Friends, there is a giveaway ofPassages Through Pakistan on Goodreads! It ends on June 7th, and two books will be given away. In honor of the giveaway, I've included an excerpt from the book on friendship and loss. I hope you enjoy! Also - the electronic version of Passages will be released on June 15!
Friendships formed in our small community were and are unique. We forged relationships with likely and unlikely people, and they occupied our hearts and souls. Together we faced birth, death, tragedy, sickness, political instability, separation from blood relatives, car accidents, boarding school, tension in relationships, food rations, and so much more.
These memories and events were woven together into an immense tapestry. But unless cared for, a tapestry gets loose threads, and those threads can unravel into holes - holes of too many goodbyes, unraveling of loss. We push the losses aside, dismiss the goodbyes as just part of life, part of being third culture kids.
But buried losses don't stay buried. Like a submarine, they eventually surface, and we realize that they were never gone. So our griefs, our goodbyes, would surface later in life, like angry monsters demanding a redo of the goodbyes, demanding time to grieve the losses, demanding another chance. But we get only one chance at childhood. When that childhood is lived thousands of miles and oceans away from the place you live as an adult, you can't go back. When our childhood is good and lived with a sense of wonder, it outweighs the pain and grief that came along the way. We may long to recreate it, perhaps because in it we see something of what the world should be, what the world could be. But recreating it is an impossibility, and in our case, even revisiting the places and people was impossible.
...Like so many things in childhood, I didn't know what I had until I lost it.
I didn't realize the extraordinary community I had around me until I was no longer in Pakistan, until I had to forge my way in the rocky and seemingly hostile territory of my passport country.
From Passages Through Pakistan: An American Girl's Journey of Faith, pp 104 a 105, Tonga Rides
Enter the giveaway here! Purchase Passages Through Pakistan here."Passages Through Pakistan" on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/211505298?ref=em-v-share
