Hearing news of disasters or conflict can often remind TCKs of other events that have happened closer to home. They remember how it affected them before, and understand how it is affecting others now.
Entrepreneurs and TCKs have some strikingly common characteristics: adaptable, open to risk, and remarkably resilient. “I’ve seen all kinds of entrepreneurs,” John Scull says. “I think, at end of day, the most important characteristic is that you can deal with ambiguity.”
Growing up abroad with a limited flow of information meant that our pop culture DNA may be non-existent or slightly flawed. Nothing brings this truth more to light than a night playing trivia in Chicago.
“Working and living in Haiti, I get a constant feeling of “You just can’t make this shit up,” Tara Yip-Bannicq said. For the past two years, the self-proclaimed “disaster junkie” has traveled around the world to help in humanitarian aid efforts in countries like Haiti and Indonesia.
This culture? That culture? A fun Denizen infographic.
When I saw my friend Si’s e-mail telling me that another earthquake had hit, only one thought came to mind. My close friend Liv would have been at work, right in the heart of Christchurch’s Central Business District. WHERE. WAS. SHE.
Why am I so passionate about helping TCKs get published? That’s simple. TCKs are different from those who have not travelled. You think differently. Y
In the tearful process of leaving South Korea after graduating from high school, I can distinctly remember a good friend of mine saying, “Ohhh… it feels like we’re at a funeral!” In many ways, we were. Whether from my own life growing up among worlds or from working with hundreds of TCKs over the past decade at Interaction International, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me how central grief and loss are to the TCK lifestyle. Grief is a very human experience and one that many TCKs begin to know from a young age. The kinds of feelings that come with grief, which is an emotional response to loss, require much care from both self and others, especially considering TCKs often undergo “complex grief,” a phenomenon that can happen when multiple kinds of loss occur all at the same time. Since grief for TCKs can be multifaceted, many find it helpful to spend time intentionally identifying the various and specific losses that have been suffered. Contemplating these losses and allowing the time and space to feel …
It is 5 a.m. and I am sitting in a café at Frankfurt International Airport waiting for a flight that will bring me to the United States in a matter of hours. Eight hours! That is how long a healthy person sleeps at night, how long the train ride from Luxembourg to Hamburg takes, how long a typical day at school is. Eight hours and you can be on a different continent with a completely different culture. It’s nothing new: globalization is bringing people closer together, creating more intercultural relationships and complicating the meaning of “home.” Conventionally, “home” is associated with a geographical location. But, what shapes “home” in a world that is more and more connected? What means “home” to someone who has home everywhere? How does a TCK define “home”? The more I thought about this question, the more it drove me nuts. I had touched upon an issue that is omnipresent in the lives of most TCKs – the question about our roots, about what defines us, about where to go next. …
Kira Miller Fabregat, 24, was one of the first Third Culture Kids I spoke to here at the Families in Global Transitions Conference in Houston. A daughter of an Argentine diplomat, she recently graduated with a law degree from the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and has lived in Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, Australia, Trinidad & Tobago and France. What do you say when someone asks you where are you from? My answer is: my family is Argentinean, my mother is from Chile, I was born in Venezuela, my passport says I’m Argentinean. I always tell my story. Why? Because telling the story is showing a part of the person who I am. … If you don’t know I’ve lived everywhere, then it means that you don’t know me at all. You don’t understand me. So I always tell my story. I tell it short, but I tell it. Why are you here at the FIGT conference? I have skills and resources within me that I don’t even know. So I’m here to try to take them …
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