"Hello neighbour, tell me your story. You come from far away, but now you are here, we are here together."
Another child sings: "hello book, with your nice stories, countries far away, new people now live in my head".
"The world is mine, the world is yours, it's ours".
"When you read you understand the people around you,
When you read you know you're not alone,
a book opens borders and let's you go into the world"
This year the Children's Book week is all about meeting other cultures. I just love books and I love meeting people from other cultures so you can imagine that I am quite excited about this theme. The coming week many schools, bookshops, and libraries will be organizing activities around this theme. It sounds like a lot of fun! I would like to encourage all third culture kids living in the Netherlands to share their story this week. Tell other children about the adventures you had when you lived abroad. I want to encourage immigrant and refugee children to tell their stories. Let's have a time of celebrating our multicultural stories and our multicultural kids. I am grateful for all the multicultural books that have been written.
Watch the film, listen to the Dutch song and enjoy all the multicultural kids.
Here is the song with the song text:
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I used to get these "Children of the world type books" from aunts and uncles when I was a child. They probably thought I'd like them because I lived in the third world. I always felt that they weren't rooted in reality but were just a Western idealised idea of what poor children in the 3rd world were like. While in reality poor kids would often laugh and point at me, run after me, sometimes try to pull my hair or throw stones at me. So I was just scared of them. As an adult I of course see things from an adult perspective and feel for these kids, that they often have a very rough life, but as a child I was unfortunately scared of them.
ReplyDeleteThank you for leaving a comment. I agree with you that not all multicultural books are good books. Just like children's books: there are good quality books and others just are not really good. We need more good kids books based on reality. Sorry to hear the harsh things you went through, life sucks sometimes and this world is a tough place to grow up in. I grew up as a blond Dutch girl in Africa I remember kids wanting to touch my hair and my skin and calling out "muzungu", we stuck out like a sore thumb. We were different. Life can be pretty hard on third culture kids.
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