What I Cannot Forget

The lives of missionary kids (MKs) and even TCKs whose parents work with the marginalized population see the hardships of poverty and human deprivation. Belle Gavin, a missionary kid, shares the struggle of where she grew up, the people from her childhood, and the life she leads today. That struggle of wishing the things of childhood were different, yet knowing that because of the people she met and the places they she lived played into the formation of who she is today. Thanks, Belle, for sharing your story today.

I spent the first decade of my life in Bangladesh, a small, overpopulated, impoverished country sunk in the river delta of South Asia. Though some of my memories have faded over time, others remain in vivid color. The sweetness of fresh mango in the summer. The oppressive, humid air that left streaks of sweat rolling down our bodies day and night. The crowded cities that melted into lush equatorial rainforests. The monsoons that crushed everything in their path each fall, leveling homes and flooding streets. The violent crowds that took to the streets each political cycle, fighting for equitable wages and their right to democracy. The bone-thin men who would pedal rickshaws across the city. Despite working from dawn until dusk, many could hardly afford to feed their families. My family left when I started middle school when the education system could no longer accommodate my brother and me. It coincided with the passing of the torch in my father’s ministry. After decades of church planting in remote villages, we were proud to watch local pastors continue on what my parents and their partners had begun.

We moved to Malaysia which seemed like a tropical paradise with all the conveniences that modernity could offer when compared to the slums that overran the cities of Bangladesh. The first time we drove around the island that would be our home, I remember gasping and shouting, “They have a McDonald’s here?!” I went to a modern international school and lived in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, but my parents’ ministry reached into the darkest parts of the country, where trafficked refugees lived in the constant peril of poverty and being arrested by the Malaysian government. We worked with the Rohingya refugees – a group of human beings whose existence is illegal in almost every country on the planet. The Burmese government would round up villages of Rohingya, forcing them onto boats with handfuls of food and water and setting them out to drift at sea until they died or landed on another country’s shores. Those who arrived in Malaysia were starving and traumatized.

Now, those worlds are a lifetime away. I haven’t been back to Malaysia in nine years and Bangladesh in fifteen. I work a comfortable job at a university and have a kind group of friends who like to try new restaurants and take classes at the gym together. My husband works for a college football team. For most of my life, I didn’t know how many points a touchdown was worth, and now I spend my weekends each fall breathlessly watching each movement on the field. I tell people about my childhood sparingly. When I first returned “home” for college, I quickly learned that there was too much to explain, too many questions to answer, and too few who truly cared to hear my story.

My life bears hardly any traces of my childhood now. But in the deepest parts of myself, the parts I push down as I overindulge in online shopping, the parts that visit me on sleepless nights, I am plagued by unending guilt. As I walk the aisles of grocery stores, I see the eyes of beggar children on the streets of Bangladesh. The missing limbs and matted hair. The signs of malnutrition too obvious to ignore. I sit at my desk, and out my window, I watch students walk to their classes. I think of the refugees my family worked with who couldn’t write their names in any language. I wonder where they are now. We visited them at the construction sites where they worked. They often lived in shipping containers nearby. The buildings they built are still standing. 

Are they?

Some days I wish I had never been touched by the crippling knowledge of the darkness of human depravity and the evils of true poverty. I wish I could throw away my leftovers and not be overwhelmed by shame-filled self-loathing. I wish I wasn’t fazed by the overconsumption celebrated in Hollywood. Sometimes, I wish I could forget. But a still, small voice reminds me that the things I have seen and lived, the people I have loved, are not colored by their darkest moments. Because evil doesn’t have the final say. For all the hardship, poverty, and heartbreak, God’s providence, grace, and mercy were more. I saw lives changed, souls saved, and brokenness redeemed. I remember the way the ocean sparkled on mornings when those who had nothing plunged into the water and gave Christ their everything. My heart still sings the Bengali hymns that echoed in the churches we watched grow from the ground up. Even those we lost now dance in paradise.

So, I won’t forget. I can’t. I will choose to remember. I am who I am today because of the real people I met. I watched them hurt, but I also watched them overcome. The forgotten people of the world grow from the soil that buried them. Brought to life by the Living Water and the Son.

Bio: Belle Gavin grew up as a missionary kid in South Asia and Southeast Asia, experiences that deeply shaped her perspective and storytelling. Now based in Knoxville, Tennessee, she works for the University of Tennessee and enjoys cheering for the Volunteers on the weekends with her husband.