To the outside world I had an idyllic childhood. My younger sister and I grew up on a small farm on the Mid-North Coast of NSW. My mother and father had immigrated independently from England and Germany respectively, and met in Sydney. They were both adventurers at heart and initially were not planning on having children. My father was very keen to have a daughter however and I....
Growing up I was securely oriented in a small Pennsylvanian town, with a loving family and little church, where my dad was the pastor. My world was safe and it made sense. I trusted in the goodness of God and the future. When I was 18 years old, I found my way to a small liberal arts college, where I studied the Bible. I fully expected that these studies would increase my c....
From as far back as I can remember I have felt lost and unwanted. I was born in Vietnam in 1991. My parents were not married and my father tried to convince my mother to have an abortion. My mother refused. She wanted to give me life. When I was nine months old my mother and I moved to Russia. When I was five my mother met my step-father and they decided to have a …....
I have always loved school. I loved hanging out with my friends each day, being part of the school community and being inspired by the teachers around me. I even loved the pressure and structure of assignments and assessment tasks. Call me crazy, but I just loved everything about it. I loved it so much that I didn’t want to leave it. As the last day of Year 12 got closer and ....
My story begins in 1939, on the gently rolling plains of Minnesota, USA. My parents, were both children of European immigrants, my mother was German and my father, Swedish. My father was a farmer and my four older siblings and I learned from an early age how to be useful around the farm; collecting eggs, feeding pigs, milking cows, helping out in the corn field. I was a shy chi....
