Every few years a missionary family is expected to come “home” to the US, for an extended visit called a furlough. The immediate point is to promote the mission project to the congregations whose donations support the missionary. The family also sees family, gets medical checkups with doctors who are more trusted than those available in the “field,” and so on.
At a deeper level, the furlough has the function of defining and maintaining the boundaries within which a missionary and his family are expected to “go native” under the mission model in use. There is a range of choices in this. Some mission projects see their missionaries as more or less permanent parts of the lands they live in. They move in for good, adopt the local dress and language in their homes; if they have children while doing this they sometimes give them names from the adopted culture. Their furloughs tend to be far apart, sometimes skipped altogether. Many of the grown children end up missionaries themselves, and sometimes they grow up to identify themselves as part of the country where they live. People who do it this way tend to be from the more fervid wings of old-line Protestant denominations, like the Methodists, some of which got their start in missionary work in the first decades of the 20th century. The model was not so popular with the new wave of evangelical missionaries after the second World War.
The wholesale emigrant model includes a similar degree of lifelong commitment to the project, and also the unusually high religious fervor, but the emigrants are not as interested in assimilation. In Central America we ran into occasional communities of Mennonites and Quakers who looked and behaved, as far as one could tell, exactly like their counterparts in rural Pennsylvania or Iowa. They wore the gingham dresses and bib overalls, spoke with European accents, and raised chickens or cattle pretty much as their ancestors had in the old country. They were present in foreign lands for religious reasons, but you couldn’t really call them missionaries. But like the more mainstream missionaries, their relationships with the people around them tended to eventually adapt to the familiar patron-client pattern that was so deeply rooted in Latin American economies since the colonial period.
There are lots of variations on this. One school that we went to in Costa Rica was run by an elderly Quaker couple named Bob and Marian Baker, who had moved to Costa Rica during the Vietnam war because, without an army, it seemed like a good place for pacifists. They were part of a community of maybe a few hundred Quaker families that had made the move for similar reasons. The Quakers had quickly become taken up a slot in the local economy as small farmers and traders. They kept speaking English, and sent their kids to college in the US, and in their social lives seemed to mix mostly with Americans and Europeans, but they had Costa Rican passports and didn’t intend to go back to the States. They lived in ordinary middle-class conditions, if there is such a thing, and not on common farms like the Mennonites.
Even the Mennonites had some variety. I had a friend in junior high school with the resonant name Ransford Heatwole, from a Virginia Mennonite family that had broken with the hyper-traditionalists and taken up missionary work on a model similar to the one my Dad was practicing. Their ways still placed them on the more conservative fringe of the missionaries we knew – for girls, dresses only; for men, those Abraham Lincoln beards – but their lives looked pretty much like ours otherwise.
After the war, the US pastor or lay person called to missionary service for a few years became the norm. Even among career missionaries like my Dad, who expected to spend their whole working lives in the “field,” there was little thought of integrating into the local society. Most of the people we knew assumed they would retire the way other preachers did, near their folks back home. My parents would occasionally poke fun at their own grandparents with jokes about never going back to the “old country,” but they never forgot where their center of gravity was.
We first visited the US in 1972. When you are a young child, the only place that’s real is the place where you are, and even one year is a long time to be anywhere. After four years in Lima, most of my knowledge about the US came from hearing my parents talking about it. They had not yet lost the habit of comparing and contrasting the way things were done locally to the way they were done in the US, almost always to the disadvantage of the local way. I remember being vaguely aware that there were wide streets and freeways without potholes in the US, and grandparents, and apples, peaches and evergreen trees.