ITP - 155: TCKs, Gifted Kids, Rwanda, and the Itch to Go Overseas

Greg:
Welcome to another episode of the International Teacher Podcast. This is Greg, the single guy reporting, and JP Mint is with me. How are you doing, JP?
JP:
Good morning from Mexico.
Greg:
Excellent. And now my voice is straight on. I’m looking straight at the camera, and I am looking right now at Marijn Bergsma. He’s Dutch, and I’m close. Is it Marijn? How do you say it again? I’m sorry.
JP:
Just as long as you don’t say Marion.
Greg:
Well, you got it stuck in my head now.
Marijn:
Yeah.
Greg:
From the Netherlands, go ahead and introduce yourself.
JP:
Think merengue without the “gue.” Marijn Bergsma.
Marijn:
Yeah. My name is Marijn. I guess in international circles I would say Marijn Bergsma.
Greg:
I’ll have to edit that out. I’m so sorry. This is terrible. I have a choice: I can either restart the thing, or we can just go right through it.
JP:
You never edit those out. What are you kidding me? This is awesome. This is a perfect storm episode.
Marijn:
Right.
JP:
We just go with it because this is typical. Marijn, can you tell us a little bit about your international journey?
Marijn:
Yeah, I’m super happy to share about that. First of all, thanks for having me, and thanks for trying to say my name mostly correctly.
I’m Dutch, so I’m from the Netherlands. I have three brothers, and we grew up here. When I was ten years old, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the mid-90s, and back then, for us, the US was this big, amazing place with blue jeans and cool stuff. I know that sounds like the 60s now, but that’s what it felt like to us in Europe in the 90s.
And with the name thing, on my first day at school there, my name was read from the list, but my actual first name is Hendrik. The kids giggled and laughed, and then I felt shame. So that’s the start of my name in the international world, I guess.
I grew up in the US, and then later in Japan. When I was thirteen, we moved to Yokohama, which was a brilliant time. It was definitely even harder to pronounce my name there. That’s sort of the start of my international journey. Since then, I’ve been in and out of different places. I’ve lived on five continents, moved about a lot, and now I’m quite happily settled in Haarlem in the Netherlands. The original Harlem.
And I kind of have that itch to get back overseas.
JP:
Tell our listeners what New York used to be called.
Marijn:
New Amsterdam.
JP:
Exactly. That’s why Harlem. I grew up knowing that little tidbit before I went to New York, and I was like, “This was New Amsterdam.”
Greg:
I’m American, and I didn’t know that, to tell you the truth. I don’t know if that faded away in elementary school or what. I learned things about Kansas, but no, I didn’t know that.
You were born into a family that traveled, and that sets the stage. You’re in the Netherlands right now, but you’re feeling like you need to get out. What’s going on with you right now?
Marijn:
That itch is always there. It’s a restlessness. If you’re confined to one room in your home, sometimes you feel like going into the kitchen or the living room. If you’re just in your bedroom all day, that’s what it feels like sometimes.
That’s a benefit, in a way, but also a drawback of international life.
From my parents’ side of things, one brother lives in Southeast Asia. I’ve lived in New Zealand and across Africa. Another brother has lived in Barcelona and Sydney. Another brother lived in Peru. The cool thing about traveling together is that you sometimes forget, when you’re older and want to settle down, that your kids keep that bug.
I’ve had that bug for a while, that restlessness. I worked with it through my profession. For 15 years, I worked either as an entrepreneur, as an investor, or somewhere in between, helping entrepreneurs get ready to grow and helping investors find the right places to put their money.
My playing field was mostly sub-Saharan Africa. Before we had kids, we lived in Tanzania. The safari thing was definitely a huge part of that.
Greg:
That’s a big draw.
Marijn:
It is. But in early 2019, we moved to Rwanda with three kids. We had three kids under age six. We sold our house in the Netherlands and moved all of our stuff there to set up a savings company.
The reason I share that is because a year and a half later, we moved back. It’s a long story, but we moved back during COVID. A lot of stuff happened, and we had to resettle back in the Netherlands. We thought, “Okay, maybe that was a little bit too much with the kids, selling a house, and moving abroad.” Our stuff had hardly arrived in Rwanda before we had to ship it back again.
So we’ve stuck around here since COVID.
What brought me back into the international world is that I’ve been working in different countries in Africa over the past years. But what I really want to do now is work more with kids: my kids, but also other kids who show gifted behavior.
I have three kids who are all intellectually gifted in different ways, but they also struggle at school in different ways, whether that’s social-emotional, executive functioning, or needing more scaffolding. I’m a very present father, and that became a passion of mine. I thought, “Man, this is awesome. I want to get into this line of work.”
Then I pushed that down and said, “No, take the safe route. Don’t be courageous. Don’t be stupid. Don’t try to do something completely new at age 42. You’re going to have no income. You have three kids to support.”
Then I burned out at the job I was at. There were several reasons for that, and I’m happy to get into those, but I don’t want to make the story too long. That burnout was a sign for me. I could recover and get back to the same thing every day, or I could recover and do exactly what was burning inside me.
That’s how I started working toward this.
Greg:
Can I ask you real quick about your wife? Since we’re talking about family, is she also Dutch?
Marijn:
No, she’s Portuguese, and she grew up in international schools as well.
Greg:
So two TCKs come together, have three kids, and now you’re ready to go out into the field after some burnout. Wow. This is developing into a wonderful story.
JP:
What did your parents do that moved you around? It seemed like you moved around quite a bit as a child.
Marijn:
We moved to the US and to Japan, so two places. My dad was in banking and investment management, and my mother was a teacher. She was an educator, but she was not formally allowed to work in the places we lived, so she gave Dutch classes at school and was very involved. It was almost like she was part of the school.
Greg:
That’s familiar. That happens a lot overseas. If you get into this, you’ll see a lot of spouses with degrees and backgrounds who aren’t formally working but add to the school community in that way.
JP:
How long were you in Japan as a child?
Marijn:
Three years. I was there from thirteen until sixteen. That was a wonderful place to be at that time. We’re talking about the late 90s. It was a great place, a wonderful school, and a great community. It felt like everybody knew each other. The teachers were also part of your life outside of school. A lot of kids had parents who were teaching, so it felt like a place you wanted to be.
When I talk to old friends, they say the same thing. It was like catching magic in a bottle. It was a special time.
But that made moving back to the Netherlands for the last two years of high school very difficult. You go from this amazing place...
JP:
Let’s talk a little bit about that transition. This is home, but it doesn’t feel like home.
Marijn:
Yeah. It’s where I was born. I think it’s where my roots are. But that doesn’t mean it’s the place that’s right for me at every time in my life. That changes.
Right now, it’s great with our kids because my nine-year-old can grab her bike and go off and do whatever she wants. My thirteen-year-old can grab his bike, go to a friend’s house, bike to a lake, and go swimming. It’s very safe and easy in that sense.
But safe and easy is also usually kind of boring.
JP:
I could see you hesitating. I’ll say it: boring.
Marijn:
Yeah. For us, right? Not for them. It’s a great platform for them to grow from. But the area where we live in the Netherlands is also not extremely diverse. It’s a wonderful place to live in terms of the nature around us, but it’s not the real world.
Greg:
It’s not like being in Rwanda, where you are a completely different color than the majority of people surrounding you. A friend of mine just went to Nairobi for the first time. He’s Canadian, Caucasian, and married to a Southeast Asian woman, so their family is already mixed. I told him, “Dude, when you get off the plane in Nairobi, you’re going to realize how really white you are.”
And the people there, with all the different ebony colors, are absolutely beautiful. That’s what Africa taught me years ago. It sounds like your kids already have a rich experience, and it sounds like you’ve got that itch to go back out again.
Marijn:
Yeah, for sure. It’s always pulling at us. Because of my experience at international schools as a student, I really feel like I was in the right place. I have great friends from that time, and I was able to develop.
Also, when we were overseas, it was my three brothers, my parents, and me. We felt very close. You don’t have a lot of other obligations outside of family and school. You don’t have to go to an aunt’s birthday party. You don’t have to go to all the things you don’t really want to go to. You’re very reliant on each other, and that creates a beautiful family bond.
I’m not saying that’s true for everybody, but for us there was an opportunity to really be together and bond as a family. I love that with my kids as well. Sure, we do that here too, but there’s something about going out on an adventure together and not knowing what the day will bring. You learn not to take everything so seriously. You know stuff will pass.
In Rwanda, I’d never be angry that the bus was late. Here, if the train is a minute late, you’re like, “What the hell is going on? Can’t they do anything right?”
Greg:
I feel the same way. Anywhere around the world, I’m fine with things happening differently. But if I don’t get good customer service when I go back home, I get super frustrated. I expect customer service there, or at least I used to. Overseas, I have a very low bar. I know something exciting might happen. I might even be pleasantly surprised and the food might show up.
I totally empathize with what you’re saying, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners do too.
It’s interesting to hear through your eyes what it’s like to be one of several brothers in a family overseas. Our other co-host, Matt, the family guy, has four kids, and Darien has three. They’ve grown up overseas in different countries. It’s interesting to hear you now as an adult and father sharing that feeling, because I can see it happening with Matt’s kids, for example.
It sounds like, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you’ve created some roots back home in the Netherlands. Matt and Stacey did that with their kids. They always had a place to go back to because they missed the aunts, uncles, grandparents, and all those birthdays. During the summer, they might travel a bit on the way, but then they’d go home for a while and set down roots for the kids.
It sounds like that’s what you’ve done in the Netherlands. Do you also go back to Portugal and see your wife’s family?
Marijn:
Yeah, for sure. We try to go there a couple of times a year. It’s about a three-hour flight from here, so it’s not too bad, though it gets pricey with three kids.
What’s really nice about my wife’s family is that her sister lives in Portugal, and her brother has been in Portugal every summer for the past eighteen years. They have this beautiful house with room for everybody and a swimming pool, so August is expected to be spent in Portugal. There’s a lot of room for the kids, and I think for my wife especially, that’s great because it keeps that connection with Portugal.
I do have roots here. With my younger brother, much less so. There’s a difference there. We came back every summer, and I’ve lived in Holland much longer than he has. But he was never able to quite settle back in. He didn’t want to be in the straight system here. The system is pretty straightforward. You can just daydream through life. He wanted more adventure.
For some people, that’s personal choice. But also, if you don’t have roots or anything to come back to, what’s going to keep you in one place?
Greg:
It’s a big puzzle.
JP:
Something you mentioned earlier was that adventure every time you leave the house, and how it brings you together as a family while you’re trying to figure things out.
I was thinking about the learning that happens when we’re not in our own country, and maybe not even in our own language. Every time we step out the door, we don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s going to be some interaction where we have to quickly struggle with the language or figure something out. The learning is constant.
I think our brains get wired when we live overseas. We get wired for that hit of dopamine, or maybe adrenaline. We get addicted to it. Then when we go home and everything feels normal, it doesn’t feel normal. I think our brains are reacting to that. Does that sound familiar?
Marijn:
Yeah. One of the keys to learning is engagement, or the ability to be curious. If you’re abroad in a place you don’t know so well yet, you have to come in more humble. You have to be more open and curious. You have to pay attention to what’s going on.
That can be awesome for many reasons. If you’re in Nairobi, for example, and you see a local bus come by with all the colors and paintings, and maybe a door hanging off, that’s something you won’t see back home. It triggers you. Your attention is much more focused on where you are.
I fully agree. And when you spend a couple of years here and a couple of years there, life also feels longer because you have these pockets of experience. If you stay in the same place for ten years, everything can bleed together.
That’s one of the values of going abroad or living in different places. It doesn’t have to be abroad. If you’re from Green Bay and go live in Arizona, that can also be an exciting change of scenery.
Greg:
Yeah, but people don’t travel that much from my hometown. I think it’s harder for them to come up with chapters of their life. Their markers might be when their children were at different stages. Of course, that’s true for any family.
But when you travel from place to place, those are automatic chapters. That was when we lived in this country. That was when we lived in that country. It’s easy for us to categorize memories based on where we were at the time.
For me, it has kept my life in chapters instead of just a timeline of age.
JP:
I agree. It’s very easy to remember a date and attach it to a country. I have all my years memorized that way. I was watching something on TV about news from 2003, and I thought, “Why didn’t I hear about this?” Then I remembered, “Oh, I was in Istanbul, and I didn’t have live TV.”
So we have those chapters: the book of Tanzania, the book of Japan.
Greg:
That makes writing a book so easy. You need to write a book, for sure. If you haven’t written one yet, you have a lot of experiences. For international people, writing chapters and anecdotes is simple because it almost writes itself.
I’ve been keeping a notebook and newsletters for the past twenty-five years to draw on later. So I urge anybody listening who is following an exciting life like this: keep notes. You might want to write it down as a book someday.
I have a question, though. How about your kids? Let’s talk about your three kiddos. Talk about going from school to school and going back to the Netherlands. What has school life been like as a parent watching your kids go through this?
Marijn:
My kids are thirteen, ten, and nine: two boys and a girl. They’re in the easy years, I guess, between being really young and being teenagers.
Greg:
Is there such a thing?
JP:
Pre-teens. Post-“might kill themselves doing something wrong.”
Greg:
The tweens.
Marijn:
Exactly. They’re in that sweet spot.
We moved back from Rwanda at the start of COVID. On March 16th, we flew to Holland. My eldest was homeschooled for a while, and then we dropped him into a Dutch school. We had to find a new place to live, and all three kids went to a Dutch school.
The Dutch school was across the street, super close, with nice kids and nice parents. But he really struggled for a lot of reasons. He was in a class with a lot of alpha-male energy and a harsh environment, very different from international schools. He had a good friend who had been at an international school in Uganda, and that friend felt the same way and eventually left the Dutch school.
For my son, he’s intellectually very high. He’s highly gifted. I don’t really like the word gifted, but it’s the word people use in that space. He’s intellectually very capable, and that made it hard for him to connect with other kids. He had different interests. He sees things very literally. In class, he would disturb others because he already understood what was being explained from the start.
So it wasn’t easy for him to settle in, make friends, and do school. Sports helped, because he’s a good soccer player. That helped him connect.
At the end of fourth grade, during a meeting with his teacher, with me and my son there, the teacher said to him, “You speak three languages fluently. What more can we teach you?”
Greg:
Wow.
Marijn:
The teacher was basically saying, “You’ve got two years here, but you can just pick your nose for two years.” That was awful.
Around that time, we figured out that he was highly gifted. You start reading, talking to specialists, talking to teachers, and they say it’s really important that he learns how to learn. If school isn’t giving him anything difficult, you have to challenge him.
So I started working with him after school immediately. On Wednesday afternoons, because Wednesdays were half days, we started working on a project. I asked him, “What do you want to know?” He said, “Can you time travel?”
We set aside six weeks. Week one was about asking the right question. Can you time travel? Well, we’re traveling in time right now. So can you travel back in time? Each week we did research, but it was more about the process: planning, structuring work, executive functions.
We went to the library. We checked online. We thought about going to a technical university and interviewing people. We watched movies to see how time travel appeared in pop culture, like Back to the Future.
I loved doing that work with him. It wasn’t work. I was being his dad. But I also noticed it changed things for him at school. He was getting extra support there, and we put him into an external Friday afternoon enrichment class.
The reason I say all this is because the Dutch school system is based on the middle: the 80 percent who will get by pretty well. I don’t want to talk too much about distribution because I don’t like how people talk about outliers. They’ll say some kids have it difficult and some kids have it easy, but that’s not really what it is.
JP:
You could say outliers.
Greg:
A lot of kids suffer because they’re ahead of the pack. They are at a higher level of understanding, and it’s hard as an elementary teacher with thirty or forty kids to make sure those top flyers are getting more.
They get shoved off to the side a lot, not necessarily because the teacher is neglecting them, but because teachers are being pulled in so many directions. As a homeroom teacher, I saw kids who needed so much emotional support, guidance, and help with the core subjects. You spend so much time with them, and then you rely on a couple of top flyers to help out.
But the kids who already understand the lesson and want more are not getting it. As a seasoned teacher, you have to choose to go after that, and that’s difficult unless you’ve had special training.
Even without special training, I always tried to feed the upper-level kids with extras. I always had an extra bag of tricks, questions, extensions, and challenges.
JP:
Extensions. Usually extension activities.
Greg:
Exactly. Extensions and higher challenges. But it’s not done enough.
I can hear that your son was missing that in school. As a parent, if the child is lucky, the parent has the time to move them forward. What you’re doing is phenomenal. I wish I could talk to every parent and have them listen to you and say, “Here’s the time you need to spend with your child.”
JP:
Because you’re keeping him engaged in the education process. Otherwise, he could completely turn off and say, “I’m not interested in learning because it’s boring.”
Marijn:
Thank you for the kind words, first of all. I wish every parent would hear this because I talk to school leaders and teachers, and I want to stress that I don’t think this is a teacher problem. It’s a system problem. There’s just not enough time. It’s triage. You have to go where you’re needed.
Especially with gifted girls, and this is something I feel very strongly about, gifted girls are often the model students. They put their heads down, do the work, write neatly, and are polite. Their behavior doesn’t disrupt the classroom dynamic.
Boys, like myself when I was younger, can become class clowns because they’re bored. I got it, so I would misbehave or talk to girls. That’s a system problem, that these gifted girls aren’t being seen.
The second thing I feel strongly about is exactly what you said, Greg. It’s not about putting your kid in school and expecting the school to solve it. It’s not a solvable thing. It’s complex, not complicated.
Greg:
But that’s what a lot of people feel it is. They feel it is the school’s job. I agree with you that it’s systemic, and it’s something we need to be reawakened to.
JP:
It’s also the factory model. We take thirty or forty kids and put them into a classroom based on what? Their birthday. Everyone grows at different rates. You have tall kids and small kids physically, but you also have high flyers and kids who are struggling, all mixed together.
It seems so arbitrary.
I was lucky because in most of my situations as a French teacher, kids were streamed. They were still at grade level, but if we had sixty grade six students, we split them by ability for French. Then we could concentrate on the kids who needed more help in one class and the high flyers in another.
But the factory model makes it difficult to stream for math, science, English, and everything else. You would need a huge school to play with those different abilities, or a very small school with multi-age classrooms, where it doesn’t matter how old you are. It matters where you are and how to move you forward.
Greg:
Even if you stream the kids, you’ll still have a couple of gifted and talented kids who go through the system and don’t get what they need from the school. You might have a math stream that goes up, and they might still be beyond that.
It sounds like parents are the answer in many cases. As teachers, we can try to ask questions, and I think that’s the most important thing. We can’t give the answer your son’s teacher gave.
I remember one gifted student I had. I only found out because he opened up to me. He said, “I get this already.” I asked, “What can I do to help you?” He said, “I need more. I need to be challenged.” So I pulled out the next grade level and said, “Let’s see how far you can go.” That led to a conversation with the parents.
It was a lot of work on the teacher, but it mattered.
It sounds like you’re doing the right thing with your kids if you’re doing projects to find out about time travel. I want to know more about that.
JP:
Did it ever come to a solution?
Marijn:
I think the answer was yes, but it’s complicated. I don’t remember the exact conclusion. But I remember the process, and that’s what really matters.
Let me give another example. My eldest had four or five Rubik’s Cubes in his room. He’s a smart kid, so people give him Rubik’s Cubes. But he never solved them. They were just sitting on the windowsill.
When he was about nine, I asked, “Do you want to solve your Rubik’s Cube?” He said, “Yeah, but I don’t know how.” I said, “Well, there’s YouTube. Let’s look up a video and do it until we’re done.”
We sat down with two Rubik’s Cubes and one good YouTube video. An hour later, we could both solve it without looking. It was a great video, and I’m happy to share it for the show notes.
JP:
Wow. I used to peel the stickers.
Marijn:
Or take it apart. But we sat down and completed it. A couple of hours later, he was doing it in 35 seconds.
But then we reflected. I said, “Why were you able to do it now? They’ve been sitting in your room for years. Why now?”
He came up with three things. One, he knew it could be done. Two, he knew we wouldn’t stop until we were done. And three, because we did it together.
That was very important for him in understanding how he learns. In the months after that, when something didn’t work well, we would say, “Remember the Rubik’s Cube? What do you need right now?”
It gave him language for something he otherwise never would have asked for. My kids don’t want to ask for help. Maybe that’s my side of the family, or maybe it’s gifted kids more broadly. They want to do it themselves because otherwise, what if we find out they’re not as smart?
Greg:
But he needed that nudge. He said it himself: he did it because he did it together with you.
Sometimes gifted kids look at something and think, “It’s just sitting there. I could do that if I wanted to.” But the fact that you targeted it and said, “Let’s try it,” activated that interest.
As a teacher, what you’re showing is interest, and you’re leading them to ask questions. That’s what we’re doing as teachers: shining a light on a problem and thinking about it first.
Are you on your way to officially teaching in an international school now? Is that your aim? Or are you going to stay with something else? What does your future look like?
Marijn:
I don’t really know yet. Right now, I teach an enrichment class at a Dutch public school. The school that initially said they couldn’t offer anything else to my son is the school where I started helping.
I started as an intern because I’m not certified as a teacher yet. It was going well, so I was able to do it by myself. I don’t think anybody from the Dutch inspection is listening to this podcast, so it’s fine. Legally, maybe not super okay.
But beyond that, I’ve definitely looked into getting certification because I noticed through this process that I love teaching. I’ve been a youth basketball coach for a long time, and I love meeting kids where they are, understanding how we can nudge, and making small changes that have bigger impacts.
That’s what I’m looking at.
We’re exploring what it looks like right now as an enrichment teacher. Do I need to be full-time? What does this look like? I’ve been speaking to heads of international schools, trying to figure out how this fits into inclusion, learning support, and the wider school structure.
I wouldn’t be able to teach math all day, all week. But I’d be happy to teach kids how to turn curiosity into action, and how to turn that action into learning. That’s where I see myself long term.
Greg:
There’s a long journey involved. Teacher certification is the first hurdle for anybody in international education. Schools don’t just pick up people because they’re interesting.
But don’t be afraid to jump off the deep end and go for something brand new. I’m almost 57, and I feel like I’m 42. I’m obviously not 42, but we have the same hairstyle and everything.
No matter what, your kids are lucky to have you. They’re lucky to have an interested father. Whatever school they end up going to, in whatever country, it sounds like you’re going to make sure their ideas are met with more ideas. That’s what they need.
I’ve talked to so many parents in my career who don’t have time, or aren’t aware of their kids. They think they’re fine.
JP:
Or they don’t make time. They have time, but they don’t make time.
Marijn, can you tell us a little bit about that teaching journey? Are you thinking Dutch certification? PGCE from the UK? American certification? Have you gotten that far?
Marijn:
A little bit. Not the Dutch certificate. If I go the full-time teacher route, it would definitely be international.
I’ve looked at different options. I know there are some options that just get you the certificate, but they don’t necessarily give you the experience, depth, and richness of education that you need. I want to go in fully ready, or at least as ready as you can be.
I doubt you’re ever fully ready the first time you’re in a classroom full of kids, but I have some experience. I’ve been looking. I haven’t decided on anything yet, but it would be international.
JP:
This is sort of in my wheelhouse because teachers come to me and say, “I need certification. I don’t have the certificate to go into the classroom.”
Being physically close to the UK, and maybe aligned more with the Dutch system, the PGCE could be a good option. It’s typically one year and can be online. You don’t need to physically go to the UK, but it would be seen as legitimate in the international system, whether American, Canadian, or British.
We had another Greg on the show, Greg Larmuth from the University of Sunderland. He works with certifying international teachers. I would recommend reaching out to him. I’ll send you his information after.
Greg:
They should listen to that episode too. We’ll have to put it in the show notes.
JP:
You’re not the first person to find that passion to become a teacher later in life. I’ve had clients who are second-career educators. They had a whole career doing one thing and then decided to become educators. There is a pathway for you. It’s about getting the right people in the same room and seeing if it works for you.
Greg:
I did that at thirty. I was doing other things for years, and then I went back to school. At thirty, I stepped into a classroom. I was older than most people starting my education program.
It wasn’t even for international teaching. I wanted to know everything first, like you. But once you get into your first day of class, we’re all equal. It doesn’t matter what kind of teacher preparation you had. That first day of school is rough.
Marijn:
I believe that. I worked with a lot of younger entrepreneurs who were three or four years into their careers and wanted to start a company in Tanzania, for example. They’d ask, “What do you suggest?” I’d say, “Go to Tanzania. Don’t sit here and plan everything. Go and experience it, because whatever plans you make, they’re not going to work.”
Greg:
You’re fearless. You’re a seasoned entrepreneur. You’ve already succeeded and failed in several instances. That’s my opinion of entrepreneurs. You know what it’s like to begin, succeed, fail, begin again, and try a new idea. You just never stop.
If you want to learn French, go somewhere they speak French. If you want to be an entrepreneur in a certain place, go to the place.
Marijn:
Exactly. When I started at the Dutch school as an enrichment class teacher, there were twenty-one kids, all quite unique. I spent a few days with the teacher who was leading it, seeing how she did things. Then one day she called and said, “I’m ill tomorrow. Can you run the class by yourself?”
All the stuff that comes at you that first day is huge. One of the kids was co-regulating with the teacher. His emotions were all over the place because she was his rock. I learned that the hard way because I was trying to say, “Dude, come on,” and it wasn’t working. I needed to spend a couple of weeks with him.
And then I had my daughter or son in that class too, coming up to me saying, “Hey, Dad.”
JP:
Dad!
Greg:
Change is hard.
Marijn:
That experience meant so much more to me than just reading more books about it. That’s what you’re saying too.
JP:
Learning through doing. Absolutely. Throwing yourself in the deep end and seeing what comes of it.
That reminds me of an email I got yesterday from a teacher with twenty years of experience who just finished her first year overseas. She wrote and said, “It was tough. It taught me so many things about teaching that I never knew.”
I told her that when I go back through my memory bank of first years in new schools, every one of those first years was a struggle. It didn’t matter how many years of experience I had. There was always the question: What am I teaching? Who am I teaching? Who am I teaching with?
That first year in a new school is always a struggle. We learn through doing, but when you’re on your own, thrown into the deep end, you’re learning something new without that extra help.
Marijn:
How great that she could reach out to you and ask, “Is this normal? Are these feelings okay? Am I a good fit?” That’s really supportive.
JP:
I told her second year is always better. You come back and see the first-year teachers struggling, and then you can be the support for them. That helps you build confidence because you realize your second year is much better than your first.
Greg:
You mean second year in that school?
JP:
Yes, second year in that school setting.
Greg:
I’ve done that about seven times.
Marijn:
I can imagine. When we move to a new country, it’s one thing to start a new job. I was setting up my own company, so at least I didn’t have to fit into a new team. But you’re moving into a new professional life and a new country.
You’re figuring out how to pay your electricity bill, which taxi drivers you can trust to get your kid where they need to be, and all the daily logistics. Then at a school, you’re also dealing with internal dynamics, how people work together, what’s in the manual, what’s actually being done, and thirty or forty kids. That sounds very tough.
Greg:
The hardest thing is to interview with someone and commit without actually knowing all those things. When I interview for a school in a country I’ve never been to, how do I ask the right questions?
We’ve been working through that on the podcast to help listeners. You hit the nail on the head. You may not officially be an international teacher yet, but you’ve traveled and grown up in the system.
When we go to a new school and a new contract as international teachers, we hit all the hurdles at the same time. It’s your first year, your first time in that classroom, and you’re also dealing with language, culture, local customs, national culture, school culture, students, and how other teachers have done things.
You’re looking for a mentor and help, and you can go crazy. It’s not for everybody. But that’s also the joy of it. It’s what keeps me in it.
JP:
Now imagine you have three kids coming with you. You have to help them fit in while also helping them stay themselves and not lose themselves completely in the newness of everything.
That will also be a challenge, but I think you’re up for it. It sounds like you look for that kind of challenge in your life. I look forward to hearing more about your journey.
Greg:
In the future. In time travel. We need to have you back and talk about time travel. We’ll invite you back on the show and you can tell us in the future about the past.
Marijn:
Let’s hope we can have another episode in a couple of years. I’ll bring my son on. I’m sure he’d love to talk about it.
JP:
Exactly. A couple of years down the road, Greg and I will still be riding this until the wheels fall off. Come back on the show with your son, if he’s up for it, and let us know where you ended up, how the kids fit in, and how they worked through the differences and similarities of living overseas.
Greg:
But we’re not done yet. I still have two questions for you. We could do a whole other episode about being a father of children overseas and getting them through those challenges, not just you being in the challenge but your kids too.
First question: Do you have any police stories or customs stories that won’t get you in trouble?
Marijn:
Yes, I do. A customs story for sure.
When we were about to move to Rwanda, there were two certainties. One was that we had a donor lined up to finance a three-year project, or at least the start of a project, setting up a company. Two, the government had said, “Great, we welcome you.” We were going to set up a micro-pension company for people who didn’t have formal work.
We were able to do that because we had a functioning business in Ghana that was similar. We had set that up, found funding, got the okay from the government in Rwanda, and moved there expecting to have a two- or three-year visa.
When we got there, we were immediately called into immigration and the central bank. They said, “Let’s give you a three-month visa, and then we’ll see how your business is doing.”
We thought, “Okay, at least in three months we’ll figure it out.” Our stuff was going to arrive in five months, so we really needed to be able to extend it.
Every three months, it got worse. I don’t want to talk badly about any of it because it’s just the way the system was working. Individually, people were great. The system was basically saying, “Don’t just let people come in and set up companies.” I sort of agree with the message behind it. I just wish we had known from the start.
The last time we tried to extend our visas was February 2020, which was a great time, obviously. I dropped the passports at immigration, and they called me and said, “We’re not going to extend them.”
I asked what was going on. It took a while. Ours were expiring within two weeks. They said they weren’t extending them right now and were sitting on them.
Four weeks later, I asked, “Where are my passports?” They said, “Well, you’ve overstayed your visas.” All five of us had overstayed our visas.
This was the beginning of March 2020. On March 14th, the first confirmed case of COVID came out in Rwanda. We were getting WhatsApp messages because everything goes through WhatsApp there. We started getting messages with photos of the guy’s driver’s license and store. I thought, “Okay, this is getting sketchy.”
I had three kids. They had asthma. I think there were only about twenty ICU beds in the country. So we thought, “Maybe we should go.”
We booked flights for Monday, March 16th, but we didn’t have our passports. I spent all Monday sitting at the immigration desk. It was crazy because everyone was trying to get onto those last flights. I spent all day there and managed to get our passports stamped for that day.
We flew out that night. All of our stuff was still in Rwanda. The people we had met were still there. We had staff in the house because that was expected and part of living there. It was hard.
I’ve had training on how to deal with immigration and police abroad, but that was really tough because you have to be very humble and very polite. You’re completely at their mercy, and there was a last flight out. Two days later, the absolute last flight left Rwanda, and then the country was closed.
That’s my immigration story. I have a few police ones, but that’s for another time.
Greg:
Let’s save the police ones for later. I’m still going over that whole story and what that teacher said to you earlier. What’s our other question, JP?
JP:
When you’re moving from place to place, what are three things you need with you to make it feel like home? They can’t have heartbeats, so no pets, children, or parents.
Marijn:
So you have to kill your pets to bring them?
JP:
Those are presumed to come with you.
Marijn:
A ball of any sort. Ideally a basketball, but any kind of ball will work. A tennis ball, even a half-filled water bottle. Something you can throw around and play with, whether with your own kids or with others. It’s such an easy way to make a connection.
If you were sitting across from me right now and I threw you a ball, you’d probably catch it, laugh, and throw it back. Instant connection.
Second, and this might sound a bit like a Tinder profile thing, something to cook with. A frying pan or something. I love cooking. It’s my creative outlet. I don’t sing or play an instrument. I play basketball, but cooking is my other creative outlet.
The theme here is connection. With cooking, you can bring people in.
We’re doing renovations right now, and some guys finished a really tough part of a job at our house. We were just sitting down to eat dinner, me and the kids, and I said, “Dude, do you guys want to sit down?” Suddenly there were three dusty guys sitting at the table. Our kids opened up and started sharing in ways they don’t usually do. It’s a cool way to connect.
I’m waffling so I can think of a third one. No, that’s a tough one.
Greg:
Two is fine. One of JP’s is right behind her: her rugs. And I just need ice.
JP:
My carpets. I have about fifteen carpets from Turkey and one from Nepal. Greg needs ice. And Greg, I’m looking at it right now: I bought an ice maker. It’s sitting on my dining room table.
Greg:
Oh my God, that’s my dream. Totally American. I have to have cold drinks, and ice is something you can’t get everywhere.
JP:
It has changed my life. You don’t understand. My freezer never has enough space to put a straight ice cube tray in there without it going wonky. So I never had enough ice. Now I have an ice maker, and in eight to ten minutes, I have ice for my drink. It is so fast and so good. I recommend an ice maker, Greg.
Greg:
I can’t carry one on the plane with me, but I’ve thought about buying one when I get somewhere. Maybe when I go home to the States for a year, I’ll buy an industrial restaurant ice maker and try to take that with me.
This conversation has gone so many places. I look forward to hearing at some point how your kids are thriving in school. It might be a magnet school. I hope they can be challenged. And if they aren’t challenged in school, at least they will be at home.
JP:
No matter what, they’re going to have the best teacher traveling with them.
Marijn:
Thank you both for the kind words. That’s really sweet. Thank you for the opportunity to share, because this is stuff that’s important to me. It’s great to be able to share it with you, and thanks for being wonderful hosts.
Greg:
Like we said before, it doesn’t matter if you’re a teacher, a budding teacher, or a non-teacher. You fit into the international world. We interview people from all over the world, and you are definitely a man from all over the world, and your family too.
We haven’t talked directly about third culture kids that much, but you are one, your wife is one, and your kids are all TCKs. It’s great to see that going through the family. You talked about wanderlust and having family members in different parts of the world, and it fits so well into our overall conversation.
You’ve been an excellent guest. This has been a lot of fun.
JP:
From the International Teacher Podcast, thank you very much, Marijn Bergsma, for joining us today from not Harlem, New York, but Haarlem in the Netherlands. I’d like to thank Greg, our single guy and author of Stay for the Show.
Greg:
Stay for the Show. It’s my new children’s book.
JP:
Stay for the Show, Greg’s new children’s book, is out on Amazon or wherever you find your finer books. I’m Jaclyn from JP Mint Consulting. Thank you all for listening, and we’ll see you next time.