August is now upon us, and as every teacher knows, that means September and the start of a new school year is just around the corner. We had been invited by William Carey Academy in Bangladesh to attend their preschool retreat in Malumghat and bring an inspirational message to the staff as they prepared for the start of the year.

I was also asked to prepare a series of lessons on teaching practice from my long years of experience, which I gladly agreed to. Both of these tasks occupied much of my time following our return to England, but there were few of us in the office and I had some peace and quiet to concentrate on the task.

So great was my focus that I had fail to adequately prepare myself for the emotional upheaval that going back to Bangladesh after so many years entailed. Although we had been involved in missions with Trans World Radio in southwestern Ontario since the early 80s, Bangladesh was our first overseas missionary adventure. We left in July of 1985 and arrived in the country with our three tiny children, aged 2, 4, and 5 with a great deal of trepidation

I was reminded of all the turmoil that this overseas service brought into our lives as we travelled down to Malumghat with a busload full of WCA teachers and arrived on the hospital compound where we had lived all those years ago. All those memories came flooding back lack in a tsunami of joy and regret, thrilling discovery and life-changing trials by fire.

Our old friend and missional colleague, Mary LeCouteur, still serving at the hospital since she herself  arrived in the mid-80s, had arranged for us to stay in the same house that we had lived in all those years ago. While we both appreciated the gesture, we were both near the edge of tears as we wandered through the rooms again, each one seemingly still filled with the sights and sounds of our children and our family life there.

Here were the paths we had walked with our children and colleagues, the school where I taught, the pool where we swam, the national school where I had first dreamed of starting a Christian school in that land that had been so arbitrarily dismissed by the field council, crushing my hope of returning as a fulltime missionary. So many hopes; so many regrets.

There was the house where our friends George and Deb Collins lived where their three children that all became our closest friends for that year. There was the home of Dick and Carol Stagg who had been our mentors and emotional supporters through our own struggles. There was the ghat, now bolstered by the silt of a hundred floods, now able to support rice paddies where once only salt flats were farmed.

Here was Bob Archibald in whose parent’s house we had stayed during our year on the field sharing about how he and our Mru gardener Adi’s son had just completed a translation of the New Testament into the Mru language. Adi would have been so thrilled!. There was Kum Kum Kyang, daughter of Twillafru Kyang who had serve us so faithfully and so well, now serving as a teacher at William Carey Academy.

My message on the principles of leadership that Paul outlines in his letters to Titus were well received and appreciated, and I was grateful to have the chance to give something back to a land and a people that had given so much to us. That year in Bangladesh might well have been the hardest we had ever been through as a family, but it was also the most formative in shaping our missional drive to serve the disadvantaged that remains with us to this day.

August 2022