Healing Comes Full Circle
More than thirty years ago, in my early days of overseas development work, I would often attend worship in Haitian batey churches in the Dominican Republic. (“Batey” is the Caribbean name for a residential area for workers on a plantation.) My children’s memories of this time include the anxiety of being asked to sit on the platform at the front of the church because we were one of the missionary families. This was often uncomfortable for us, but at the time we had little command of the language to express how we felt.