Sent: Reflections on Mission, Boarding School and Childhood

Mountain streams, bright butterflies, tropical highlands...night-time tears, separation, sorrow. This is a raw, honest book about reinventing childhood in the service of God. Young children were sent to boarding school so that their parents could do missionary work. These are the stories of those children’s lives. Much of our childhood was a grand adventure...some of it was not. Here are our voices from the past and from today, trying to make sense of what being sent away as children meant, and continues to mean, for us.There have been books about cultural confusion in mission children (Third Culture Kids). There have been books telling about missionary lives. This is one of the few to tell of the adult lives that followed in children sent away to a mission boarding school from young ages, so the work of God could continue.'Sent' is a powerful anthology of 42 stories. They may make you cry, they may make you think deeply about what you believe, what sort of parent you are or will be. We hope you will see that the deeply held convictions of parents can shape their children's lives in unintended ways; and that healing can still occur.

Dr John Chenoweth MB, BS, FRANZCOG, FRCOG graduated from the University of Queensland in Medicine in 1976. He worked as an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist and fertility expert in Brisbane Australia until he retired in 2018. He is married and has four children, with ten in the following generation. His parents took him to their mission work in Thailand at four years of age, and sent him to Chefoo boarding school in Malaysia at age five. He was there until eleven years old when he was sent home to stay with relatives in Australia for further education. The events described in this book have been of critical importance to him.

Dr. Jenny Ostini is an Australian applied social scientist working in social and policy settings on gender, literacies and understanding workplace experiences and behaviours. She credits her complicated childhood for her enduring interest in the choices people make and the impact these choices have on their lives and families.

Bernard Dainton and his wife live in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. After secondary education and university in England, he studied at London Bible College 1988-91, before working in an inner city church in London for nearly twenty years, at the same time as earning a living with a series of charities. He attended Chefoo Boarding School from January 1970 to June 1975.