of culture shock and fear. He was in the first grade of a local school which taught in Russian, and he was trying to learn the language and survive.

'Jenny and I had been used to working among skilled and competent professionals and with all kinds of excellent support services. The amazing infrastructure of modern Western life from good roads to dependable lab tests to banking services was where we had lived. Canada is consistently rated by the UN as having the world's highest standard of living.

'It was a massive cultural shift. The huge majority of people in the former Soviet states were 50 to 80 years behind in the way they lived, and in their working environments. Often there was no heat, no computers, no basic knowledge of pharmacology or sterilisation, no travellers' cheques or credit cards, and a work ethic that goes with a welfare military state where no relationship exists between performance and pay.'

'We found virtually nothing on which to claim success, and daily failure seemed the rule. We knew in theory that our true identity should be in Christ, but in practice it felt that our identity was in our work, and going down fast. We had a lot to learn.'

'Coming to terms with failure and with much lower expectations of what can be done in a day took a long time. It helped to think through what is most important and to focus on that. When so much of Western energy is devoted to money and entertainment, endless education and retirement planning, it takes time to sort out what is really important. Maybe we are beginning to learn.'