My Passport Doesn’t Tell My Whole Story

Description

What if the country on your passport is supposed to be “home”—but it doesn’t feel like home at all?

For Third Culture Kids, growing up overseas can be an incredible adventure. You experience different cultures, make friends from around the world, learn new ways of living, and develop a view of the world that many people never experience. But when it is time to return to your passport country, the transition can bring unexpected questions:

Where do I really belong? Why do I feel different here? Why does everyone expect me to understand a culture that feels unfamiliar? Is it okay to miss the place I left behind? And where is God in all of this?

My Passport Doesn’t Tell My Whole Story was written for TCKs—and for the parents who love them. Timothy W. Dailey writes from the perspective of a father who raised some of his own children overseas and had to learn firsthand the joys, struggles, losses, and challenges that can come with cross-cultural family life and returning “home.”

Written especially with junior-high and high-school-aged readers in mind, the book talks honestly about friendships, culture shock, family relationships, homesickness, identity, faith, belonging, and the surprising strengths that come from growing up between cultures. It also helps parents better understand what their children may be experiencing and how to walk beside them through the transition.

This is not a book for one nationality or one part of the world. Whether your passport is Filipino, Indian, American, British, African, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, or from anywhere else, the TCK experience crosses national borders. The cultures may be different, but many of the questions of identity, loss, adjustment, and belonging are remarkably similar.

Most importantly, this book reminds young people that they do not have to reject one culture to embrace another. Every friendship, language, country, goodbye, new beginning, and experience can become part of the person God is shaping them to be.

Your passport tells people where you belong on a map. It doesn’t tell them your whole story.