At Home in the World

Rhonda Wiley-Jones' book At Home in the World: Travel Stories of Growing Up and Growing Away, is a coming-of-age memoir about her as a girl from the rural Arkansas delta whose mother wants more for her. The world of a ten-year old girl in 1963 sets the stage for her travels abroad and within the U.S. until a young woman in 1980. Rhonda savors various worlds through mission studies and missionaries, who visit her church. Rather than narrowing her views of the world, her church...
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Rhonda Wiley-Jones' book At Home in the World: Travel Stories of Growing Up and Growing Away, is a coming-of-age memoir about her as a girl from the rural Arkansas delta whose mother wants more for her. The world of a ten-year old girl in 1963 sets the stage for her travels abroad and within the U.S. until a young woman in 1980. Rhonda savors various worlds through mission studies and missionaries, who visit her church. Rather than narrowing her views of the world, her church experiences expand her world, and in turn, her worldview. Her mother, wise beyond her own experience, discerns that travel is fundamental to growing up with options and launches a fledgling daughter into the world. Each journey into the world whets Rhonda's appetite for learning more about people and geography, ideas and culture. Traveling, usually alone, mark her growth chart at ages fourteen, fifteen, seventeen and during her college sophomore year. Rhonda travels alone on her first train trip across Arkansas, soars across the Atlantic to Europe for a world youth conference, and jets across the Pacific to Hawaii to work with an island church in a multicultural maze. She then transfers from one college to another to spend a year in another U.S. culture, while working as a missionary in Salt Lake City. Rhonda's upbringing at church and the mentoring by her mother result in opportunities and growth. Neither her church nor mother expects the evolving outcomes inherent in her journeys.She emerges--a young woman traveling solo in the United Kingdom and Ireland at age twenty-seven. Her intent is to achieve a new level of independence and in the process takes stock of the self she once thought she wanted to be. The breaches discovered in her self-assessment, in the belief she once had in her church, as well as her view of the world stand in stark relief against her expeditions into the world. This final declaration of independence coincides with her departure from a church that she has loved and that has given her so much growing up. Rhonda grows up and grows away to find herself at home in the world, due to the collective contributions to her life - her mother's tutelage, the church's influence, geographical and ideological travel, as well as the time spent maturing and reflecting on what she has experienced.