I fell in love with a guy whose background is very different from mine. He grew up in a large Baptist family that all went to church together twice on Sundays. Both his parents each had 7 siblings and most of his cousins lived locally and took part in or led youth groups during the week. You could say that the Church was the family center. Jan Franzon had read the Bible through and through and you could say he had read most of what there is to read about God, the holy spirit and Jesus. But by the time he reached his teens he felt like he had been to a spiritual banquet and was fed up. His was far from the life of a third culture kid!
Jan met the task force that I grew up in in his twenties and fell in love with it. He felt that all he learnt finally gave a practical meaning to all he had learnt in the Bible and at church. He met people whose lifestyle really attracted him. He felt like their lives were fully engaged in putting theory into practice. They seemed to be putting his former ideals into everyday experience. He discovered how the lofty words of the Bible, like those of the sermon on the mount where Jesus laid out the principles of how to live, could now become practical. These people distilled these truths into everyday living and strived to live absolutely honest, absolutely loving, absolutely pure and absolutely unselfish lives. Every day, not just on Sundays. They also added a further dimension of Jesus’ teachings that is often forgotten. In the Bible it says that Jesus left his holy spirit to guide us. Jan discovered how this was more than reading the Bible. These people spent time listening daily for this guidance and when Jan tried it, he found new direction, purpose and joy in his life.
When I first met Jan, I was amused and struck by how he always questioned the status quo as if it was his right to do so.
The spark of faith, love and joy in life that Jan discovered and that my parents had found working with Frank Buchman stayed alive when people lived out these principles to the full. But there were times when that spark was lost. When it didn’t provide direction, purpose or joy in life.
As a child I had been taught about those 4 guiding principles and how I too could listen for guidance. They were part of my life right from the start. They were part of that connection and love I had for Jesus too. They gave me a secure foundation that has been there all my life. But there were times when I struggled. I can remember how one of my cousins came to visit when I was 5. When he woke up in the morning he jumped out of bed and started playing. I had been taught to have a time of quiet first and although I remember how I questioned it inwardly, I didn’t question that I had to have my quiet time and pray first as I had been taught obedience. But there is another aspect to this kind of discipline as I learnt not to think but rather to follow.
It took a long time for me to learn how important it is to review ‘the given’. That it is even allowed and necessary in order to be able to evaluate, think, recreate or even create a framework or structure that is my own. The person who has provided the greatest security and support in my life is my husband. It is with him that I have been free to evaluate all I learnt growing up and discover how to become who I am purposed to be, free to think and to be my creative self.
You could say that Jan and I took up where my parents left off within the same organization. But that organization had changed dramatically in the past 50 or more years. It was no longer led by the initiator who was sculpting and training a task force to remake the world morally and spiritually before and after the 2nd world war. It had passed through phases of different names and leaders and had spread worldwide so that there were now many centers around the world and less task forces. The idealism and mobility of the work my parents started off in had become a lifestyle and no longer had the same original spark.
When the world leaders of MRA, Frank Buchman and Peter Howard died a lot changed. They were original thinkers. Many of those who led in different capacities after that could be seen more as followers. But conferences continued to be held, plays and musicals that transmitted the message that if you want to change the world you need to start with yourself continued to be created much as before. But through the years self-made leaders put down roots and even though we maintained a common international focus and inspiration the original life-changing spark was challenged. Roots provide strength but can also limit growth and movement. For many, family life became their framework life experience, even though international focus and team building remained the organization’s focus worldwide. And yet the spark lived on through several generations.
In reality it was a release to me when I fell in love with a man who was new to this lifestyle!
It was a true privilege to have been brought up in that rarified atmosphere – but was this something I wanted for my future going forward? I loved my varied, traveling life, the friendships and connections. Was this something I wanted for our family life if we had children?
I remember walking with my newly wedded husband one winter in HALMSTAD. We passed an area where all the houses were much the same. It was dark and snowy and all the houses were well-lit. In Sweden you don’t close out the dark with curtains and you could see all the families going about their evenings – enjoying a meal, watching TV – being together. The houses all looked the same but even if I personally prefer artistic originality I remember thinking: ‘I long to live somewhere like that!’ To be like all the others on the same street!
After we married I moved to Sweden and we lived in a beautiful home which hundreds of people had clubbed together after World War II to buy as an embassy for the work of MRA in Stockholm. A wonderful place to live and bring up a family, but was this what we felt we were called to do as a couple and a family? We wanted to bring change in the world and the idea of 26 people living together and looking after eachother didn’t quite meet up to our hopes or ideals. During those years we attempted to bring about some structural changes that would have made it possible for many families to live there and work alongside, but the elders living there were not ready for that kind of change and we didn’t feel that our job was to perpetuate the embassy lifestyle with over 20 others.
Both our children were born during these 3 years we lived in Stockholm. We had friends and family in Zimbabwe and lived into the intense struggles during the civil war in Zimbabwe. I had 60 close family members living there at the time and we were drawn to work in Zimbabwe with a team who were heavily involved in bringing a peaceful solution after years of unrest and civil war. Now that the time had come to start rebuilding the country that had been torn apart by war, the organization we worked with had been given a farm in the middle of the country called Coolmoreen. After we expressed interest to come to Zimbabwe we were invited to live there, help to run the farm and be part of building up this center for peace building and we decided to take our family to Zimbabwe.
Even though we had a calling to work there I was afraid of taking our small children into what was still a war zone. At the bottom of all this was the deep-rooted fear of being out in the dark since the time in Oslo when a man tried to grab me in the dark on my way to see my grandfather. I am not a great Bible-reader, but one day as I struggled with our plans, I opened my Bible and the first thing I read was a verse that I didn’t write down and never found again. It said something like: the safest place to be is where God wants you to be. That sealed it for me and we started to book our journey.
They had a lack of cars at Coolmoreen so we decided to take a car with us! Over a hundred people contributed to the only new car that we ever bought. Our bright red Datsun Bluebird was shipped to Durban and we flew to Johannesburg where the Children and I stayed with friends while Jan flew to Durban to pick up the car.
Our Zimbabwean adventure started with a long drive. We were stopped by military on the way. They poked their machine guns into the car and asked is to hand over our papers repeatedly. The Children were amazingly unphased by this whole new world! This was early December 1980 and we drove north through Zimbabwe to spend Christmas with over 30 of my relatives in the Horseshoe area north of Mvurwi. My cousin David was a tobacco farmer and his family lived there in a complex of beautiful big rondavels. My aunts, many of our cousins and their families came for to church and dinner on Christmas Day. It was an amazing experience to be welcomed by family, including my father’s sister Vi who had often looked after me in my early years. It was hot and we ‘lived’ in their pool. Jan asked jokingly if we should change for dinner! But it was not taken as a joke – we all changed for dinner!
After Christmas we took off south, past Harare and on to Gweru and Coolmoreen Farm. This was to be our home for two years.
The farm was started by Nancy Brereton’s Irish father who had moved to Gweru as a police officer. She had recently given the farm to be used for reconciliation work by a team of people working with moral re-armament and she lived in a cottage on the farm. She managed the vegetable garden with Timot who twice a week, piled his bicycle high with vegetables and fruit delivered orders on his way to town where he sold the rest.
Peter and Jean Loch had come from their own farm in Kenya, to manage the farm at Coolmoreen, the farm workers and their homes. This involved caring for the cows, insemination, birthing calves, milking and selling milk to the milk board. They grew fields of pumpkins and white maize known in Zim as mealies. Every year the mealie stalks were cut and run through a chopping machine for days on end to be mixed with molasses in a huge silage pit, for the cows to eat the following year. They also built new housing with electricity and water, for the workers and their families. The care of the hens, the incubators and the sales of day-old and week-old chicks was Jeans responsibility. She was a nurse and also ran a farm clinic twice daily for the 100 or so people who lived on the farm. They had brought their golden labs Bodger and Simba and had by then been there for 2 years without a break.
We all ate our meals together in the main house but we lived in smaller houses that lay within the farm enclosure. The Lochs lived in a rondavel – the traditional round Zimbabwean house with a thatched roof. Nancy lived in the little cottage she had grown up in and we were to live in a black painted building that had previously been the henhouse, between the rondavel and close to the incubator and chick house.
Our henhouse opened into a mini-kitchen with a little sink where we brushed our teeth before going in to the larger room where we slept. I would lie on the floor while the Children, who were 2 and 4, relaxed and fell asleep. After a week or so we were all covered in small itchy bites and one evening as I lay on the floor, I began to see lots of small insects jumping around! Fleas! The chickens’ fleas obviously ruled the roost so it was decided that we should move up to two small rooms in Nancy’s tiny cottage. We invested in pine bunk beds and after a serious debugging we moved in with Nancy and her two dogs Pooch and Rover. Nancy was a true original who we came to love and enjoy. It probably wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for her to take in the four of us but she never complained! She was a born gardener and taught us how to plant trees, grow bananas and pawpaws. We learnt that if you ever want to grow and eat your own pawpaw, both male and female plants are necessary. She would hold her ring on a thread above the tree to see if it was male or female which she could tell by seeing if it circled clockwise or anti-clockwise!
Two weeks after arrival at Coolmoreen the Lochs told us that they had planned a 6-month sabatical to Britain. They were leaving the farm to us but they had also invited Mike and Marguerite Horn to join us from South Africa to provide us with support! They had farmed for years but as they didn’t arrive immediately we had to jump in at the deep end. We started by inviting ourselves to the parents of Kjersti’s classmates. Most of her classmates families were farmers in the area and we chose which farm to visit depending on the problems we were facing on the farm!
An insemination program had been introduced at Coolmoreen by a farmer from the US. The bulls must have been huge because the small Zimbabwean cows had a hard time giving birth! The team on the farm embarked on reconciliation meetings around Zimbabwe and were away most weekends. The cows obviously didn’t know this because they gave birth every weekend without fail! I would get a knock on my door and Shepherd would ask me to come and help! I was alone with our Children so we trouped down to the dairy as if we knew what we were doing. Invariably it was a breech birth and Shepherd would say, “MaKjersti – what shall we do?” and my response was always “What would you do if it was your cow?” And when he told me I said, “Well that’s what we will do!” We didn’t lose a single calf but when the Horns came, they suggested we get an African bull and stop the insemination program!
We had our own little menagerie on the farm. The Lochs dogs Simba and were lovingly taken over by Kjersti and Joffe. There was a small orchard of citrus tree between the farm buildings and in season we would each pick a clementine when we took the dogs for our evening walk.
The children were each given a rabbit and lambs who they named Emily and Daniel after a favourite book. One day when we were looking around the area that we had fenced off for the rabbits Jan trod into what seemed like a hole – but was the underground warren where Mamma Rabbit had her first brood of baby rabbits Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. They didn’t have much in the way of toys and the baby rabbit became their favourites!
Despite my nomadic life I had all my schooling in English and felt that having schooling in one language was important. Kjersti did her first school year in Zimbabwe but as we reached the start of school in Sweden I became more and more certain that once she turned 7 her schooling should be in one language – Swedish.
My father’s closest brother gave my parents a beautiful heavy gold clock as a wedding present. It may have been heavy but that clock went with us on all our journeys. In their turn, my parents gave us a symbolic clock when we were married and just as it was for my parents, whenever we unpacked that clock we were home!
I longed for my children to have what I hadn’t had. A place to wake up to day after day and not simply a symbol of home – like the clock on the mantelpiece that I grew up with. Our Children are also third culture kids. The farm they grew up in is no longer there, nor are many of my relatives or the team we worked with. Our Swedish home base was Alnäs in Stockholm which had been home to Jan and me but one that our children barely remembered. But we still felt drawn to spreading our wings and working in another part of Sweden. It also felt important for us to create the family framework that our children needed moving forward and we invited my parents to move to Sweden and join us in Arvika.
In Arvika we lived in a house that was just like all the others on the same street. My parents moved into the tiny top floor. But would we ever feel like others on the same street taking into account the world-wide network that we were still engaged in daily? This was our normal life but strange to others!
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