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Trans Cultural Kid Jan emailed the programme having heard Kageha Jeruto Marshall’s interview last week about being trans-racially adopted. Jan’s adolescent years were spent at school in Kenya too. She is white and her parents are white but she at times feels more Kenyan than British. She is a Trans Cultural or Third Culture Kid...  John in the studio with Jan |
Jan describes herself as a TCK: a Trans Cultural Kid whose family were never in one place for very long.
In 1953 Jan’s parents, who were working for the Salvation Army, moved from Germany to Kenya to carry out relief work in the slums of Nairobi.
The family lived in a house in the slum area. It was pretty scary at the time as it was the time of the Mau Mau uprising and during the families first few weeks, eight people were killed in sight of their house.
 Thousands were killed by British troops during the Mau Mau uprising |
Jan went to a boarding school in an ex-pat community in Nairobi. Her parents would visit her each week as it was too dangerous for Jan to travel across the city back home on her own. She thinks her parents were very wise, they weighed up the risks to their safety and they were always very open about the risks involved. Despite the obvious dangers, Jan loved Kenya.
Jan was in Kenya for 5 years and aged 18 she returned to the UK with her family. She found Britain, grey, dark cold and dismal. It didn't feel like 'home' and she was miserable at first.
Jan trained at St Thomas’ Hospital to be a midwife, and then moved back to Africa. Through an Anglican Mission agency, she went to work at a remote bush hospital in Uganda as a midwife-nurse-everything. She was 23.
While there she met her first husband, a doctor who was flown to the hospital from England in a medical emergency. He stayed there and they ran the hospital together for a while. Her first son was born in Kenya.
But when her children were just 2 and a half and 9 months old Jan’s husband was killed in a car accident. As her visa was running out anyway, Jan returned to the UK.
Jan has continued to travel when she can and through her work teaching at an International College, All Nations Christian College, she works with doctors, teachers, water engineers from around 33 different nationalities.
She explains the term TCK by saying that she is one of many who have experienced another culture but who are not fully part of it. When she meets an African person she tends to get on well with them because they can see she understands Africa. She was once glowingly introduced to an African congregation as, 'white on the outside, but her heart is black!'
MORE INFORMATION:
Kenyaweb
Kenyan History - a chapter on the independence movement
Time Line
key events in Kenyan history
Monuments for the Mau Mau
a BBC News report
The Salvation Army in East Africa
Do you have a cross-cultural identity?
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