Lands of Milk & Honey: Part 2

A Kid’s-Eye View

Despite the challenges, dangers and stressors, Frank and Eileen summarize their experience in South Asia like this: “Our life was rich, especially our family life.” Eileen adds, “When our kids go through hard times, we’re always checking in with one another. ‘Is everybody okay here? Do we all feel like this is where God has called us?’” Serving as a family has always been the Goodmans’ priority, and even though their kids are now older, they still emphasize that mindset, challenging them, “You need to find a place to serve. This is what we do.”

Each of the Goodman kids processed the transitions from South Asia to the U.S. to Europe in his or her own way. Madison is grateful they left Iman when they did. She was ready to be done with the ever-increasing limitations on where she could go, what she could wear and who she could talk to. She also says Iman was a really good place to grow up. She’s now launching into adulthood and Frank and Eileen are delighted to see her pursuing ministry among refugees on her own initiative.

The Goodmans’ younger daughter, Laura, struggled more with the move to the U.S. She complained to her parents, “Iman was so much safer than America.” That may be because when they were in South Asia, the Goodmans constantly mitigated security risks. That lifestyle felt normal and safe to her. Like most people in Iman, the Goodmans had walls around their yard and an unarmed security guard on duty all day and night. He served as a sort of bouncer, screening visitors at the gate.

Fortunately, the house the Goodmans moved into in the U.S. had a fenced-in front yard, but it was nowhere near as imposing as their concrete block wall in Iman. Visitors could open the gate and walk right up to the front door. Laura felt exposed and unsafe for the first few months. Over time, she adjusted and even enjoyed aspects of life in the U.S., but when they landed in Europe she told her parents, “It’s so good to be back in Asia.” Laura knew they weren’t technically in Asia, but the atmosphere felt familiar. Frank and Eileen are grateful that all three of their kids still speak fondly of Iman. All of them want to go back to visit, especially the oldest two who have more memories there.

Starting Over

The Goodmans arrived on the Mediterranean coast in the summer of 2015. Eileen describes the transition as “lots of stresses and firsts.” For two months they lived in a tiny apartment overlooking a run-down neighborhood. Madison and Laura shared a bed and Ryan, the youngest, slept on the couch. They didn’t have a car. Eileen had been dreading homeschooling but got started with it. Madison struggled with the transition to an online curriculum. She missed the interaction and friendships of her school in the States. Ryan often cried, missing his cousins, friends he had made in the U.S. and the toys he left behind.

It hurt Eileen to watch her kids struggle. She wondered, Can I trust the Lord with their hearts? Over time, though, everyone adjusted. Homeschooling wasn’t as bad as Eileen had feared. The kids’ desire to make friends drove them to work hard at learning the local language and soon they were busy with hobbies and social activities. Frank had an easier time settling in than the rest of the family. Just a few days after arriving, he started an English-language MBA program at a public university. The classes provided an opportunity to learn some local culture and build relationships with staff and other students.

After a few months, the Goodmans moved to a nicer apartment. Eileen started to enjoy that she could blend in much more in Europe than in South Asia. She could wear what she wanted, go where she wanted and talk to anyone she could manage to communicate with through English, Kaumi or snippets of the local language. She remembers, “It was nice to not have to worry about adapting to the culture every time I stepped out the door.”

The Goodmans were also excited to discover that the Lord had moved several missionary families they knew from South Asia to the same city in Europe that summer. “It was like being with extended family,” Eileen explains, “because we had so many shared experiences.” The Goodmans had been planning the transition for years with no idea that southern Europe would become the epicenter of a massive refugee crisis the summer they arrived. In 2015, almost a million migrants poured into Europe, fleeing war and persecution in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Many arrived in coastal cities by boat and many of them were Kaumi. Eileen points out, “God had a number of us in place to help receive them. I thought, Look at You, Lord. You’re so good at being prepared.”

Within days of the Goodmans’ arrival, word spread through the missionary and refugee communities that a Kaumi speaker with ministry experience had arrived and was available to help. Eileen found herself inundated with invitations to lead Bible studies and run programs for refugees. “We saw God using the decade we spent in Iman to open doors in Europe,” she remembers. “It gave us credibility. That was encouraging.”

Lingua(s) Franca

One of the factors that attracted the Goodmans to Europe was that they could jump into ministry with Kaumi refugees without having to learn a new language first. Many residents of their city spoke English, which meant Frank and Eileen could function right from the beginning. They both wanted to reach at least a base level in the local language but didn’t anticipate spending a lot of time on it. Frank had always found the Kaumi language to be a struggle. He had been able to manage the humanitarian project in Iman because the staff adapted to his vocabulary, but he never felt completely comfortable in extended conversations. Eileen reached a high fluency in Kaumi, but they both hit an unexpected language wall in Europe: They weren’t just working with Kaumi people.

A lot of the South Asian refugees streaming into their city in 2015 were from a culturally and linguistically similar but distinct people group called the Mobarek. If you picture the Indo-Persian language family of South Asia as a tree, Kaumi and Mobarek are closely related branches. The basic grammatical structure is the same, but a lot of vocabulary differs because each branch incorporates loan words from different source languages. Kaumi speakers usually understand Mobarek, but to Mobarek speakers, Kaumi sounds awkward, almost like Shakespearean English to an American.

For their first few years in Europe, Frank and Eileen intentionally focused on increasing their Mobarek comprehension and vocabulary, mainly by listening to podcasts, sermons and other recordings. Frank now finds it easier to follow conversations in Mobarek than in Kaumi. God even used Frank and Eileen to help bridge the language and cultural gaps between Mobarek and Kaumi friends who didn’t always have the patience to understand one another. “It’s just been really sweet to be a part of that process,” Eileen says.

The unexpected effort required to function in Mobarek limited Frank and Eileen’s ability to pursue the local European language, but they slowly chipped away at it. “Our heads felt like they were exploding a bit,” Eileen remembers.

Finding a Fit

Having learned from their experience in Iman, Frank and Eileen now approached their life in Europe with an attitude of facilitating each other’s individual ministry visions. In addition to his graduate studies, Frank became the finance director of a humanitarian aid organization that served a large refugee camp. On a single day at the peak of the migrant crisis, more than 10,000 people made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean from Turkey and North Africa. They arrived in overcrowded rubber rafts to seek asylum in the European Union. The rafts were designed to hold about 15 people, but smugglers often loaded as many as 50. And that was after many of them had endured a difficult journey by land from South Asia.

In his role as finance director, Frank mainly worked from an office in the city rather than directly with refugees, but he visited the camp occasionally. Near the end of 2015, he went out to help clean the reception center where boats carrying refugees first landed. The center was just a chain-link fence and a few tents designed to corral people in orderly lines while they waited to board buses to the main camp.

As Frank cleaned and organized the area, a single rubber raft with an outboard motor landed on the rocky beach. About 20 people were aboard. The weather had been terrible and hardly anyone attempted the crossing that day. Suddenly, Frank recognized one of the new arrivals as part of the facilities staff at the office he had managed in Iman. Frank called his name and soon found himself hugging the young man. “It was kind of weird,” he says, “because we weren’t close friends. And it was shocking to see him as a refugee.” The Goodmans kept in touch and heard that he eventually settled in Germany.

Dreams Do Come True

While Frank spent the majority of his time focusing on humanitarian work, Eileen poured herself into leadership training to empower South Asian believers—both Kaumi and Mobarek—to plant churches and start multiplying Bible studies. In South Asia, small groups of believers struggled just to survive and they shared the gospel in their communities at great risk. But Europe was home to many Mobarek and Kaumi Christians, and they faced far less opposition to reaching and discipling their own people than they had in their homelands. Eileen celebrated that the believing refugee community was strong enough that she could play a supporting role. She remembered her longing back in Iman: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do ministry-focused leadership training for women? In southern Europe, she did exactly that. “So many dreams have come true for ministry here,” she says.

Eileen also taught English classes to help newly arrived refugees integrate into European society. English skills helped them find jobs wherever they eventually settled. One day, Eileen walked into class and a student excitedly announced, “I met Marzia, who used to work for you in Iman.” Eileen peppered him with questions and showed him a picture of Marzia to verify it was her friend. Eileen had wondered if she might turn up because she had always longed for a better life and had the kind of courage it takes to make it along the refugee corridor from South Asia to Europe.

Marzia had been looking for Eileen, too. She and her kids fled Iman when her abusive husband, who had abandoned them and taken a second wife, returned to try to take the children to an extremist school. She was asking every American she met if they knew the Goodmans. Eileen was thrilled when they finally reconnected and considered it a precious gift to have a friend in Europe she had known for more than a decade. At the same time, it was hard to see Marzia and her children struggling.

Many of the women Eileen ministered to fled their homelands not because of bombs and bullets, but to escape husbands who beat them and tried to sell their daughters as child brides. The mothers, powerless under Islamic law and a broken legal system, ran toward hope in Europe. The school where Eileen taught had to hire teachers for what they called “pre-beginner” classes. Many of the women who were trying to learn English so they could get jobs in Europe were illiterate in any language. One of the volunteers’ eyes widened when Eileen explained that she would have to teach adults how to hold a pencil.

Just as in Iman, God sometimes spoke to refugee women through dreams. One day, as Eileen led a discussion group for South Asian refugees interested in learning about Jesus, a woman stood up and announced, “I am a Muslim, but I come to these classes to learn about the Holy Book. I had a dream and Mary and Jesus appeared to me. Jesus was dressed in white, and Mary told me to tell you that everything these people are telling and teaching us is true.” Then she plopped back down in her seat. Eileen knew the village in South Asia where she and her family, none of whom were yet believers, used to live. Years earlier, all the missionaries in that area had to leave due to security concerns. They couldn’t have guessed where and how the Lord would continue to work in the lives of people they had tried to reach.

As with the missionary community, Eileen found that her experience in South Asia opened doors and established credibility with refugees. She explains, “So many times I’ll introduce myself when I’m teaching and share how much we love the Kaumi people and loved raising our kids in their homeland. Later on in the conversation, they’ll be talking about trauma or pain or sadness, and they’ll look directly at me and say, ‘You understand. You were there.’”

Eileen couldn’t always relate to their trauma, but she identified on a deep level with anything related to Kaumi culture. “It’s a heart connection and it takes down walls,” she says. “They just break out in smiles when I talk about how much our family loved life in Iman, especially the food. And then they start bringing me food, which I love. Out of their nothingness, they want to bless us.”

Frank and Eileen saw so much value in having people with experience in South Asia serving refugees in Europe that they lobbied their regional leader to designate their city as a “strategic waiting place” for the missionaries still working in Iman. Should it be necessary for the team to pull out of South Asia, the Goodmans volunteered to help plug them into ministry among Kaumi refugees in Europe, either temporarily or long-term.

A Different Kind of Faithfulness

“Ministry here is just fun,” Eileen says. “That makes faithfulness and perseverance a lot easier.” Frank points out that South Asia required a different kind of faithfulness. “We all pray that God would use us for His purposes and glory. Sometimes we have grand images of what that will be like. Yet when He selects us for the nitty-gritty, quiet or behind-the-scenes work, do we willingly accept the challenge of faithful obscurity?” In Iman, the Goodmans had to be faithful in an ambiguous and constantly changing ministry situation. There were no local churches to partner with. Church planting looked different than they imagined because new believers faced persecution.

Over time, Frank learned to be patient, to take advantage of every small opportunity and to prioritize humanitarian projects as meaningful ministry in their own right. That experience shaped the way he approaches ministry now in Europe. “During our time in Iman, God led me to see that part of my being faithful to His work is to be involved in the humanitarian side, even if there isn’t a lot of opportunity to share my faith or do biblical discipleship.”

In whatever circumstances Frank and Eileen find themselves, now or in the future, the one thing they count on to never change is the faithfulness of God. “Our perseverance comes from the Lord,” Eileen emphasizes. “He gives us the strength to keep on going—the energy, the focus, the drive and the inspiration. Any faithfulness we have comes out of that strength.”