Examiner Interview

Third culture kids and home keeps moving

• October 20th, 2010 3:48 am ET

Photo: Courtesy of Heidi Sand-Hart

Taken from: Examiner

Looking for a book about third culture kids based on personal experience? In Home Keeps Moving, Heidi Sand-Hart shares her experience as a third culture kid. She wrote about how her life as a third culture kid and discusses issues many third culture kids face such as finding a sense of belonging and her search for a home. I asked her some questions:

Examiner: Trick question: Where are you from?

Everywhere and nowhere! My father is Norwegian, my mother Finnish, I was born in England and grew up in India, England and Norway. My parents met in London while working with the Asian community so my brothers and I were always surrounded by multiple nationalities and languages. Since leaving home, I have lived in USA, Canada, UK, Thailand and New Zealand (thus far!) and I’m now married to a New Zealander.

Examiner: How has being a TCK impacted your life? (positively and negatively)

Being a TCK has molded most aspects of my life. It was only when I became an ATCK that I realised the full extent of how I had been "ruined for the ordinary". By having such an exciting and varied upbringing, I struggle to find my place in this world and settle anywhere for more than a year or two. I feel like I am always passing through and don't perhaps commit as much as I could at times, to my current surroundings. Yet I love the knowledge gained and the ability to feel "at home" in the most bizarre corners of the globe; the ability to adapt quickly and relate to different cultures in an appropriate way. I have a strong desire to see more of this beautiful world and help as much as I can. There are so many positives to take from a TCK upbringing and if given the chance, I wouldn't change it for anything...

Read the full interview at: Examiner

Expat Arrivals review

By Expat Arrivals

Book Review: "Home Keeps Moving - A Glimpse into the Extraordinary Life or a Third Culture Kid"

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Growing up is never easy – and there’s no shortage of literature aimed at analysing the finer points of teenage angst or determining what makes children tick and tock during those pivotal years of early development. But about when these challenges are compounded by the pressures of moving and living abroad?

The phenomenon of so-called Third Culture Kids (TCKs) is increasingly common in our globalised world, yet little writing hones in on the specific concerns of the nomadic tribes of children that have been uprooted and moved abroad, often multiple times and to multiple destinations, by their parents during their formative years of development.

Heidi Sand-Hart looks to give these Third Culture Kids a tool that they can use to relate and empathize with in her book “Home Keeps Moving”. Sand-Hart is a TCK herself, and and her autobiographical account invites others to validate their experiences and understand their own muddled emotions.

As the child of missionaries, a Norwegian father and a Finnish mother, she uses her many moves from England to India - with a touch of Norway in between - as an elongated illustration of the unique characteristics TCKs often develop and the frustrations they struggle to keep at bay.

In simple language she maps out her own journey across the big bad world, allowing her audience to stop at signposts and take note of the direction that she believes TCKs are often unknowingly wandering in: this way for difficulty in dealing with the abstraction of “home”, that way toward the complexities of calculating “loss”, and straight on ‘til morning toward the slow, creeping sense of grief that many battle to overcome.

Interlaced throughout the work are excerpts contributed by other Third Culture Kids who, using their hard-won hindsight, shed some light on the many skirmishes they fought with having such a mobile lifestyle during childhood, and what happened when it was time to make their own decisions about the future.

Sand-Hart doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, and she certainly isn’t an author that force-feeds her audience opinions they’d be hard-pressed to swallow. Rather, she’s incredibly open and honest about her own emotions, and in being so, from time to time the book takes on a self-reflective and confessional quality. This is particularly evident in the reactions she had to a life that was specific to missionary children, an element that seems to have inspired a great moral dilemma and a delayed period of “rebellion”.

Some Third Culture Children may not be able to identify with these particular issues, but otherwise, she paints her own picture in the soft but helpful light of subjectivity, and helps others to take up a brush of their own....

Read the full review at: http://www.expatarrivals.com/

Educare Magazine Review

Educare

SEPTEMBER

2010

New Books

Home Keeps Moving by Heidi Sand-Hart

Heidi’s experiences and insights struck a chord with me as they will for many readers. Born to Finnish and Norwegian parents who worked for Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in the UK and independently in India, she experienced so much that other TCKs can relate to. The book recounts her family’s many moves through the eyes of a TCK. She recounts how she was catapulted from continent to continent constantly, leaving friends and starting all over again, leaving her with an unquenchable search for a “home” and a sense of belonging somewhere. In her own words introducing the book

“Nothing about my upbringing was “normal”. I do not come from one country, but four. I have been to nine different schools, more than 42 countries (and counting) and my belongings are scattered across three different continents. My definition of “normal” strays about as far from the conventional mould as it possibly could…”

She currently lives in London with her Kiwi husband, Paul, and views herself as a citizen of the world.

We warmly recommend Heidi’s book to TCKs, their parents & other family members and anyone working with TCKs in international schools and agencies.

It can be bought either at http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/heidisand-hart from the UK or at www.amazon.com for N America. Those outside of Amazon territory can order from homekeepsmoving@gmail.com via paypal. She also has a blog site at http://homekeepsmoving.blogspot.com/ with more information about her experiences and the background to the book.

Introducing Agape Home

As well as to promote and inform people on the progress of Home Keeps Moving, I would also like to highlight friends and good causes around the world.

Kicking it off with Agape Home Orphanage in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where my husband and I volunteered for 5 1/2 months in 2008-2009.

This video is a great introduction to the founder (Avis Rideout) and the work they do at Agape Home. Check their website for more info: http://www.nikkisplace.org/

Oscar Book Review

Oscar Book review: 'Home Keeps Moving' by Heidi Sand-Hart

Reviewed by Carol Kingston-Smith

Home keeps moving. A glimpse into the extraordinary life of a “Third Culture Kid” by Heidi Sand-Hart is an engaging narrative of a 1980’s child-hood spent negotiating several different countries and the attendant array of cultures, homes, schools and relationships. Heidi, a “missionary kid” (MK), with parents from different European countries, weaves perceptions and reflections of her own experience in a kaleidoscope world of changing realities in and out of contributions from other “Third Culture Kids” (TCK’s). As Ruth E.van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing up among Worlds, helpfully points out in her forward to Heidi’s book; the TCK experience is one which has resonance and meaning in a rapidly globalising world, where mobility and cultural interchange has increasingly replaced static, monocultural lifestyles. Essentially, this is a book which presents the joys and challenges, frustrations and successes of lives and identities negotiated and re-negotiated in transit lounges, passport queues and baggage reclaim -those places which are neither here nor there but somewhere between worlds. I call this the territory of the expanding identity.

As a TCK myself - albeit one with a far less complex history - I can readily identify with the issues Heidi raises: the mixed loyalties, the acceptance of difference (and the attendant anger and dismay at those who don’t), the restless search for identity, feelings of rootlessness and yes, there is also the undercurrent of tidal grief which ebbs and flows through memories and experiences and friendships come and gone. Heidi and others share their struggles of faith and are real about the questions and the rebellions as well as the potential strengths afforded by their “untraditional” childhoods. One catches a glimpse of both the potentials and the pains of identities forged in the fissures between times and places (and for some TCKs these are multiple). How these identities flourish, it seems to me, depends to what degree one can integrate an expanding identity and let go of ones idealised identities…however many they may be! To embrace the reality of our complex fusion of worlds and peoples, cultures and values and perceive ourselves, not as “broken reflections” but rather as part of an expanding representation of what it means to be human is perhaps the deepest gift a TCK has to receive and make sense of. It is, as such, a gift to be shared; a gift of grace in a globalised world where increasingly integrity and wisdom are needed to negotiate the kaleidoscope of hybrid identities. Heidi points us towards that path of grace and suggests that yes, it is possible to live fruitfully in the expanded middle, beyond the boundaries yet within them. If you listen deeply you may hear the subconscious plea which many TCK’s carry, in the words of a well known TCK, Salman Rushdie, “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!”....

Read full review at: Oscar

BUY YOUR COPY OF HOME KEEPS MOVING NOW: http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/heidisand-hart