The Wind in the Casuarina Trees: A Third-Culture Memoir of Faith, Displacement, and the Search for Home

What happens when home is not one place, but several—and none of them ever fully lets you go?

Born in Lima, Peru, to American missionary parents, Kelly Nix grew up between cultures, languages, countries, and identities. Peru was home. The United States was his family’s homeland. Costa Rica became another place he loved deeply. Then, at fourteen, an abrupt return to the United States ended the missionary life he had always known and began a struggle with belonging that he would not fully understand for decades.

In The Wind in the Casuarina Trees, Nix tells the story of a Third Culture Kid who learned to adapt almost anywhere while never feeling completely at home anywhere. With candor and restraint, he explores the hidden costs of repeated transition: unresolved grief, interrupted relationships, cultural dislocation, guarded attachment, anger, restlessness, and the strange experience of appearing to belong while privately feeling like an outsider.

But this is not simply a memoir of loss. Drawing on Third Culture Kid research, Scripture, and more than four decades of ministry and cross-cultural experience, Nix also asks a harder question: What can God do with a life shaped by all of those places?

Through the stories of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Daniel, and Paul—and through his own journey from Peru to Costa Rica, the United States, Brazil, Missouri, and eventually San Antonio—he considers how displacement can leave permanent marks without ending a person’s usefulness or purpose. Like Jacob after his night of wrestling, some of us may walk with a limp for the rest of our lives. That does not mean we cannot keep walking.

Written especially for Third Culture Kids, missionary kids, adult TCKs, globally mobile families, and anyone who has ever struggled to answer the question Where is home?, The Wind in the Casuarina Trees is a memoir about memory, faith, identity, grief, forgiveness, and discovering that a complicated life can still become a meaningful one.