Uprooted with No RAFT Marilyn Gardner
It is mid-September and six months since borders closed, masks became mandatory, and life changed for people around the globe. While fall is always a time of movement and change for expats and third culture kids, for TCKs transitioning to college, and for those who have tried to make transitions during the summer from their lives overseas, the tools that many of us have used and used well in the past are not necessarily helpful in this new COVID world. Many of us have seen and used the RAFT acronym (Reconciliation, Affirmation, Farewell, and Think Transition) developed by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, our iconic leaders on all things TCK related. In fact, I myself wrote an essay on transition a few years ago, citing their acronym and connecting the dots to my own experiences.
As I think about the acronym in the year 2020 and the unexpected chaos and uprootedness that a worldwide pandemic has caused, I think we may need another acronym that gives us a different tool for unexpected departures, virtual goodbyes, and long periods of waiting in the in between. It’s with this in mind that I offer a few tips that I’m calling CRAFT, because a Crisis before the RAFT changes everything. A full disclaimer is that I have been uprooted unexpectedly myself a couple of times, but never in a worldwide crisis like the one we have faced these past months. I come at this from a public health nurse perspective, a writer, a TCK, and a three-imes over expat. Though I have been through several difficult transitions, they are transitions that are far different than what I know many of you are experiencing. So, keep what is worth keeping, and blow the rest away.
Crisis Management Response and Resilience Aftershocks Forging Ahead Time Crisis Management: First and foremost, COVID has been a worldwide crisis with a domino effect. There are three stages to crisis management: Pre-crisis or creating a crisis management plan; mid-crisis—the point where all hell breaks loose and you respond to what’s happening in the moment and try to put the plan into place; and postcrisis—where you evaluate how you, your family, and the team responded to the crisis and evaluate whether your plan was effective. This is the point where you refine and change your crisis management plan based on what you’ve learned. Perhaps your organization never even had a plan to begin with and you were left trying to craft your own crisis plan with little support. Perhaps your organization had a well-defined
December 2020
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