Category Archives: CCK

The TCK Patriot

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Fourth of July, Nigeria Style

Growing up as a Third Culture Kid, I never really identified with my home country.  I celebrated the holidays of my host country or my school’s country.  I grew up in Mexico City and went to a British school.  I celebrated the Queen’s Birthday, and Mexico’s Independence day on the 16th of September, and of course the Day of the Dead.  I didn’t feel nationalistic about anyplace but was happy to celebrate with everybody.  I don’t ever remember celebrating the 4th of July although I do remember dressing up on Halloween a few times.  I just didn’t have anything to identify with.  I knew very little of US history and even less of its culture.
When I went to live in the US after high school, I was in for a rude awakening and had severe reverse culture shock.  It wasn’t until my Junior year in college that I started to learn about the USA.  I was living in Boston and a friend took me under wing and taught me about the history of the area and the people who lived there.  For the first time I started to feel something for my home country.

The longer I stayed in my home country the more comfortable I became.  As I moved from state to state I leaned new things about its diversity.  I learned about the holidays and what they stood for.  And I learned to criticize what I didn’t like about it.

I continued to travel outside the country with a slightly new perspective.  I started to compare other countries to my own and see what the differences and similarities were.  I started to appreciate things.  I saw that compared to many countries, women in the US were much better off.  I learned how important freedom of speech really was.  Although this country had a lot of problems and I didn’t always agree with what our government did, I  always had the right to express my dissatisfaction openly.

As I grew older, when living overseas, I could be very critical of the US and their foreign policy and many of their actions.  But when Fourth of July came around, I always cried overcome by emotion when I heard the Star Spangled Banner.

Kind of strange how that all turned out.

 

 

The Question of “Home”

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Re-posting this, just because….

The eternal TCK** question –   Where is “home”?

Dictionary.com tells us the following

home [hohm]

noun

1. a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.

2. the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.

3. an institution for the homeless, sick, etc.: a nursing home.

4. the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.

5. the place or region where something is native or most common.

Synonyms

1.  abode, dwelling, habitation; domicile. See house.

2.  hearth, fireside.

3.  asylum.

For Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, it is an ongoing topic.  The eternal question – where are you from?  Where is your home?  These are not easy questions to answer.  Home is here and everywhere.  I am from here and everywhere.

That very last word is my favorite.  Asylum.  The place where you feel safe.  That is where home is.  That is where home should be.  What makes you feel safe?  People you trust.  People who love you.  Mutual understanding and respect.  Comfort.  Growing up, my home was always where my family was, unless I was with them, and then it was wherever we were.  It didn’t matter if it was a hotel room or a house or an airport.  As long as we were together and had a pack of cards nearby, we were at home.  A good card game could get us through anything.  Some of my fondest memories are of blackouts during torrential rainstorms playing cards by candlelight.

We all continue to search for the elusive “home” but I think we know where to find it when we really need it.

“The strength of this family bond works to the benefit of children when parent-child communication is good and the overall family dynamic is healthy. It can be devastating when it is not. Compared to the geographically stable child, the global-nomad child is inordinately reliant on the nuclear family for affirmation, behavior-modeling, support and above all, a place of safety. The impact, therefore, of dysfunction in this most basic of units in exacerbated by the mobile lifestyle.”

Excerpt from GROWING UP WITH A WORLD VIEW By Norma M. McCaig

**TCK’s are people who lived outside their passport country as a child

African Marriage Proposals

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One summer I was living in Ibadan, Nigeria, working for my father at an agricultural research institute.  Ibadan was the largest village in Africa and sprawled across the countryside without any particular order.  There were a few hotels and “proper” restaurants but not many and we rarely went to them.

My British and American friends, Simon, Ed, David, Francis, and a couple of others decided to have a night on the town. We went to a rooftop Lebanese restaurant for a filling dinner of kabob and hummus and then on to a proper Nigerian nightclub.  It had a fence around it and a large grass roof and a dirt floor but no walls.  There was a very loud band playing at one end of the room and an area to dance.  We took over a table at the other end of the room and ordered beer all around.

Francis was being very protective of me and it kind of made it look like we were “together”.  Francis was married with five children.  A Nigerian came over to our table and asked Francis if he could dance with me.  Francis, quite embarrassed, told him he would have to ask me himself.  Of course he came right over asked me to dance. I had been in Nigeria long enough to know that this could only lead to trouble.  I was getting ready to say no, thank you very much, when Simon started kicking me under the table and making gestures like I should really go have a dance.  Simon, of course, was a trouble maker himself, but I got up and danced with the guy.  Keeping in form with most of my other white American girl/ black African boy experiences, by the end of the dance he had asked me to marry him.

About half way through the evening I really had to go to the toilet.  Everybody said I should just forget about it.  I said, “no really, I gotta go”.  So David escorted me to the ladies’ toilet. We went through a beaded doorway where women were just hanging around and inside there were two stalls with holes in the floor.  There were no doors to the stalls.  I went in and squatted and David stood guard.  It wasn’t that terrible, partly I’m sure because I was a little tipsy by this time, but it was interesting.  The women were obviously just waiting for business.  I didn’t get a chance to look around but I assume there were other rooms in the back for other activities.  David seemed very nervous about the whole thing and said I was not allowed to drink any more beer.  I think David might have been back there before.

Back at the table my dance partner had re-appeared, apparently not finding any other takers for his marriage proposal.  I was the only white girl in the place.  He insisted that he would be a good husband and would have no problem accompanying me back to the United States.  When we got up to go home, he said he could come with us.  He had no plans for the night and was happy to stay with us.  He followed us all the way out to the car and the guys acted like they were going to let him in.  I was totally appalled.  How could they be so mean?  Finally they got tired of him and kicked him out.

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Later that summer I had a stalker show up at my office.  He knew who I was and all about me and said he worked in the building.  I asked around but nobody seemed to know him.  For a couple of weeks he was standing at my door at the end of the day and wanted to walk me home.  I never led him on or agreed to anything.  He kept asking to take me for a drink or to walk me home.  Finally I said I would have a drink with him.

He said he wanted to marry me and he had it all planned out.  We would be married and he would return to the United States with me and he would go to school with me and we would always be together.  I told him politely all the reasons why it was just not possible, the least of which was that we did not know each other at all and I was leaving the country shortly. And he had a counter proposal for every one of my reasons.  Finally I just became quite rude and told him to leave me alone.

I was sad to see the summer end but I was very happy to leave that situation behind when I returned to college in the fall.  Nigerian women were very blunt and straight forward.  They didn’t care if they hurt men’s feelings, they gave it to them like it was.  I think Western women had difficulty being so cold about it and in turn perhaps were more approachable.  On my next trip to Africa, I was much more Nigerian than Western when dealing with African men.  Its all about adapting to new cultures.

 

My Day at the FIGT Conference

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Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland

Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland

 

Yesterday I went to the FIGT (Families in Global Transition) Conference.  I had been looking forward to it for a while.  It is a support group for expat families and third culture kids and they have a conference every year where people come together to share their work and ideas and provide information on resources available.

Anyway, I woke up very early because I had about a 45 minute drive and it started at 8 am.  I felt awful.  I had a scratchy throat, I was achy, I was spaced out.  How could this be?  A cold?  I hadn’t been sick in years.  Great!  Well, that wasn’t going to stop me.  I dragged myself out of bed, dosed myself up with pain killers and hit the road.

The conference was non stop, session to session, from 8 am to 5:30 pm.  By the time I got out of there I was exhausted.  I left right after the last session and while trying to maneuver downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, I must have take a wrong turn or not taken a turn or something because I was totally lost.  I don’t have a GPS in my car but I do have an iPhone.  I pulled over and tried to figure out where I was.  For some reason I couldn’t get it to find my location.  I must have been in a bad area because the maps were loading really slowly and I was not getting results.

So in a panic I called my son.  Help!  Luckily he was home and guided me to a place I recognized and I made it home an hour later.  Needless to say, I went to bed early.

In spike of my set backs and panic attacks, I did have a great day.  I met interesting people, attended sessions where I learned new things, and had that warm fuzzy feeling I always get when I’m around my fellow TCK’s.

Here are a few highlights.

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The first session I attended was called:

Living Whilst Surviving – an Anatomy of Hope and of What Kept Them Going

Presented by Eva Laszlo-Herbert

This was a story of a family who faced great adversity during war in Europe, were separated, deported, jailed, sent to camps, and yet they had great resilience and managed to keep going during all of it, finding small things to make them happy.  “They did not forget, they forgave.  They did not say ‘Why me?’, they said ‘What can I do’?”  They found ways to make things better.

She transitioned this to her current life as an expat in the Netherlands.  The take away I got from this session was about the children.  She commented on the expat children in The Hague.  They are privileged, with nannies, good schools, all kinds of gadgets – iPods, iPhones, they have drivers, and travel the world.  Yet, many of them feel isolated and unhappy.  In some cases their mother is unhappy with her situation, living abroad, feeling isolated.  This transfers to the children.  Often her coping mechanism is to keep the children busy and away from her.

There should be more of a support group for both the wives and the children but nobody wants to talk about it.  They feel guilty because they know they are privileged and don’t really have anything to complain about.

A friend of mine refers to these problems as “first world problems”.  And she is right.

One thing Eva emphasized more than once was how damaging it is to over book a child.  They are constantly busy with dance lessons, soccer practice, piano lessons, French lessons.  They don’t have time to themselves.  Time to think.  Time to dream.  Time to imagine.  Time to just be.

I wanted to tell her about my son.  Many years ago he took a pen that didn’t work and it became his weapon, his gun, his rocket launcher, his airplane, his truck.  And all these years, he has spent hours with that pen.  It is a joke now because if he loses his pen, we all have to panic and look for it.   But it really doesn’t matter, because we can always find another pen that doesn’t work.  He has had several.

Let them just be.

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The second session I went to was:

In Search of Identity: Awakening your Authentic Self

Presented by John Grant Hill

This was about communication and specifically Neuro Linguistic Programming.  Something I had never heard of.  What I got out of it was that most of the things we do, we do out of habit.   But we can choose to do things differently.  So if we look at two different types of people who are trying to communicate with each other, oftentimes there is conflict because they are not communicating on an equal level.

For example, one person is “introverted” and one is “extroverted”.  The introvert takes his cues internally.  He is very sure of himself and knows what he likes and wants and doesn’t need a lot of external input – i.e. advice, terms of endearment, hugs.  While the extrovert takes his cues from the outside and needs a lot of input in order to make a decision or feel good about himself.

If people understand these differences, they can learn to communicate with each other in different ways that reduce conflict.

A very interesting topic but it would take a while to fully understand it (in my opinion).

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The third session was:

Unpacking Our Global Baggage for Creative Expression: Writing your TCK Memoir, Solo Show, or Essay

Presented by Elizabeth Liang

Elizabeth is an actress and writer.  She performed a segment of her one-woman multi-character show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.  If you live in the LA area, I suggest you go see her (see link).  I could identify with most of what she said.

 

So that gives you an idea of my day.

Maybe more will come to me later…..

 

 

 

Food Friday: Women’s Day and Pirozhki

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March 8

Happy International Women’s Day!!

 

In Russia International Women’s Day is a big deal.  Everybody gets the day off!  Women receive flowers and chocolates and have a day of rest.  The day before, co-workers give presents and have parties bringing cakes and snacks to work.  One yummy snack the Russians make is Pirozhki.

These are small pies made with bread dough.  They can be eaten as a snack, a light lunch, or an appetizer.  This is the traditional version, however, my mother in law taught me a shortcut.  Here in the USA, she buys the Pillsbury Grand biscuits in the refrigerated section of the super market.  She splits each biscuit dough section in half, flattens it out, puts filling in it, and folds it over.  I have to admit, it is much easier!  But the real thing always tastes the best.

 

Basic dough

1 package active dry yeast (1 Tbsp.)

1/4 cup warm water

1 cup milk

8 Tbsps. butter, cut into bits

1 tsp. salt

2 tsps. sugar

1 whole egg

2 egg yokes

4 1/2 to 5 cups flour

1 whole egg, beaten

Yield: 4 dozen

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Heat the milk to lukewarm and add the butter to it. Stir the milk and butter mixture into the yeast. Add the salt, sugar, egg and egg yolks, mixing well. Gradually stir in enough flour to make a soft dough.

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead it lightly until smooth and elastic. Place in a greased bowl, turning dough to grease the top, and cover with a clean towel. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.

Punch down the dough and divide it into 48 balls of equal size. On a floured board roll each ball out to a circle 3 1/2 inches in diameter.

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Place a heaping Tbsp. of filling on each circle, then press the edges of the dough together firmly to seal. Gently shape the pies into elongated ovals.

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Place the pies seam side down on a greased baking sheet. Cover and let rise until they are just doubled in bulk, about 40 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Brush each pie with the beaten egg. Bake for 20 minutes, or until golden.

FILLINGS

Beef

2 large onions, minced

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2 Tbsps. butter

1 lb. lean ground beef

2 tsps. salt

pepper to taste

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Sauté the onions in the butter until transparent. Stir in the beef and cook until done. Add the remaining ingredients, mixing well. Cool.

Cabbage

4 Tbsps. butter

2 large onions, minced

1 lb. cabbage, finely shredded

1 tsp. dill

2 tsps. salt

pepper to taste

Sauté the onions in the butter. Add the cabbage and continue cooking for 15 to 20 minutes more, until the cabbage is tender but not browned. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Cool.

Mushrooms

2 Tbsps. butter

2 medium onions, minced

1.5 lbs mushrooms, chopped  (wild or tame)

6 Tbsps. minced fresh parsley

2 tsps. fresh dill

salt and pepper to taste

Sauté the onions in the butter until soft but not brown. Stir in the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes more. Remove from the heat and stir in the remaining ingredients, mixing well.

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Cool and Enjoy!

 

 

Anxiety Confessions

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I realized something about myself this past week.  I’m still a TCK.  I spent most of the week going through and sorting my ex-husband’s stuff.  And he had a lot of stuff.  He never threw anything away and he was a shopper.  So he accumulated a lot of stuff.  The whole experience was one huge anxiety attack for me.  How could anybody have so much stuff?  I spend most of my time trying to get rid of stuff.  I weed out my closet on a regular basis.  I don’t want to be tied down to a bunch of “things”.

Granted he did have some kinda cool stuff.

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As my son started going through it, he wanted to keep a lot of things.  That is understandable.  I get that.  I know I get sentimental about things and he should have anything he wants to keep.  However, as his pile grew, so did my anxiety.

“Are you sure you want that?”

“Is that something you really need?”

“I don’t think you need to keep that!”

I had to walk away several times.  I had to force my mouth shut.

During the same week, I decided it was time to get rid of the bed I have had forever.  Well, my mattress and box spring.  I don’t actually have a real bed or a headboard.  I have a metal frame.  I have thought about buying a bed on several occasions.  I think a sleigh bed would be nice.  A beautiful big piece of furniture.  But when it comes down to the wire, I can’t do it.  I think about being tied down to a big piece of heavy furniture.

“What if I want to move?”

“What will I do with that big thing?”

“It doesn’t fit in my backpack.”

“I don’t need more stuff.”

Yes, I know this is totally irrational and crazy but there you have it.

Confessions of a Third Culture Kid.

On another note….  I now have a blog at the Baltimore Post Examiner:

“Eclectic Global Nomad”

My posts will be featured every Tuesday.  Check it out!

It’s always something

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The first year Saturday Night Live aired on TV in the USA, Gilda Radner was part of the cast. She played several different characters, but my favorite was Rosanne Roseannadanna. This character did a “commentary” on the nightly “news” show. She would go on and on about some stupidity somebody had done and then focus on some very disgusting detail and Jane Curtain would put an end to it all saying it was making her want to throw up. Rosanna would end the skit by saying Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something! If it’s not one thing, it’s another!

About 10 years later Gilda was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died three years later in 1989.

My ex-husband, Nicholas, always had a great sense of humor and loved Saturday Night Live. Rosanna was one of his favorites, too. As well as John Belushi, Samurai Delicatessen.

I met Nicholas when I was living in Minneapolis, MN. He was a left radical who passionately believed in living green before anybody thought about it much. He wanted to be a writer. He grew up speaking Russian at home and had just returned from Nicaragua where he was learning Spanish and following the Sandanistas around taking photos. He was anything but boring. We dated for four years and then married in December of 1988. We went to Cancun for our honeymoon but also visited Chichen Itza, Merida, and Uxmal. About a week after we returned, he left for a month in Russia. His first trip to the motherland. He met most of his relatives for the first time. He always wanted to live and work in Russia and it looked like it might be possible with all the changes coming about.

Nicholas started out his career as a journalist working for the Tampa Tribune and we moved to Clearwater, Florida, in 1989. That only lasted about a year. He was bored to death. He was supposed to be writing about environmental issues but they kept assigning him to local festivals and tourist attractions. Due to a strange set of circumstances we ended up in Washington DC and in 1991 he left for Moscow as a freelance journalist. He witnessed and reported on the coup of August 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. I heard him on NPR the day the tanks rolled into Moscow. He liked to live large, work hard and play hard. He loved to get out there in the thick of it. When Yeltsin was bombing the Parliament House in Moscow in 1993, Nicholas was out there in the crowd spotting snipers and running around the “war zone”.

During the 10 years that Nicholas lived in Moscow, he started an Expat List and and Expat Site. Both were forums and information hubs for expats living in Moscow. It was fun to see it grow over the years and to realize it filled a niche for much needed information. Although it has changed a lot since those days and Nicholas is no longer involved, it does still exist and people continue to use it.

Our son was born during this time and he spent the first six years of his life living in Moscow. After returning to the USA in 2002, Nicholas ran a program for exchange students and professionals from Russia and Ukraine. He enjoyed it but I don’t think he found it especially challenging.

Then somehow it all fell into place and he landed a great job. He developed, coordinated, and edited a news website for a Defense Department contract covering all the news for Central Asia. This website has been instrumental in counter terrorism activities in the area. The website is Central Asia Online.

He and I had our differences but we were married for 16 years and had some very good times traveling around Europe and dealing with the challenges of living in Russia. He tried to be a good father and stayed close to his son.

In April of 2011, Nicholas, had a seizure at work. They found a tumor in his brain and after it was removed they determined it was an aggressive form of brain cancer, stage 4. With the help of chemo he lived a pretty normal life for the next year. He had a very positive outlook throughout his illness and he added the  following signature to his emails:

Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in
a well preserved body, but rather, to skid in
sideways, totally worn out, shouting … “Holy
shit…what a ride!”

Then the chemo stopped working.

He and our son had planned a trip back to Russia for the spring of 2013. In August, 2012, the trip was moved up and they went for a two week visit. They saw relatives, friends, and many of their old stomping grounds. It was a dream come true for both of them.

A few weeks after they returned, Nicholas was in the hospital with rolling seizures. They tried several drugs and he was able to recover to a point. They gave him several different treatments to shrink the tumors but they just kept spreading. In December he was told to seek hospice.

Both Nicholas and Gilda had cancers that are difficult if not impossible to test for or discover early on. Because of Gilda’s high profile, there has been progress in ovarian cancer and a lot of money has poured into research in that area. They are even testing a vaccine that could help stop the recurrence after treatment.

Brain tumors and brain cancer have a long way to go, however. More research is needed.

Please help by donating to the cancer research fund. For more information and to donate click HERE.

It’s always something…..if it’s not one thing it’s another.

Nicholas Pilugin, August 17, 1955 – January 17, 2013

Food Friday: Burmese Chicken Curry

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Back in March I wrote about a cookbook my mother had worked on when we lived in Burma in the post,  The Lady.  The Rangoon International Cook Book is dated 1954.

Aung San Suu Kyi is much in the news now as being the “unofficial” leader of her country.  She stood by her beliefs and suffered for many years under house arrest because she longed to see Burma free.  She comes by it naturally.  Her father was the founder of the Burmese army and negotiated independence from the British Empire.  Burma was the first country to leave the Empire.  He was assassinated the same year they gained independence.  Her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, became Chairman of the Social Planning Commission for the Union of Burma under the newly formed Burmese government and later was sent to India and Nepal as the Burmese ambassador.

Daw Khin Kyi also found time to donate some of her recipes to my mother’s cookbook.

Chicken Curry (Burmese)

2 chickens 65 ticals (2.5 lbs each)

0.5 cup vegetable oil

3 chillies

3 cloves garlic

3 small onions

1 tsp salt

1 tsp curry powder

1 tablespoon Chinese soy sauce

5 cups water

pinch of saffron powder

3 bay leaves

1 stick cinnamon

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Have chickens cleaned and drawn.  Cut into suitable sizes.  (I bought a cut up chicken.)

Mix saffron powder, curry powder, and Chinese sauce, and rub into the chicken.

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Grind chillies, garlic and onions till a paste  is formed.  (Use red chilies if you can find them. )

Fry in cooked oil till brown.  Add spiced meat and cook till it sizzles.

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Add 5 cups water.  Throw in 3 bay leaves and stick of cinnamon.  Simmer till tender, when the water should be reduced to half.

Serve with fruit and/or chutney.

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The Family

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Flying home from my winter wonderland visit with the family I thought about a conversation my mother had with one of my nieces as they were saying good-bye.

Mother:  We really do have an odd family

Niece:  Should we take offense at that?

Mother:  Well, no, you are all very interesting.

Niece:  Interesting?  Now I know we are being insulted.

Mother:  But interesting is good.  I can’t think of anything worse than a bunch of boring people.

Niece:  Well, we certainly are not boring.

Mother:  No, none of you are boring!

 

It was all in good fun but it made me think of what makes up my non-boring family.  There were sixteen of us.  We are scattered across 5 states.

The patriarch grew up on a farm in Iowa and ended up spending over forty years as an expat.  He  met many Heads of State and he had been to 90 countries by the time he was 90.  The matriarch, kept up with him all the way also starting out in a small town in Iowa.  My brothers and I are third culture kids who grew up all over the world.

I married Nicholas, a Russian American whose parents were refugees after World War II.  Nicholas’ father never learned to speak English so Nicholas was his translator from a young age.  Nicholas used to tell me that coming home from school every day he felt like he was crossing a border into another country.  Most of his family still live in Russia.  Our son spent the first six years of his life in Russia and has traveled to many places around Europe.

My brother moved to Australia after college and met and married a woman from New Zealand.  She also came from a cross cultural family with roots in England and Australia.  Their children carry dual passports – New Zealand and USA.  They visit their relatives half way around the world whenever they can.

My niece married a first generation American with Indian roots.  She is now immersed in the traditions and culture of an extended Indian family.  One tradition included a rice eating ceremony for their baby daughter.  For this ceremony they needed a baby sari.  Not just any sari but a beautiful, fancy sari.  They found it was difficult to find one the USA and so another sister-in-law of mine and my niece are starting a baby sari business.  They have an Indian woman lined up to make the saris and they are working on a website to market their goods.  You will be hearing more about this as things progress.

So we are a cross cultural conglomeration.  And we all get along beautifully.

Cheers!

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