Chapter 1

In 1985, I was born two years into my parent’s marriage when my mother was just 20 years old.  They brought me home from the Reading Hospital to the old tan house that my father renovated during his engagement to my mother.  Brought up in an Anabaptist community, both of my parents, during their teenage years, had made a personal decision to follow Jesus Christ and a public decision to join the Dunkard Brethren Church. 

Occasionally in public they were approached by excited strangers, thinking they had spotted their first Amish family.  While both groups reject much of mainstream American culture, the Brethren church is very different from the Amish.  Both groups have Anabaptist roots, consider themselves to be evangelical Christians, and promote a close family culture.  Both wear plain clothing, and head coverings but avoid television, divorce and remarriage, and violence. 

The Dunkard Brethren Church is considered more liberal, allowing the use of technology such as cellphones, computers, vehicles, and electricity.  Many of the members also wear store bought skirts and blouses rather than homemade dresses. 

The churches are small, usually one hundred members or less plus children who gathering each week to worship, pray for each other, and listen to a sermon preached from God’s word.  This lifelong commitment to God and each other creates a community and safety net where joys are celebrated together and sorrows are shared.

In the weeks that followed my birth, family, friends, and members of the Anabaptist community came to visit, usually bringing baby gifts and a home-cooked meal.  My grandmother and aunt came in to assist with the housework and hold me while my mother napped.  All of this was meant to ease my mother’s burden as housewife and new mother. 

However, the scene was not idyllic.  For the first four months, I tortured my parents, crying inconsolably during every waking moment.  The pediatrician dismissed my symptoms and said they were due to colic and a nervous mother.  This difficult time eventually resolved itself, and soon I was developing as expected. 

Growing up in an Anabaptist community, my mother had ample experience babysitting the children of other members of the church.  After surviving the traumatic initiation of my first few months, my mother began to recognize my behaviors as strange.  Now looking back, she thinks the first clue was when, during my eighth month, she rearranged my nursery furniture.  While most infants wouldn’t notice such a change, I screamed, unable to be calmed.  Desperately trying to figure out what set off this particular crying session, my mother mentally reviewed our day.  Nothing stuck out to her until she considered the new layout of the nursery.  She rushed around the room until everything was moved back into place.  The effect was immediate.  My sobs subsided into hiccups, and I gently fell asleep. 

This was not the end my panicked tantrums.  Fiercely opposing any uninitiated change, the transition from one season to another was especially traumatic during my early years.  As my first and second summer ended, fall brought on violent battles between my mother and me.  Resisting shoes and long sleeves, I fought and bit my arms until she feared for my safety. 

In 1985, few people had heard of the term Asperger’s Syndrome, and it is doubtful that even now a baby so young would be correctly diagnosed.  So, without the plethora of books and articles by qualified and experienced, my mother faced my abnormalities alone. 

Heartily blessed with practicality, she did the only thing that made sense to her.  She removed and replaced the clothing that caused the new sensations for five minutes at a time until my panic subsided.  Then, by incrementally increasing the time frame, I slowly adjusted to the new apparel.

This scientific pattern of her empirical understandings for introducing me to change by measured degrees characterized my childhood.  She announced every event of my day, hours ahead of time as well as all possible differing scenarios.  This time to process and question our schedule prevented the huge discussions that were necessary to deviate from the plan later.

She claims I was conversing as clearly and complexly as a teenager at 18 months of age, and I had an attitude to match.  When at two and half years I was reciting entire verses and the Lord’s Prayer without prompting, my mother thought I was a little genius, until upon reaching kindergarten the lopsidedness of my abilities became apparent.  I enjoyed the tasks and tests, and I related well to the teacher, but the other children remained a puzzle to me. Every day after school during my afternoon snack, I recounted verbatim the conversations of the day.  Seeing my confusion, my mother patiently explained what the other children meant by their comments, and we ran through the various scenarios of ways I could respond. 

She got another glimpse into my ‘strange’ little mind at the beginning of second grade.  On one of the first days of school my new teacher spent some time reviewing nouns and adjectives.  I told my mother I hadn’t felt prepared for the day as I hadn’t yet unpacked the box in my mind where that information was stored.  When she questioned me further, she learned that all of first grade was stored in boxes in my head, and that each box had many files.  Over the summer, I had moved many of the boxes from first grade to the back of my mental room.  That night, while I lay in bed, I mentally checked each box to see what I might need for tomorrow.    

My little brother was born when I was two and a half, and as he grew, my opportunities for social learning increased.  No matter how rough my day at school was, his presence assured me that I would have a friend once I got home.  We spent our summers in the woods around our house, acting out the few scenes of cowboys and Indians we had managed to watch in the electronics section of Walmart.  Our winter evenings were full of Legos, rubber band guns, and the Farming Game. 

One spring evening, my mother, father, little brother, and I sat around the kitchen table, wolfing down the roast beef, carrots, and baked potatoes my mother prepared.  Anxious to get outside and start enjoying the lengthening daylight, my brother and I focused on cleaning our plates when my mother cleared her throat suspiciously.  My head flew up.  At nine years old, I had noticed her declining health.  My brother and I were worried about the vomiting that had become a new part of our supper routine.  Unwilling to prolong my torture, my parents decided to tell us the news and risk our disappointment if things didn’t work out.  

                Not suspecting that my years of pleading for another sibling were at an end, my heart leapt with the news.  It was a miracle.  We were expecting not just one baby, but twins!  With one for each of us, my brother and I wouldn’t have to fight or take turns.  

                Their safe arrival was as marvelous as my brother and I had always known it would be.  Our family finally felt complete.  The twins were born in October, and my mother no longer had to struggle to get my brother and I ready in time for school.  Knowing that if we got ready in plenty of time,we would be allowed to give the babies their 8 am bottle was all the incentive we needed.  My morning Lucky Charms were consumed in record speed, and I waited in front of the bathroom mirror for my mother to wind my hair up into a bun underneath my white prayer covering.

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The pleasure my family took in watching the twins develop offset my continued social difficulties at school.  In fact, the ever-increasing anxiety from social disparity with my peers caused my mother to withdraw me from my private school for most of sixth grade.  While few believed that this would remedy the problem, the break from social pressures was just what I needed. 

The mornings in my room with my schoolwork and the afternoons playing with the babies somehow gave my brain the space it needed to mature.  My return to school at the beginning of seventh grade wasn’t without difficulty, but now somehow, I was able to form tentative friendships with the other girls. 

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In February of my seventh-grade year, when I was fourteen, my parents took me with them on a 10-day mission trip to Guatemala after Hurricane Mitch displaced 730,000 people with mudslides and flooding.  Our days were spent purchasing supplies and­­ distributing donated items to small refugee villages. 

 Growing up in an Anabaptist home and church, I regularly heard and read about mission work. My childhood dreams of being a veterinarian or horse trainer quickly morphed into more humanitarian desires as I witnessed real people struggling to survive. 

I saw how the Guatemalan government provided four posts and two sheets of tin to each family uprooted by the weather.  Those who had no additional materials to add found this devastatingly flimsy structure no match against the rains and winds that constituted the aftermath of Mitch.  The refugee children lit up at our gifts of stuffed animals even though the parents’ tired eyes rested with gratitude upon the sacks of rice and jugs of oil.  It was as I watched them haul their new possessions back to the saddest of makeshift dwellings that I felt the first tug.  It was then that I knew I could never live contentedly in the USA and accept the suffering that was inescapable for so many in the rest of the world.  I realized that my idyllic life in the Pennsylvanian countryside was not the standard.  This new knowledge created a sense of responsibility and a determination to change the world. 

Once back in Pennsylvania, I was unable to forget the devastation and suffering I had seen.  My life as a seventh grader, which focused on tests and birthday parties seemed to lack meaning.  I began to plan my return to Guatemala.  Astounded by my determination and foolishness, my parents convinced me that I could do much more good in the world if I would first finish high school.  All I knew was that God had called me to Guatemala, and I wasn’t very worried about the particulars.  I reluctantly agreed to finish high school and graduated through an advanced track from my private church school at age sixteen.

Much to my parent’s relief, I was unable to find a mission willing to take on a sixteen-year old girl.  My parents then persuaded me that the best way to prepare for mission work was to become a nurse.  Lebanon Valley Career Technology Center had an eleven-month program that fit the bill.  Nothing had prepared me for the culture shock of my non-religious classmates view of life.  Growing up without a television and limited contact with the outside world, their loud recounting of weekend parties and custody battles felt like another world to me.  Their disrupted lives seemed full of unnecessary pain and selfishness as I compared them to the peace and unity of my community.  They discussed their tattoos and piercings, as well as past lovers and ex-husbands without shame.

 I welcomed their questions about my clothes, abstinence, my hair covering, and even my cosmetic use (or lack thereof).  While my Anabaptist upbringing was just normal life to me, their looks and questions were my first inclination of how strange I seemed to the rest of the world.  I freely shared my convictions and opinions, convinced that just knowing how good my life was would immediately convert them by the dozens.   

My dozens of converts never materialized, and I began to suspect that missionary work might not be straight forward.  Newly fitted with my license as an LPN, I was accepted by Mennonite Air Missions for a temporary six-month trial.  A conservative Anabaptist mission established 30 years prior, my family and I had only learned of its existence a year before.  The fact that they were willing to overlook my age, two years below their 20-year limit, was a testimony to their need for nurses.

I was to join another LPN at a clinic in the wilds of Petén.  I knew nearly nothing about the mission or what my job description was to be, but I was determined, and my naivete was as powerful as my determination. 

My parents worried themselves sick even as they purchased the plane ticket, and my church gathered for a going away party/commissioning service.  There was no detaining me now.

Suddenly the knowledge I had about the mission field felt incredibly sparse.  Could reading about Amy Carmichael, Mary Slessor, and Elizabeth Elliot really help me at all in Guatemala?  What did missionaries really do? What did they do on a day to day basis, in between the incredible events that they told when they got back home?