In Encounter, you share with readers your incredible experiences coping with culture shock, natural disaster, and classroom struggles while teaching at Leulumoega Fou College in Samoa in 1990. What did you most want to preserve about your time in Samoa?

I most wanted to capture the experience, what it taught me, and how it impacted my life following the experience.  In capturing the experience, I sought to make the story as immersive as possible for the reader.  I want them to feel what  I felt when they step on a cockroach in bare feet first thing in the morning, the sweat on their face, tears in their eyes, and how the constant confusion and uncertainty of cultural collision drags us down emotionally.  I want my readers to be as confused and uncertain as I was.  I want them to face the hard moral choices I faced, and leave them to make their own decisions – what would they do in that time and place?  What would they do now?  Most of all, I want to preserve the search for wisdom, understanding, meaning and purpose to all the hardship and suffering.  The reflective passages are there to help the reader reflect on the bigger picture, but with humility, acknowledging just how limited our knowledge and experience actually are or can be.  To make the book immersive, I re-read and studied authors who I thought had done that well – like Steinbeck, Dickens, Hemingway, Frank McCourt, and contemporary thriller writers John Le Carre, John Grisham, and Lee Child.  To help make scenes vivid, I returned to poets Shakespeare, TS Eliot, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tolkien.  For reflection, I turned to the way CS Lewis and Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife) wrote their reflective pieces.

How did you decide what to include versus what to leave out, especially in more vulnerable or unflattering moments?

My guiding principle was to be honest with whatever I put in, but the need to keep the word count to under 100,000 meant I had to cut a lot out.   I approached judgment of others by honestly sharing what they said and what they did so the reader could make their own judgment.  Unflattering moments and vulnerability are a necessary part of learning, but also necessary to show contrast.    The climb out of the valley of “badness”  is only meaningful if we first know how bad that valley was for us.

In the case where I did provide judgement (characters Helen, Tammy, and some others) I did so because it was necessary to show my changing understanding of them – how my initial judgement changed from unflattering to gaining wisdom.  This is most important, and most difficult for me to write about, in the case of my relationship with Helen, where my initial assessment slowly changes from someone I’m wary of, to someone I loved and cared for deeply.  (The “real” Helen passed away from breast cancer in 2007 as a young mother with two young boys; Tammy passed away in 2021 after a life of overseas service as a teacher and nurse.)  However, for many people working overseas as volunteers, aid workers or missionaries, it’s often our fellow workers and those we live with that are the most difficult, not those we go to serve.  I wanted to share that experience in the hope that it would help others going through a similar struggle when thrown together with colleagues and co-workers they may not like.  I want them to know that even if your negative assessments of difficult people turn out to be true, in true community, you still need to care for them, love them, and recognize you will need to depend on them.

How did your Christian faith shape the way you interpreted your experiences at the time?

We would not have gone to Samoa if we did not at least hold a Christian worldview.  And we would probably not have persevered without having the challenge of Jesus words, and the example of both his life, and the lives of many Christians since that time. I mention St Francis and Mother Teresa, but there are many others.  This is why each chapter starts with a quote from the words of Jesus, because it was those actual words that challenged me personally each step of the way.

In going to Samoa in 1990, the risk of death was very real since the previous year a field worker had died of Dengue fever, and there were other threats to safety and security we could not control.  We believed then, as we do now, that if we died our death would not be an accident – that God would work this for good, for His purpose, and God’s purpose is what gave us purpose in whatever we did.  I don’t think we would have willingly engaged in suffering and risked our security, peace, happiness, or life for something that we do not believe to be true.  I have looked at atheism, and it is a selfish, meaningless, and purposeless wasteland.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from Encounter?

I hope they gain a window into what a life lived with purpose can look like, that such a life can be found following Jesus on the narrow road, that such a life may be hard, and involve suffering, but it will at least be very rich and will lead to an abundant life.

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