Susanna Montgomery grew up in Chicago with all the benefits of middle-class American life — electricity, running water, the Internet. But after spending more than a year in poverty-stricken Niger, where she saw rampant hunger and disease, she has just one thing on her mind.
Going back.
“Once you do something overseas, especially in the Third World, you can’t be satisfied living the opulent and self-centered life in America,” said Montgomery, whose parents are Christian missionaries in Niger.
Montgomery, a Speech junior, is one of several Northwestern students with missionary work in their backgrounds who say they plan to follow their parents into lives of service abroad.
Ian Ludwig spent the past 15 years in Taipei, Taiwan, where his parents are missionaries. Now a Weinberg freshman, Ludwig said he plans to return to Taiwan.
“With my past and my experience, I think that it’s the way that God would want to use me,” he said. “To me, Taiwan is home.”
Part of Ludwig’s missionary work involved comforting lepers at a leprosarium — a hospital for people with leprosy. He said lepers are treated as outcasts in Taiwan and rarely receive kind gestures.
“If you just give them a handshake, they’ll start crying,” he said.
Because he was only 3 when he moved, Ludwig said he felt more comfortable living in Taiwan than he does in his country of birth.
Students returning from missionary work often have colorful stories of life abroad.
Montgomery recalled a one-legged farmer in Niger who cultivated a flourishing garden with the help of missionaries. Many of the farmers in Niger were using century-old techniques that don’t work with the depleted soil, she said.
People learned from his techniques, she said.
Jeremy Hunsucker, a Weinberg freshman, spent six years in Hong Kong with his parents, who are Baptist missionaries.
His parents’ missionary work allowed him to visit Thailand and Indonesia and scale the Great Wall of China. On a hiking trip to India, he visited the Mahatma Ghandi memorial and met with a friend of Ghandi’s.
“India was quite a unique experience,” Hunsucker said. “You can’t imagine what Calcutta is like until you get there. There’s so much poverty everywhere.”
Students said they were proud to improve the blighted conditions of the countries in which they lived.
For the past five years, Montgomery’s parents have worked for the Serving In Missions program in Niger. The organization has founded a hospital, a leprosarium, a school literacy program and an agricultural program.
But the life abroad can lead to feelings of alienation once they return to America.
“It was really hard,” Montgomery said. “I came back expecting it to be home and (instead) I came back and everything seemed different. It took a year to feel like I belonged again.”
Some children of missionaries participate in “assimilation camps” before returning to the United States. There they are re-schooled in American norms and folk ways, said Ludwig, who did not attend such a camp.
Unlike most of his friends, who enrolled in small Christian colleges, Ludwig said NU was his first choice. He said he wanted to go to a larger secular school and get away from a “sheltered environment.”
Though he lived in Taiwan for most of his life, Ludwig said he has had few problems adjusting to the NU culture.
“The first couple of weeks I hung around with a lot of Asian students,” he said. “Having people to talk to and relate to helped a lot.”
Hunsucker said his transition was fairly easy, but that it took some time to get used to Americans again.
Despite occasional hardships and the sometimes difficult return to American culture, students emphasize the positive aspects of the missionary experience.
“Now I try to make giving a part of my life,” Montgomery said. “I want my children to be missionary kids just so they can have the experiences that I had and learn the things I learn. You can’t duplicate that.”
