When I was nine my family started a move from the tranquil suburbs of San Jose, California to the desert city of Windhoek, Namibia, located in southern Africa. My parents were taking myself, along with my younger sister and brother, around the globe because they felt a calling from God to be missionaries. All of our possessions were sold off, including my much beloved toys, until everything we had could fit into eight large suitcases. These suitcases are what we carried to the airport as we prepared for our journey. I felt no small amount of apprehension and excitement in what lay ahead of me in the new country, but an event I would experience in the coming flight would forever change and shape my perspective of how I see the …show more content…
“Play your game quietly, everything is fine,” my mother admonished me while pointing at the cheap handheld game in my lap. I did as I was told but my heart was not in it and I pretended to play my game while sneaking glances around. A curtain obstructed my view of the front half of the plane but after some time I could hear people speaking some language I didn’t understand, which I learned when I was older was Portuguese. After some time two men and a stewardess opened the curtain, the two men were holding rifles and scrutinizing everyone. I recall the stewardess saying to have your passports out and ready and then noticed almost everyone had their passports in their hand including my father which I hadn’t noticed until just …show more content…
Those men that stopped our plane were trying to find any of their political adversaries that might be on board and luckily they didn’t involve any non-related parties in their conflict that day. Our plane was the last large plane to land in Angola for a long time as that situation could have devolved into the horrific event. When I made this realization at the age of nine, the way I viewed the world around changed and brought with it a higher acknowledgement of my surroundings. Becoming aware that not everything in the world is safe and that there are dangers around that can bring you into its orbit can be seen as the death of innocence but I see it the acknowledgement of