My Family Culture

A major catastrophe has almost completely devastated the infrastructure of your country. The emergency government has decided that the surviving citizens will be best served if they are evacuated to other countries willing to take refugees. You and your immediate family are among the survivors of this catastrophic event. However, you have absolutely no input into the final destination or in any other evacuation details. You are told that your host country’s culture is completely different from your own, and that you might have to stay there permanently. You are further told that, in addition to one change of clothes, you can only take 3 small items with you. You decide to take three items that you hold dear and that represent your family culture.

When I first read this assignment, I thought to myself I feel like I would go crazy and end up with "Wilson" like in Castaway or something on a deserted island. I also tried to think of just three items, and I so badly wanted to choose our family safe as it holds documents and other valuables that I would never want to lose.  In this circumstance though, I will showcase the top three items. 

The first item I would take would be my Bible.  While there are plenty of Bibles to choose from I do have one that I've had throughout my undergraduate work (at a Bible college that we attended chapel daily).  This Bible is filled with verses highlighted, written encouragements from messages, and markings from travels during trips.  My Faith represents who I am, what I desire to be more like, and what I pour into my children, family, and community.  Without my Faith, I am scared to know what life would be like.  Having my Bible with me would offer me the encouragement that I would need when I would feel like I couldn't go any longer.

**side note, this picture is not of my actual Bible although it resembles what it looks like really well**

The second item I would take would be a collection of family pictures.  While memories will last a life time, my children are young.  If it was only our immediate family chosen, I would want them to visually have a representation of who "The Eldridge's" really are!  Family photos of my childhood, my husband's, my parents, and of course any other relatives we could take.  As silly as it sounds, we recently got a safe for our house that holds important documents.  Something on a list for me to do is to located family photos that I couldn't live without if our house burnt down and place them within the safe (at least copies of them as some are in frames around our house).  

The final item I would take would be important documents as to "who" we are.  Social security cards, passports, birth certificates, marriage license, immunizations, etc.  Having lost my wallet that contained my social security card and license once, I never want to go through that process again!  If we were transferred to another country, we would have to get work in order to supply for our family.  Obtaining employment, if anything like the States, would require these documents.   

If I arrived at location of transport and found out that I could only have one personal item, while it would be painful and I would be so hurt; I would have to choose the identification items.  My feelings would already be destroyed, my moral would be in an attempt of looking at the brighter side.  BUT let's look at reality, I just lost my entire world and family.  I lost my life support system of health care, luxury items, and everything that I knew to live a day to day life.  If told I could have three items, then upon arrival be told that I could now only choose one . . . I would expect the next stop a concentration camp and think they're attempting to wipe out the American population of blonde haired blue eyes beauties.

A Bible can be replaced.  And frankly, I can get on Facebook to get pictures if I needed to print them out although older family photos would not be available.  Is this country a remote area of the world?  Will we have Facebook?  Maybe the best question to spark our conversation would be what would we do if we didn't have social media for a month.

No new insights were gained from this exercise.  While I do love sharing about who I am, I am very much looking forward to hearing and understanding more about my classmates during this exercise.