About: Jannie

Name:Jan
2008-08-11 19:58:32
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I'm an Adult Third Culture Kid who holds a passport for Canada and the United States and who immigrated to Canada in 1991 and later became a citizen. My birthplace is Florida, but we left when I was five, moving to Germany because of my father's job in the military. We arrived the week the Berlin Wall began being built and lived there during the Cuban Missile Crisis...historical times. We returned to the U.S. four and a half years later, continuing our mobile lifestyle in the southwest, central and northwest parts of the country, occasionally traveling east to see my father's family. After I left home, in 1975, I exhibited the TCK traits of restlessness and wanderlust, living many places in the U.S., attending many colleges and universities. In 1998, I met a Canadian TCK named Mark in grad school in the U.S.; we came to Vancouver for an adventure, married, and stayed in BC. The home we now live in is the first home I've owned and the 35th home I've lived in. My life in Canada is amongst the intercultural community and I've been a part of it since 1998. In 2004, a peak experience in my timeline was to change things forever: my family made a historical trip. Peculiarly, two months before we before we left, Hurricane Ivan made landfall at our destination. After a pause, we decided to go anyway and the aftermath of the hurricane didn't get in our way and, as it turned out, the barrier island protected much of the town. It was the first I'd set eyes on my birthplace since 1960 and the effect was monumental. I could literally feel and *see* internal puzzle pieces falling together. I deeply, instinctually, felt 'home'. It was a purely, visceral experience, completely unintellectual. All my senses recognized the place at a deep level, even though I'd had little experience there and hardly recognized any of the town, visually. The feeling of humidity, the smell and feel of the air, the whiteness of the sand, the emerald color of the water. After returning home, I pretty much had an identity crisis, realizing I was not who I thought I was, that I'd become too closely identified with cultures that weren't mine, that I could never be part of, except in spirit. I felt adrift. I stopped doing many of the things I'd done with regularity and started becoming less close with many of the people with whom I'd become tight-knit. I could only tell them that after I'd gone 'home' and was almost ritually changed. I'd seen where I was from, it fit, and I didn't fit with them anymore, as I once had. Though difficult, I knew I was going to be okay because I had new knowledge of the real me. But it was a mystery to people I'd become close to and I could explain it in no way they could understand. Some time before, in 1996, I'd discovered Global Nomadism, through Norma McCaig's work and organization. It made sense, I read "The Absentee American", made some inroads, but the organization was based in Washington, DC and I was in British Columbia. As it turned out, my life took a different turn, anyway, when I quit my permanent postion teaching at a regional university college in 1997 and moved closer to Vancouver. After a "spiritual sabbatical", I went back to school, received my ESL teaching credentials and devoted myself to teaching immigrant women at a school I formed. From 1996 till now, my TCK work has been put on hold. I'd been doing TCK research off and on for years, but made the plunge reaching out to Brice Royer through Facebook. Through him and the new world that has opened up to me, I see that much has changed since my investigations in the '90s. A huge movement and social network has blossomed, where before it had been in isolated niches like Georgetown U., D.C., etc. Far away from me! The internet has made the world smaller and accessible and I am now making inroads and, as Ruth Van Reken says, beginning to use the 'language'. I am so happy to be part of the TCK community, the heartland. I have very much enjoyed the TCK Academy teleconferences and, as a result, realize I have my grief work cut out for me. Many of the women I taught have children who became automatic CCKs upon immigrating to Canada and they are interested in the field and way of being, too. I am getting my sea legs and will be delving into many areas. Also, a new chapter in my life has begun, as I closed my school in December. I am yearning for a new endeavor, have yet to find out what I will do, but know it will be aligned with my values. I'll put my years of work in community organizing, graphic design; writing and editing; innovation; teaching, mentoring, and leading to good use. I may end up in a purely creative field, as I've been a 'shadow artist' for too many years and want to honor that side of myself. Along with two other women, I am in the midst of a self-guided program that will invite synchrony into our lives with the aim of being led to our calling and I'll let you know what happens! For my avatar, I have chosen the hummingbird because it is the Canadian aboriginal symbol for healing.

Posts by Jannie:

What kids games did you play while traveling?

What kind of games did you play when you were traveling? All those thousands of miles/kilometers of road trips or while waiting in airports?

My three brothers and I would play a game, get tired of it, rest, feel like playing another game and so on. Hour after hour after hour…otherwise we’d be bored out of our gourds. Reading, puzzles, etc. entertained to a point, but sooner or later we wanted to interact again.

What did you play? Were there any games you played to wile away the hours en route?

The games were low-level competition, played with a spirit of fun and comeradery Here are some of the games we played:

“License plate”… when we were traveling by car: we’d call out the name of the state or country when we saw it and the person the who spotted the most won.

Then there was “I see something”…someone would pick something with a certain color…it could be anywhere, as long as it would be visible throughout the turn. It could be in the car, airport, or outside. They’d say, “I see something orange…” The rest of us would try to guess what it was. If it was our turn, we’d have to try hard to *not* look at the object, part of the scenery, etc….that’d give it away!

We’d respond “cold” or “hot” if someone was getting closer to said color…then “warmer, warmer, warmer” the closer they got, till they guessed it. The turn would pass to the one who guessed correctly.

We also played “A my name is ____” and run through the alphabet. “A my name is Angela, my husband’s name is Art, we live in the Arctic and we sell adders.” Of course, nowadays it would be husband, wife, partner, friend, whatever works, but back then it was what it was. Around 2/3 of the way through the alphabet, we’d be getting tired of it, but then we pepped up the closer it got to a downhill slide.

Aside from games, we sang a lot…long ones like “The Ants Go Marching” or “I Love To Go Awandering”, etc.

These are some of my fondest memories and my brothers and I played or sang till out mouths went dry…

How about you?

August 29, 2008 | Filed Under Fun and Games | 11 Comments 

Protocol question

I am going through a very turbulent time. I’m actively working on loss and grief related to my Third Culture background. Peeling back the onion layers. I have uncovered much and I’m currently working on all of this with my Egyptian psychiatrist, the amazing Dr. Laila Moussa-Tewfik.

While I’ve been working on these issues, I have been surprised by volcanic anger that has obviously been stuffed and not dealt with till now. Though, I’ve been aware I’m a Global Nomad for some time, I have patently not done the work that needs to be done to heal properly. Till now.

While I am not aiming my anger at anyone and am, instead, getting the content and emotion out  through writing, with ViaVoice on the computer, talk therapy, and exercise, *it is infusing my whole being*. Yet, I am also aware that it is natural and normal right now and I’m giving myself the space.

The problem is is that I can see that the anger is affecting the content and style of my communication. Anger is on/near the surface and informs almost all my responses in the forum right now. Again I’m not aiming anger at anyone, but it is just there and vacillates between slow boil and volcanic.

Who wants to hear someone who constantly sounds angry?

While in the midst of this process, I’m aware that there is stiffness, less approachability, more seriousness, and almost none of the playful self I know and love. I miss that fun self, but know I’m committed to working on my stuff. Taking care: not overdosing on the self-work, taking breaks, having some fun, but the anger is always there right now, coursing right below or on the surface.

I speak to you of these things and bring these questions openly to you in a good way because I respect you, TCKid, and everyone involved.

Do I stay on TCKid now and maintain an online presence as I work it out, maintaining ‘appropriate online behavior’ or do I take a time out and come back later? I don’t know what the protocol is around something like this.

I’m being very up front with you here and want your advice about whether it’s better to stay connected during this process or take a break. I appreciate any feedback I get about this situation.

August 25, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | 8 Comments 

Training Manual for Working with Internationally Mobile Youth

Here Today, There Tomorrow, Parker, Elisabeth, Katharine Rumrill-Teece.

Here Today There Tomorrow: A Training Manual for Working with Internationally Mobile Youth. Washington, DC: Foreign Service Youth Foundation, 2001.

A workbook compiled of 24 successful training exercises on working on transition issues with mobile teens. Discussing topics on managing transitions, personal development and perspectives on culture, these complete lesson plans help teenagers adjust to new environments.

Can be ordered from the Foreign Service Youth Foundation:

http://www.fsyf.org/resources/resources.html#For%20Cross-cultural%20Educators

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | Leave a Comment 

Great video series

 http://www.griggs.com/videos/btcg.shtml

From the Going International video series:

Overview of Welcome Home, Stranger

Prepare yourself for repatriation to the United States of America. Welcome Home, Stranger focuses on the unexpected problems of returning home. Beyond Culture Shock is about living there and Welcome Home, Stranger is about returning home,it is a pair because it is the personal impact of culture, adjusting to life over there and adjusting to life back here which is one cycle. The 15 minute video and guide:

Other titles:

Bridging The Culture Gap
Managing The Overseas Assignment
Beyond Culture Shock
Welcome Home, Stranger
Working In The USA
Living In The USA
Going International - Safely

Cross-Cultural Relationships & Communication Workshops

Griggs Productions is operated by a “diversity-training veteran of  more than 25 years, Lewis Brown Griggs specializes in helping companies ‘maximize human potential.’”

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | Leave a Comment 

Always Home: Studies Show That Expat Kids Are Among The Most Adaptable In The World

NEWSWEEK

by Barbie Nadeau

Updated: 2:21 PM ET Oct 29, 2007

When he was 4, Michael Portegies-Zwart asked his mother, Carolyn, the question that all parents dread: “Where do I come from?” But instead of reaching for the anatomy books, she pulled out the atlas. “[I’m] from the United States, your father is from Holland and you were born in Vienna,” she explained. The young boy looked at her quizzically. “Yeah, but where am I from?” he pressed. She shrugged, not quite knowing how to respond. Three years later, the family moved to Rome for his father’s job with the United Nations. After living there for nine years and attending international schools, Michael, now 19, finally figured out the answer: “I’m from the world,” he says.

Portegies-Zwart is part of a burgeoning community of nomadic kids who are growing up globally. Called third-culture kids–or TCKs–these children of diplomats, aid workers, missionaries, military personnel, journalists, academics and business executives are being raised in a culture that lies somewhere between their parents’ native one (the first culture) and that of the country where they are based (the second culture). Unlike immigrant children, they have no intention of staying long in the host country; expat families are transferred as often as every two years. And many TCKs live in privileged situations, with subsidized housing and private schooling, creating a distance between them and neighborhood youth. As a result, TCKs tend to integrate well, but never fully penetrate the local culture.

Increasingly, they are finding comfort in numbers. Global changes–an increase in humanitarian-aid programs, the expansion of multinational corporations, larger embassy staffs and ongoing military activity–are steadily increasing the number of expatriate families. American passports issued in foreign countries have nearly doubled in the last decade, from 3.6 million to more than 7 million. The number of British citizens who live abroad has also risen, from 8.6 million to more than 14 million since 1992. A host of new books and Web sites have popped up recently to serve this growing population and their children, beginning in 2000 with David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken’s popular guide “Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds.” A recent book by Germans Hilly van Swol-Ulbrich and Bettina Kaltenhuser called “When Abroad–Do as the Local Children Do” targets 8- to 12-year-olds and covers everything from re-patriation to saying goodbye to old friends. The Web site Expat-Moms.com deals with specific issues like how to tell the kids you’re moving again, and ExpatExpert.com talks about integration and socialization as well as culture shock, grieving and being unable to see grandparents.

All the attention is prompting a dramatic shift in how third-culture kids are perceived. Once thought of as oddball nomads or spoiled dilettantes, children of expats are now more widely viewed as savvy and accomplished sophisticates who are comfortable anywhere. They may grow up playing in the Amazonian jungle or commuting to school on Tokyo’s crowded subways. In Rome, which hosts two sets of international embassies (to Italy and to the Vatican) and three U.N. organizations, thousands of third-culture kids zip around on mopeds and play soccer in the piazzas alongside the locals. Most TCKs have firsthand knowledge of everything from world geography and cuisine to high culture and international politics. They learn local languages quickly, are precociously comfortable with adults and mix effortlessly with people of all ethnic backgrounds, says Pollock. All in all they possess an adaptability and a broad-mindedness that is valued more than ever in today’s borderless world. “They have much more than a textbook understanding of global culture,” says Brigida Randa, a family therapist and guidance counselor at St. Stephens School in Rome, where the majority of the students are TCKs. “What they know best is how to adapt to transition and change.”

That knowledge is increasingly translating into successful careers. A recent study showed that 70 percent of Americans who grew up overseas reached higher levels of education and were employed in higher-ranking professions than their peers at home. Two thirds chose to travel or live overseas. Nearly 90 percent of all third-culture kids earn at least a bachelor’s degree, and their international upbringings make them among the most highly skilled students on campus. No wonder top universities are actively recruiting TCKs; an informal survey of all the international schools in Rome shows that now every graduating class sends kids to universities like Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford. Ten years ago that was an anomaly, says Michael Brouse, director of external affairs at St. Stephens School.

Still, many TCKs never stop feeling like vagabonds. When they return to their “home” or passport country, a place where they generally spend summer holidays, they often feel out of sync. According to Pollock’s guide, third-culture kids may be well versed in foreign affairs, but they tend not to have a very patriotic view of home. In a recent survey by the University of Michigan, 90 percent of international TCKs say they can’t relate to their home-country peers. Having missed out on pop-culture trends, and even the latest hit television shows, they are lacking a vital social link. For Adrian Weisell, 21, who grew up in Rome, the toughest part of attending college in Ohio was adapting to sophomoric American attitudes. While 18-year-olds in Italy are treated as adults and have been drinking wine for years, he says, his Midwestern peers were heavily focused on circumventing the legal drinking age. When Michael Portegies-Zwart’s younger sister, Nicole, chose to attend university back in the United States, she found the differences jarring. “I’ve adopted the Italian culture; I don’t really feel American,” she says, in perfect American English. “I’m used to kissing people on both cheeks when I see them. In the States everyone just hugs.”

Forging an identity becomes more complicated. “When you ask these kids where they are from, they always respond with a question,” says counselor Randa, who grew up in America with a Sicilian father. “They ask: ‘Do you mean where I was born or where I live now? Do you mean where my passport is from?’ ” She believes TCKs are among the most adaptable, empathetic group of people around, but that parents are critical to helping them feel grounded. “Family time is much more important to these kids than to those living in their own country,” she says. “The physical home must often represent the entire home country and culture.”

More and more employers are recognizing the importance of keeping their expats’ children happy, too. Author van Swol-Ulbrich runs CONSULTus, a German firm specializing in expatriate integration. She says that if kids don’t adapt to the host culture, it can make life miserable for the whole family–as well as the employer. In one case, she says, the son of a star overseas employee is having such a hard time with the local German culture that the mother wants to take him back home to the United States. But that is the exception rather than the rule. “I feel very lucky,” says Nicole Portegies-Zwart. “Sure, it’s a weird life sometimes, but that’s just the way we are. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” In today’s global marketplace, growing up in a third culture means always feeling at home.

Source: URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62886

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under Articles, General Forum | 14 Comments 

The Heartland

Hi, I’m Jan, an Adult Third Culture Kid who holds a passport for Canada and the United States… who immigrated to Canada in 1991 and later became a citizen. My birthplace was Florida, but we left when I was five, moving to Germany because of my father’s job in the military. We arrived the week the Berlin Wall began being built and lived there during the Cuban Missile Crisis…historical times.

We returned to the U.S. four and a half years later, continuing our mobile lifestyle in the southwest, central and northwest parts of the country, occasionally traveling east to see my father’s family. After I left home, in 1975, I exhibited the TCK traits of restlessness and wanderlust, living many places in the U.S., attending many colleges and universities.

In 1998, I met a Canadian TCK named Mark in grad school in the U.S.; we came to Vancouver for an adventure, married, and stayed in BC. The home we now live in is the first home I’ve owned and the 35th home I’ve lived in.

My life in Canada is amongst the intercultural community and I’ve been a part of it since 1998. In 2004, a peak experience in my timeline was to change things forever: my family made a historical trip. Peculiarly, two months before we before we left, Hurricane Ivan made landfall at our destination. After a pause, we decided to go anyway and the aftermath of the hurricane didn’t get in our way and, as it turned out,  the barrier island protected much of the town.

It was the first I’d set eyes on my birthplace since 1960 and the effect was monumental. I could literally feel and *see* internal puzzle pieces falling together. I deeply, instinctually, felt ‘home’. It was a purely, visceral experience, completely unintellectual.  All my senses recognized the place at a deep level, even though I’d had little experience there and hardly recognized any of the town, visually. The feeling of humidity, the smell and feel of the air, the whiteness of the sand, the emerald color of the water.

After returning home, I pretty much had an identity crisis, realizing I was not who I thought I was, that I’d become too closely identified with cultures that weren’t mine, that I could never be part of, except in spirit. I felt adrift. I stopped doing many of the things I’d done with regularity and started becoming less close with many of the people with whom I’d become tight-knit. I could only tell them that after I’d gone ‘home’ and was almost ritually changed. I’d seen where I was from, it fit, and I didn’t fit with them anymore, as I once had. Though difficult, I knew I was going to be okay because I had new knowledge of the real me. But it was a mystery to people I’d become close to and I could explain it in no way they could understand.

Some time before, in 1996, I’d discovered Global Nomadism, through Norma McCaig’s work and organization. It made sense, I read “The Absentee American”,  made some inroads, but the organization was based in Washington, DC and I was in British Columbia.

As it turned out, my life took a different turn, anyway, when I quit my permanent postion teaching at a regional university college in 1997 and moved closer to Vancouver. After a “spiritual sabbatical”, I went back to school, received my ESL teaching credentials and devoted myself to teaching immigrant women at a school I formed.

From 1996 till now, my TCK work has been put on hold. I’d been doing TCK research off and on for years, but made the plunge reaching out to Brice Royer through Facebook. Through him and the new world that has opened up to me, I see that much has changed since my investigations in the ’90s. A huge movement and social network has blossomed, where before it had been in isolated niches like Georgetown U., D.C., etc. Far away from me!

The internet has made the world smaller and accessible and I am now making inroads and, as Ruth Van Reken says, beginning to use the ‘language’.  I am so happy to be part of the TCK community, the heartland. I have very much enjoyed the TCK Academy teleconferences and, as a result, realize I have my grief work cut out for me.

I am getting my sea legs and will be delving into many areas. Also, a new chapter in my life has begun, as I closed my school in December. I am yearning for a new endeavor, have yet to find out what I will do, but know it will be aligned with my values.

I’ll put my years of work in community organizing, graphic design; writing and editing; innovation; teaching, mentoring, and leading to good use. I may end up in a purely creative field, as I’ve been a ’shadow artist’ for far too many years and want to honor that side of myself. Along with two other women, I am in the midst of a self-guided program that will invite synchrony into our lives with the aim of being led to our calling and I’ll let you know what happens!

For my avatar, I have chosen the hummingbird because it is the Canadian aboriginal symbol for healing.

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under Introduction | 15 Comments