I took care of a few business things, killed a worm on my cucumber plant, and a few other odds and ends. As an aside, I must say that the corn muffins that I made by a modified recipe - modified so I could use up my Swiss cheese and use a broken top of my dill - came out really great! But, I'm having some problems with my plants so I e-mailed the extension people to see if they can give me any tips.
But now let's get back to the business at hand...
Here I'm going to quote again from the human rights report, which will mean I back track just a bit so that the context is easier to follow.
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By January of 1987 I thought I had raised the set amount to leave for Vienna, but the mission raised the amount with the stated reasoning that the dollar was falling. Well, the dollar wasn't falling as much as they were increasing my target amount.
I am not so sure but that they weren't testing me trying to get me to be more assertive about wanting to work in the Soviet Union. I figured that they asked me to be a secretary and that's what they wanted me to do. They don't like to be taken at face value, and when I did do that (which I generally try to do) they accused me of not being assertive enough. This happened all through my Vienna days & I'm sure we'll come back to it.
Another thing that happened during my first deputation trip regard[ed] my future housing in Vienna. I had sent ... the Director of the North American branch of ECM... a long letter explaining in some detail why I wanted to live alone, at least at first. The gist of my letter stated that I had moved a lot and lived in difficult situations and wanted to settle a bit into my own lifestyle, etc., which I had never really been able to develop. [The Director] readily agreed with this. However, when I was in Denver [on a deputation trip] I got a call from Alaska (my parents & the mission had my itinerary). It turned out that [another missionary with a different mission being sent to the same joint mission I was], whom I had never heart of till then, expected me, along with another girl, to be her roommate in Vienna. I, of course, informed her that she must be in error as I was going to be living alone.
I later discussed this with [the Director], and he told me that there must have been some mix-up in Vienna, because it wasn't his doing, etc., etc. Well, later, through observation I learned that the "office" workers with the mission in Vienna didn't live alone. The first two years you were generally "trained" in mission ways (I think more akin to brainwashing) and if you stayed on after that then you became the senior worker to train your junior roommates. It's awful. My Mom saw it, too.
In addition, it's hard for me to believe that [the Director] was actually so "innocent" in this matter as his office... alone had my itinerary. He must have given someone this information. I don't see why the Vienna offices of ECM or the Vienna mission I was on loan too would need such information.
Before I left for Vienna my father told me that I might be requested to undergo a security briefing at his work. He had already told me that he had a security clearance through the Pentagon (not through Boeing, per se, as I understand it). I didn't think anything of this, that it was anything to worry about. Dad was always very supportive of me going into mission work. Nothing ever came of the possible briefing, but Dad did also mention that it was possible that in a communist country someone might try to kidnap me in exchange for information from Dad. That was the only concern I ever heard about to this point. I got the impression that everyone thought that I was trustworthy on that regard - although it wasn't until much later I thought about it like that.
Actually, it never occurred to me till several years later that it was even possible for me to have problems on account of Dad's work. But after my Vienna years back in Seattle, [a worker with another mission that had East European work] told me that many people whose parents are in military work aren't even allowed into E. Eur. mission work. That certainly had never even crossed my mind as being a possibility. By that point I had lived through enough that it didn't matter. I had already decided that I had to obey God rather than man (i.e., government) and I felt called by God to work in these countries, especially the Soviet Union. No one had ever told me not to study Russian, work with emigrants, etc. anyway. I had already spent several years of my life in preparation for that kind of work and it was the primary professional training I had received.
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So you can see that there were already some real problems developing on several fronts. Because of my experience with SGA and the responses to the questionnaire I'd sent out to missions I was sensitive to questionable things in missions. I was still somewhat (!) naive regarding how my work would be affected by dad's (and vice versa to a certain extent). I don't remember this early having the assertiveness issue come up. I was certainly assertive regarding requesting to live alone. But I do know this did come up in Vienna, and it's possible it did this early.
I'm not including all the names here because that's not the main issue, although I might reveal those names after I identify myself, assuming I do identify myself at some point. It's getting a big unwieldy not using the name of the mission I was on loan with though.
I don't think I ever mentioned to any of the mission people that I was a bit irked that they increased my required support amount more than seemed reasonable. This could have been something they were doing across the board though and they may have thought that it would be better to start off with enough, knowing that support can drop over time for various reasons, requiring constant work at it, which a two-year sting wouldn't provide a lot of opportunity for doing. And they didn't know how much more the exchange rate would fall.
Sometimes it's hard to know when to take things at face value and when to read something into it. I mean if you think of all the potential converging here for things to happen that might not be your standard every day sort of fare, you can maybe understand the difficulty to make such discernments.
In such a circumstance, what's worse, taking everything at face value and responding likewise, even when you suspect there's something else going on, or to go the other way and tend more toward reading into things according to apparent implications and responding in kind. Right or wrong, I tended toward the former position, but in the end I felt like a stiff branch that got broken in the storm, rather than a flexible willow branch (for example) that just bent along with it.
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Before we go on to my arrival in Vienna, I'm going to discuss another file. I'm not sure which one yet because there's a lot I'd like to delve into before I start in on Vienna.
