An Evening Abroad

To help our four children, ages 3 to 11, understand that we belong to a worldwide church, we began having an international family home evening once a month. We dedicate the entire evening to studying a foreign country, learning about the nation, the members of the Church who live there, and the customs they have.

To prepare, we turn to the Friend magazine and look for an article—usually labeled “Making Friends”—that spotlights a family or a child from a different nation. We look through several issues to find an article about a family from a country we want to study, and we use that material as the basis of our lesson. After choosing a country we go to the local library for books about the food, the culture, and the government in that country. Encyclopedias and Internet resources can also be helpful. We use those materials to supplement the lesson and to plan a dinner and dessert.

Our night begins with a meal featuring the food from our chosen country. Many lively discussions have taken place over each new dish. Then we start our lesson by locating the country on a large world map and placing a removable sticker to mark it. After several months we can look at the stickers marking the various countries we have already studied.

Then we read the Friend article and discuss the differences and similarities that our family has with the international family in the magazine article. The New Era and the Ensign also feature similar articles about members of the Church worldwide. The Deseret News Church Almanac (a new edition is released every two years) has other facts about how many members, wards and stakes, missions, and missionaries are in each nation.

Then we turn to material from the library and Internet and talk about the country’s culture, government, and social system. To finish our evening, we serve refreshments like those served in that nation. It can also be fun to invite neighbors, grandparents, and missionaries to share the evening, especially if one of the guests originally comes from the featured nation. Besides studying foreign countries, we study different regions of our own country.

These special family home evenings take some advance preparation, but they are worth the extra time because the whole family is involved and excited. Our children learn about geography, history, and respecting cultural differences. They also learn the Church is global in its reach and that children all over the world have some of the same interests and a testimony of the gospel.—Janalee Merrell Watkins, Vernal, Utah

Illustrated by Joe Flores