‘Sorry, he’s spent his whole life in East Africa.’ I find myself saying this almost daily. (I say East Africa rather than Tanzania because many people have no idea where Tanzania is, or mishear it as Tasmania.) Sometimes saying this diffuses the tension of a situation, like when Elliot joins […]
When we went through customs in Dar es Salaam on our way to Australia, Elliot ran ahead of me while I spoke to the customs agent and he did his thing with our passport. The customs officer poked his head out of his cubicle, smiled at Elliot and commented on […]
On his first time in Australia since he was 6 months old, there are all kinds of things Elliot is discovering, like: carpet! street lights. On the way home from the airport in the dark in the car, he was watching his hands and saying to himself, ‘light, dark, light, […]
Twice in the preceding weeks, Elliot had come home from school talking about people hitting. We hadn’t wanted to alarm him or make a big deal, so we’d made very casual inquiries. Who was doing the hitting? Why? He replied, ‘They were hitting to make the children share.’ Sounds like […]
Every Sunday I think about that Huffington Post article written to parents of young children in church. And every Sunday I am unconvinced by it. We have no creche or Sunday school but each week at church, people say to me, ‘It’s fine for him to run around,’ ‘We don’t […]
It was Elliot’s fourth day of going to school. For the first time, he didn’t cry when I dropped him off: just held out his arms to the teacher with a little wobble of his lip. When I came to pick him up, they told me hadn’t cried the whole […]
TCKs are Third Culture Kids and our little Elliot is one. We’ve been keen to surround him with resources that will help him to sort out his world, however subtly. Because books and reading are a big part of our family life, we’ve been on the lookout for picture books […]
Meet Jesus at uni 