My Family Culture: Week 2

Blog: My Family Culture
Imagine the following:

A major catastrophe has almost completely devastated the infrastructure of your country. The emergency government has decided that the surviving citizens will be best served if they are evacuated to other countries willing to take refugees. You and your immediate family are among the survivors of this catastrophic event. However, you have absolutely no input into the final destination or in any other evacuation details. You are told that your host country’s culture is completely different from your own, and that you might have to stay there permanently. You are further told that, in addition to one change of clothes, you can only take 3 small items with you. You decide to take three items that you hold dear and that represent your family culture.


The three items that I would choose would be our children's birth certificates, our family bible, and the family scrapbook.  I would choose our children's birth certificates because that would be all they would have of their origin, complete with their names, birth dates, our names, and our town where they were born.  It would be a lasting piece of their identity.  I would take our family Bible, as it is the basis of our religion for our family.  The words in the Bible can bring comfort, identity, belonging, and peace, all things that our family would be missing during this chaos.  For our family, our Bible is the only book that we would need to find all the answers that we would be asking.  Finally, the last item I would take would be a scrapbook that I made for my firstborn, in the weeks prior to her birth while we were waiting for her arrival.  This scrapbook contains pictures of my husbands and my grandparents, parents, and our sisters/brothers and their families.  It also contains birth dates for everyone, a small description of each person, and some words of wisdom from them about life in general.  I created this in order for my daughter to know the important people in her life and would take it with us as a remembrance of our extended family that we probably would have lost contact with.

If upon arrival in our new country we were told we could only keep one thing, I would keep our family Bible.  I would be able to write the important dates of their births and birthplaces in the pages, along with the names and information that is found in the scrapbook.  The Bible would then contain all three items in one, and would remain the backbone of our family's faith.  Although I would be sad to lose the other two, in the end it is my children's eternal life that I am concerned more about then if they know where they were born.  The Bible would give them the most opportunity to share in our family's faith.

This exercise was one that I had to look at on Tuesday (when I usually get all my work done for the week) and I put it aside until today as I was almost sick to my stomach to think of this scenario.  I am one who doesn't watch the news because it fills me with uncertainty to think of the future difficulties that my children will face, so to think of a catastrophe such as this was one that I did not want to address right away.  It was also a little more difficult to think of what I would take with us based on culture, rather than immediate need as I was first thinking that I would take my children's comfort items (their bears & blankets that they sleep with every night) for their own security rather than the things that would give them cultural background.  Their immediate comfort, which would come from their security items, seemed more important to me at the time!