Teatime In Taiwan Goes to Africa!

Well, it’s been a minute since I last posted (in part because Covid kept me hopping, in part because I got distracted), but something is happening and I wanted to take a minute to share with those of you who have followed my story and supported me along the way.

Tomorrow afternoon, July 20th, I head to Taoyuan airport going to Johannesburg, South Africa, by way of Singapore. However, JoBerg is not our final destination. From there we will board a van and drive the five or six hours to Eswatini (formerly Swaziland).

The “we” are some friends, mostly met in Taiwan, including Ryan Jacobi, Frances Wen, Vicky Chang and Si Jackson. Ryan and I are flying in from Taiwan (he got back from the states yesterday), Frances is coming from Canada (she will come back to Taiwan with us), and Vicky and Si are coming in from the UK.

Our destination is Project Canaan, a minstry of Heart for Africa. Project Canaan (PC) was started a little over ten years ago as a children’s home for children who have been abandoned or orphaned, and they only take child two years old and younger. They currently have over 360 kids living at PC, with more joining them on a too regular basis. In addition to the children’s home, they have a school and a farm, with all that goes along with supporting both, including a mechanics shop and a construction team.

A while ago, they realized that they are raising a bunch of Third Culture Kids, aka TCKs (see below for a brief explanation of TCKs), and that it would be good to train both staff and the kids about what a TCK is and what it means to be a TCK. I’ve known Janine Maxwell (the Mom to all of those kids) for a few years now and she reached out to ask if I could help out with putting together some curriculum to help with the training.

Now, I’m not a teacher, but I know a few, so I said I’d be happy to help pull something together. However, when I started looking at what is available on the Siswati culture, or basically anything about the culture of Eswatini, I hit a wall. There just isn’t much information on the culture of that country or people. So we decided it made sense to take a small team in to do some research. Hence this trip.

We will spend about nine days on the ground, talking to people, seeing things, asking questions, and basically trying to pull together all of the data we will need to create a training program for these kids and the future PC kids. Future trips will focus more on the actual training, including training teachers to use the curriculum, and eventually we will put together a bridge program to help prepare the kids who are leaving PC as they graduate from high school (currently, the highest grade is 6th grade, so we have a few years).

I’ll be back in Taiwan on July 31st, then I put on another hat and become a camp cook, but that’s another story. (For those of you who know me well, no worries, the catsitters are in place, the kids will be well taken care of!)

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TCK

“A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, a sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.” David C. Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds

In other words, these kids are from Eswatini by birth, but are growing up in a more Christian culture and being educated in a Western curriculum school. So they are taking parts of each of their cultures to form their personal culture, with Siswati influences, as well as Canadian, American, Kenyan, and multiple other African cultures. When they enter the Eswatini culture, they will look and sound like they belong, and know the culture, but they will look at life differently than the average citizen of Eswatini. We hope to help them adapt while keeping their sense of self.

If you would like to be a part of this project, please either follow this blog, send me your email, or go to https://onemissionsociety.org/missionaries/detail/Hearn

Your support is appreciated!