What am I doing?
What is MK Care?
MK(missionary kid) Care exists to provide care and resources for Ethnos360 Missionary Kids and their parents to better equip them for the unique dimensions of cross-cultural ministry and family life. Our passion is to help cultivate healthy families enabling them to fulfill their role in establishing indigenous churches.
My Role
My role is described as the Caregiver Role. This means that I will be involved in regular check-ins with care coordinator, engaging in professional development trainings, in-person MK visits, virtual MK visits, assist with MK debrief opportunities, assist with Ethnos360 MK Care Retreats. Overall my goal is to establish secure and interactive environments where MKs can share their stories, seek support, and feel listened to.
What that Entails
One of the first things I'm going to be doing and going to be continuing to do through my ministry is developmental training. Now, this is not training like the training I have had up to this point and that I detailed on the My Training page, rather it is going to workshops, training sessions, and seminars. Much like doctors, pastors, and others who have had training of some kind have meetings and seminars to refresh their knowledge, gain new insight, and talk with others who have experience, I will be doing this developmental training to help me to grow in experience to better care for the missionary kids and their families. Some of the things it will help me to better understand is how to talk through hard things that the MKs have experienced, how to better understand and care for the MKs’ mental health if needed, and how to help MKs to transition well. My desire is to be able to understand how to care for missionary kids so that I will be able to care for them to the best of my ability.
A key role I am going to be playing a part in is in person MK visits. I am really excited about this because it means that I get to go visit missionary kids wherever they may be and build a relationship with them. I know from personal experience as an MK myself, that at times it can be lonely and difficult to connect with people as the way you think and the way you have grown up is often foreign to those both in the US and those in the country you grew up in. The in-person visits will give me a chance to connect with, check-in on, and encourage the missionary kids I am visiting and give them tools that could be useful in connecting with others or transitioning to a new place. These visits with MKs could be in a small group setting or a one-on-one visit. The settings could range from visiting their homes, or to the mission centers they are living on, or to the colleges that they are attending. I am excited to see the ways that the Lord can use me during these visits.
I will also be involved in virtual MK visits. Because a lot of missionary kids are overseas and there are over 1000 of them all over the world, it is difficult to be able to connect with every single one of them in-person wherever they are on the globe. Because of this MK Care is using several different platforms to virtually connect with missionary kids. It gives MKs who may be in isolated locations opportunities to connect with other kids their age. This role is similar to the in-person visits, in that the goal is to connect with, check-in on, and encourage the missionary kids.
Speaking of checking in on and encouraging MKs, an important area my role includes is assisting with missionary kid debriefs. This is an opportunity to come alongside MKs and their families and talk with them through their experience on the mission field, any difficulties they may have gone through, and anything else they feel is difficult. The goal of debriefing is to be a safe environment for missionary kids, where they can talk about what they feel they need to talk about so that they can be healthy, thrive, and grow in areas of struggles or weaknesses. Simply put, debriefing is a way that I can a safe person for MKs to open up to so I can walk alongside them and encourage them.
Another role I am going to be assisting with is the MK retreats. I have been on a couple of these missionary kid retreats myself and I have had a blast. Those retreats had an impact on me because it gave me an opportunity to connect with other MKs who understood what it was like to be a third-culture kid, I was given material that helped to explain and give words to things I had known to be occurring but I did not have the ability to explain, and it was a safe environment where I could have fun as well as deep conversations. Ethnos360 does a summer retreat for their missionary kids every year, however, there are other retreats throughout the year that are not put on by Ethnos360 that missionary kids can attend. The MK Care team does its best to have people at those retreats to assist in them and to be there for the missionary kids. Because of the impact the retreats have had on me, I am very excited to be able to be involved in this area.
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