(Third-Culture) Kids Will Be Kids

Laura and I chaperoned this year's high school trip: a busload of kids freed for a weekend from the thumb of their parents and the anonymity of their school uniforms.

There were many fun activities planned, like game viewing in Kruger Park, horseback riding, mountain biking, and cave exploring. The kids seemed to enjoy most sitting on the bus and chatting with their friends.

One boy complained that the leopard that we stopped for (a less-than-guaranteed spotting) was too far away. "They should put these things in cages so we can see them better," he suggested. Sure. And maybe taxidermied, too, so they wouldn't move so much.

Most interesting for me was hanging around the so-called "third culture kids": children who have a passport and citizenship in one country, but have spent the formative years of childhood living in another. Most often, these children feel like strangers in both cultures, and have more in common with one another than members of either their natural or adopted cultures.

Domingos, though ethnically Shangaan and born in Mozambique, grew up in inner-city America. He has been back in Mozambique for less than half a year, and clearly struggles to find his identity.

He is the only Mozambican I've seen to be flashing a grill and other assorted bling more commonly found hanging off of America's inner-city youth. He didn't want to blend in amongst his ethnic brothers and sisters. He wanted to be unique.

I suspect, in fact, that he adopted a stronger sense of this American-based urban hip-hop culture after leaving the United States than when he was living there. This is the life of a third culture kid: while building elements of various cultures into their stories, they often have difficulty developing a sense of ownership or belonging in any of these cultures.

The struggle to establish identity is a significant enough challenge for most teenagers, even when they have a clear sense of home.

* * * * *

The trip had plenty of adventure and misadventure both.

Each night, boys woke up to find themselves covered in toothpaste. Zach even kept his toothpaste-soiled clothes on for the remainder of the day as a badge of honour. Laura, by contrast, reports that the girls quietly braided each other's hair and then went to sleep.

Oko, a gangling teenaged acrobat, shattered a pane of glass and bloodied his knee trying to climb out of a window. He wanted to use the window because everybody else was doing it.

Another boy, Orlando, inexperienced at mountain biking but wanting to fit in with his faster peers, fell over the handlebars of his bicycle and careened across a gravel road. A dozen stitches and a lot of pain later, he was an unenvied class hero.

First culture or third, kids are still kids.

School Open House

On Friday evening, Laura’s school played host to an evening of music and poetry by the students and an ethnically-diverse array of desserts by parents and teachers.

(You can view a short video here if you'd like. If the video is choppy, it's probably because your Internet connection is as slow as ours. Just press "pause" and the video will continue to download. Once it has completed downloading, press "play" and it should be smooth.)

Of course, when it came time for desserts, we were busy chatting with a parent, and only once it was too late did we realize that most of the desserts were gone (and that the parent with whom we were talking had his kids bring him a plateful of treats so he didn’t miss out!)

The evening was a great way to build community amongst the students, parents and teachers. And with such a small school – there are 52 students from kindergarten through high school – a tightly-knit community is one of the value-added components that people appreciate most. There’s a similar program offered every two months or so.

The school has a very international feel about it. Despite its small size, the students and teachers come from over a dozen countries: England, Russia, South Africa, India, Kenya, Canada, United States, Brazil, Mozambique, Nairobi, Zimbabwe, and others.

The two-year-old sister of one of the students tried to steal this month’s show. She so much wanted to be a part of the celebration that she stood with many of the presenters (dwarfed by the six- and seven-year-olds in the photo to the right) and sang along to the songs and moved her lips to the poetry recitals. At least, I think she was only moving her lips. Maybe she had the poems memorized, or at least I should give her the benefit of the doubt.

The kids at all grade levels look forward to these evenings as a chance to showcase to their parents what they’ve been doing in school.

Well, almost everything. There were no songs about science experiments or poems about math problems. And nobody recited the periodic table of elements or Newton’s laws of motion. As the lone math and science teacher at the upper levels, Laura will have to do something about filling that void.

For this evening, at least, students need not worry about report cards and teacher meetings. Those come in a few short weeks.

Laura's First Two Weeks

Laura is at school right now, and has nearly finished her second week of teaching. She's enjoying teaching more than she expected to, which is great. The workload is pretty heavy, so between the new demands of teaching and having to navigate a new culture, she's pretty tired by the end of each day.

(We've now been living out of our suitcases in other people's homes for 7 weeks, which has been taking a bit of a toll. We'll be glad when, in two weeks from now, we get our own apartment and can finally unpack and relax.)

Ideally, "Mrs Kuhn" would write her own blog entry about teaching, but that will have to come later, when she has more time. Writing is a relaxing diversion for me, but just more work for her.

Laura is having fun coming up with assignments for students and figuring out ways to get them excited about math and science. Yesterday, she created an assignment that requires her students to research a space mission -- they can choose any shuttle or probe -- and find out about the scientific research that was conducted on the mission. Personally, I think Laura will enjoy reading the students' reports at least as much as the kids enjoy doing it. They groaned about having to write an essay in science class!

Laura has to be at school by 7:00am each day, with her last class ending at 1:45pm. She usually stays at school to work for another couple of hours to prepare lessons for the following days.

On the way to school yesterday, she carried a jar with her to pick up some sand on the side of the road (Maputo is very dry -- there's an abundance of sand everywhere) for a science experiment that day. The students had to measure the temperature of sand and water to see which one heated up more quickly and, once hot, which one was best at retaining its heat. I stopped into the school at the end of her classes and helped her to make some potion for today's science experiments.

Whatever the potion was required her to wear a lab coat and goggles. I wanted to get a picture of her in full lab gear to share, but she politely refused. I guess she'll be able to empathize when her class of junior scientists objects to wearing those goggles -- what high school kid wants to walk into her next class with a "goggle face" imprint across her forehead?

Well, time to go study my algebra in case Mrs. Kuhn springs a surprise quiz on me!

Jill-Of-All-Trades

If you have ever spent time volunteering for something, you'll understand that feeling of getting in over your head -- not because you can't handle the job for which you volunteered, but because once you've volunteered for one thing, you'll be asked to do more and more and more...

Today, Glenn and Kris (our hosts) took us by the school where Laura will be teaching so that she could speak with the school's director, get her schedule and books, and start preparing for the school year that begins next Tuesday.

What she found out is that she's been asked to teach eight full-year classes:

• Grades 9 & 10 Earth Science
• Grades 7 & 8 Science
• Grade 9 Geometry
• Grade 10 Algebra
• Grade 6 Math
• Grade 7 Math
• Grades 11 & 12 Statistics and Trigonometry
• Grades 11 & 12 Chemistry

The school director piled her high with textbooks, workbooks, problem books, and other various who-knows-what books that Laura will sort through over the coming days. She's feeling a little overwhelmed tonight, but reading "Rookie Teaching for Dummies" (which she found on Kris' book shelf) is helping.

(To be honest, I'm not sure how helpful the book is, but it's proving to be a great stress-reliever. Every page or two, Laura breaks out into laughter. The most recent example is a section called "Wacky Hall Passes", in which the author recounts some of his favourites that he's used, including a six-foot-tall cardboard cut-out of Captain Picard that the poor kids had to drag to the 'loo. Hopefully it wasn't an emergency!)

A week before starting, the school is still trying to plug up some teacher vacancies. While I was there with Laura today, they tried throwing some of those vacancies at me to see if they'd stick. It was easy for me to say no to kindergarden. They were more serious about mid-level math and English classes, but that's really not my passion. Let's hope they're not too persistent -- and if they are, they might just see some kid running down the hall in a few weeks from now with a six-foot-tall cardboard cutout in tow.

We're Going to Mozambique!

It's official! We will be spending a year in Maputo, Mozambique starting in July.

Planning and discussions have been in the works for many months, and now our departure is just two months away.

Just two months until we set our careers on the back-burner, sell our car, rent out our home and move to Maputo to volunteer alongside a Christian church planting organization called OMS International.

We're excited, yes, and a little nervous too. We don't think of ourselves as the overly adventurous sort. Nor overly religious, though we do try to follow wherever God leads.

We're not theologians or fanatics. We're normal. Average. (Doesn't everyone think they're average, or perhaps just a tad above?)

My purpose in Mozambique will be to establish a micro-enterprise development program to help poor people create their own employment opportunities through training and small loans. A seamstress may need money for a sowing machine and some fabric; a chicken farmer may need money for his first chickens and feed. As these businesses make money, and their family’s financial situations improve, the borrowers repay the loans, which are then re-circulated to a new family.

My wife Laura will be teaching at the Christian Academy of Mozambique (CAM). This is a small Christian school of about 50 English speaking students from around the world -- generally children of missionaries, foreign diplomats and business people. The school offers an accredited American education so that the students can go to North American universities, if they so choose.

Laura, who worked in Canada as a biomedical engineer conducting laboratory research, will be teaching math and science courses to high school students.

She'll find out exactly what classes the school's director needs her to teach a couple of days before starting.

* * * * *

This won't be our first time in Africa. Two summers ago, we travelled to Mozambique as part of a team of seven Canadians from St. John United Church in Hamilton, where Laura's dad was then serving as the senior Pastor.

On that occasion, we were in Africa for about two weeks, and in Mozambique a grand total of four days. Maybe five. This coming year will be very different.

We spent much of those days in Khongolote, a suburb of Mozambique's capital city, Maputo, working alongside Mozambican nationals to build a cinder block church building.

We learned through this process that construction in Mozambique is an activity done from scratch: in order to build a wall, we had to start by mixing concrete and casting cinder blocks in a mold, lining them up under the heat of the African sun to dry before setting them in place.

The new church building in Khongolote was a much-needed improvement over the church's previous make-shift home, which was a large canvas tent prone to collapse under heavy wind or rain.

Prior to the tent, the church's first home, shortly after the community was relocated here as a result of severe flooding five years ago, was the shade of a tree on the same site.

Before leaving Maputo two years ago, we caught the smallest of glimpses of life in Mozambique, including:

• shopping in a local open-air market, where price negotiation and high-pressure sales techniques are tested to the limit

• visiting some of the local church sites and a seminary, which is a cramped and sweltering two-room building

• walking on the Indian Ocean beach -- we were advised not to walk barefoot on the beach in Maputo, advice which we took to heart once we saw its state of cleanliness!

• visiting the school where Laura will be spending a large part of her time.

This brief exposure to Maputo is helping us to be a little more excited -- and a little less nervous -- than we would otherwise have been for the coming year.

But we're also keenly aware that our view of Africa won't be the sheltered, romanticized view of constantly upward progress that we acquired on our first visit. We'll be challenged in the year ahead to live on the edge of stress and discomfort. That's where people allow God to do His best work.