B5 JOURNEY FROM OBEDIENCE TO JOY

Abstract

My pilgrimage begins with my own experience of living on the immigrant margins. I was born on a dairy farm in Friesland, the Netherlands, and lived there my first five years. When my family emigrated from the Netherlands to California, we moved from a place where we had been rooted for generations to a place where we were the new immigrants. This uprooting defined my early formative years as we found ourselves in this unknown and foreign land. When I started kindergarten, I understood little of what was said around me and I did not speak the entire year. Outwardly I may not have looked that different, but I felt like “the other.” I knew we were different.