Ever had an experience you couldn’t stop talking about?

A baby’s birth? Perhaps an overseas holiday, or a great movie?

When I was young, a kid in a nearby primary school was desperate to tell his class how his Dad spent the previous night painting their new car a different colour – and changing the licence plates. The teacher broadened the kid’s education by phoning the police, who taught him what it’s like to have a father in prison.

Like the Ancient Mariner whose “heart within me burns”, for decades my heart burned to share stories about our volunteer experience in Samoa, and how that experience shaped my life. In Samoa, I began drafting vignettes with pencil and paper, writing weekly letters to family, and keeping a journal of our life-broadening education. Many vignettes found their way into my book Encounter, where they help provide the narrative with details that evoke immediacy and confirm authenticity.

Returning from Samoa in 1992, I soon discovered that writing demanded time that conflicted with work and family commitments. Raising a family, maintaining a house and paying the mortgage, not only devoured time, they also took up long term residence in my brain space. They conspired together to prevent my writing attempts progressing further than chapter one.

Instead, I added wisdom and maturity by raising two girls, burying my passing parents, learning to lead large multi-cultural teams around the world, and building a multi-million dollar business from scratch. Learning to shoulder the weight of responsibility, not just for my family’s welfare but the welfare of many families dependent on my leadership, enabled me to see Samoan leaders and communities in a more holistic and realistic perspective. I now see my younger person’s struggles with the clarity hindsight brings, and using an older person’s wisdom, understand the positive impact of my Samoan life on the decades that followed. This is the wisdom learned in the cauldron of shared suffering, the struggle to live in an alien culture in a least developed country, and the struggle resurrect a school in the aftermath of a devastating disaster.

Saleimoa Store after Cyclone Ofa

Knowing that perspective mellows with age, I’m also conscious our fickle memory preserves more mountain peak experiences than dark valleys, and tries to bathe our past in the glow of a golden age. I did not want to add yet another memoir that sanitises the past, or rewrites history by whitewashing unhappiness, or avoids inconvenient truths that conflict with people’s precious ideologies. I include details in vivid description and genuine dialog to confirm authenticity, and enable readers to identify with real people, feel the cockroach crushed underfoot, the sweat on their face and tears in their eyes.

To write Encounter honestly, I had to relive each experience. After writing for a few hours, I often felt emotionally exhausted, because while those relived experiences sometimes brought pleasure, they also brought trauma and tears. However, it was also cathartic, enabling me to process past actions, including those many in our contemporary world now frown upon. While some readers may disagree with my choices, I hope they take the opportunity to consider what they would do, if they truly walked in my shoes. I hope reading Encounter challenges people, whether they are travelers or not, to at least see their own culture through the eyes of another.

But I want my readers, whether expats, backpackers or suburban home dwellers, to experience more than the comedy, tragedy and drama of that time and place. I want them to face the same the dilemmas we faced – the real-world value judgments we had to make when all options available were bad. I want them to feel the culture shock, confusion, uncertainty, and frustration we all feel when we live in an alien culture we know almost nothing about, no matter how well-meaning and earnest we may be.

Me With Our Salvages Water Tank

I hope that by experiencing the Shakespearean truth that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, readers will be challenged to examine their lives, their culture and their worldview.

Finally, I hope they find answers to some of their deepest questions, and by finding truth, also find beauty and goodness. For telling good stories is a timeless way to help us understand the transcendent truth, beauty and goodness of God – those attributes of His character and essential elements of being that enable us to live with meaning and purpose.