The next step to leaving for Bangladesh, after moving out of our apartment and leaving our jobs in Canada, was pre-field training. We attended Mission Training International (MTI) in Palmer Lake, Colorado, and couldn’t be more thankful for the entire experience.

The program was thoroughly designed, intense, personal, and beneficial. Not only did I feel more capable to go overseas, but to take on the rest of my adult life. Aside from the curriculum, it is difficult to separate our MTI experience from the people. For one month we lived in a boarding house with 21 families (singles, married couples, and families with kids) who we more than just got along with, but grew incredibly close with.

Doctors, vets, ultrasound techs, youth ministers, church planters, tent-makers, hair stylists, firefighters, accountants, speech language pathologists, farmers, musicians, and baristas from across North America, all leaving the comfort of their passport country to serve God in a foreign land. We shared meals, watched movies, tobogganed, and had a crazy snowball fight. We adventured the Colorado landscape, enjoyed late-night fast food runs, and spent hours by a fireplace playing card games while sharing stories and laughs.

For the first two weeks, we practiced and studied the best methods for language acquisition. We made silly phonetic sounds, moving our mouths in ways we weren’t used to. We listened and mimicked intently, identifying the differences between an aspirated vs. unaspirated consonant, and the distinctions between various vowel sounds. We took a child’s approach to learning language and brought it to the adult level: using pictures, repetition, and a lot of listening in context. Using ‘trial’ languages we explored these methods — Jess learned some Malay and I learned Mandarin! As a class we also learned a bit of Jhe (an indigenous language in Vietnam).

During the last two weeks we spent hours challenging our assumptions and biases, reflecting on cultural differences and emotional regulation, and worked through stressful simulations together. We examined how transitions could affect us—and how we, in turn, might affect others. Lessons covered the many difficulties we might (definitely would) encounter, what to expect, and how to talk about them. By putting labels on new (and potentially isolating) experiences, we feel better equipped to process our thoughts and emotions when we eventually face them. This shared experience created a great intimacy and vulnerability during times of sharing and discussion, despite all our different backgrounds and countries we would be moving to.