PICAYUNE PEOPLE: Faith Academy teacher Linda Puckett is a woman on a mission

Teacher Linda Puckett brings two decades of experience as a missionary to the Faith Academy of Marble Falls students who sign up for her World View and World Religions class. 

The Beaumont native’s faith has taken her to the sprawling countryside of southern Brazil, the rural reaches of Zimbabwe, and the high rises of Taiwan’s capital city of Taipei. 

“Be open and get out of your skin a little bit,” Puckett said when asked about the philosophy of life that led her on such a far-reaching journey.

Puckett was born and raised around the bayous of Beaumont in Southeast Texas, an upbringing she described as “humid,” “rough,” and filled with bowls of jambalaya and the shade of magnolia trees.

She got her first taste of faith-based service while doing charity work with her church as a teen in downtown Beaumont. While in high school, she went on several mission trips to Mexico. As a student at Baylor University in Waco, she worked with underprivileged children in the city. 

“Baylor is its own world. But then, if you get into the community, you see a whole different side of it, and I loved it,” she said. “I wanted something more than what the bubble was.”

Puckett would go on to make a life outside of society’s bubbles. 

After graduating from Baylor with a degree in education, she made missionary work a full-time pursuit, signing up for a two-year stint as a teacher at a Baptist camp in the remote agricultural community of Tupã, São Paulo, in southern Brazil. 

She split her time between Tupã, where she lived with a Brazilian roommate, and the Baptist encampment itself, where she pulled double duty: teaching children of other missionaries and locals and working as a farmhand.

“I really had no idea about farms at all,” she said. “I was teaching full time, but I was also helping harvest watermelons, raise silkworms, and milk cows. I moved cattle, too, and I was terrible.”

Puckett quickly picked up the Brazilian national language of Portuguese and learned to be self-sufficient. She was also exposed to true poverty for the first time.

“I know there are people who are hungry and that have needs here (in the United States), but, boy, you haven’t seen need until you’ve seen it in some of these other places,” she said.

Puckett left Brazil with a strong resolve to continue her mission work on a grander scale. At a seminary in Fort Worth, she met a man on a mission and her future husband, Thad Puckett. Thad worked on missions in South Africa but was also looking to further his religious education at the seminary. 

Linda completed her master’s degree and began work as a teacher in Mansfield and Fort Worth while Thad finished his degree. She credits this time of her life as her greatest teaching education.

“There were these fabulous teachers who taught me how to teach,” she said. “They taught me how to engage with kids and care more about the kids than what they were learning and how to help them learn even when they didn’t want to.”

After Thad graduated, the Pucketts set off on their next adventure: two years teaching at a seminary outside of Gweru, Zimbabwe, in southern Africa. 

Linda drew upon her Portuguese prowess to teach immigrants attending the seminary from the Portuguese-speaking countries of Mozambique and Angola. 

While in Zimbabwe, the couple also helped locals establish churches, a practice they would carry with them on their next mission. 

Linda described the Africans she met, taught, and lived and worked with as incredibly warm, kind, and open despite their hard lives. She also recalls watching out for the deadly black and green mamba snakes that were known to slither into bathrooms and hyenas that prowled the countryside at night, hunting for prey.

Zimbabwe was a stark contrast to the Pucketts’ next mission. They lived for 16 years on the 13th floor of an apartment in Taipei, which had a population of around 5.5 million in the 1990s when the couple called it home.

While in Taipei, the missionaries continued to teach and establish churches, working alongside other missions to bring the word of God to a country that was 98 percent Buddhist.

“We worked with some fabulous Chinese believers who had a heart for starting churches, but there were also plenty of Westerners living in Taiwan at the time,” Linda said. “If you weren’t comfortable around the Chinese, you’d end up just spending time with the Westerners, so you had to figure out how to not do that. But we were less comfortable in the (Western) bubble than outside of it.”

The Pucketts learned Taiwanese Mandarin and grew to love the country’s cuisine. They made lifelong friends and raised their adopted daughter, Amanda, there. 

“We meant to retire there,” Linda said.

Her mother, Clyde Glenn, who had moved to Spicewood after Linda started college, was suffering from dementia. Following a visit to the Highland Lakes to check on Glenn’s health, the Pucketts decided they needed to return to the United States.

After more than 20 years abroad, Linda took a job teaching at Faith Academy. Seventeen years later, she still hasn’t totally adjusted to the settled life.

“I’m not 100 percent comfortable in America yet, and I try to be,” she said. “The truth is, when I’m around my family and my friends, I’m at home.”

Faith Academy has become a home to her, and she uses all of the tools she has acquired to help her students learn and grow as people and Christians.

“I love those kids regardless of what they bring to the table,” she said. “Yes, academics are very important—make no mistake, we get that—but their faith is also important, and we do have that open door. I promise you, kids will learn better in an atmosphere where they’re not just tolerated but respected and loved.”

dakota@thepicayune.com