Shopping alone when you are five
The world must be so exciting for her. I try to imagine how she experiences the shops, the distance to the riverside park or the large playground, the roads full of traffic, the market. Buying a snack in the corner store is something trivial for us, a relatively meaningless act we won't remember. It's no ...
The be-who-thy-be new age bullshit
I watched a well-intended speech today for fifteen year old level A students. The gist was that life happens according to your own internal clock, not according to the timetable imposed on us by society. It's okay not to be married at 30 or graduating after 25 or getting your first job at 27. Did ...
What is context?
I asked Miru what 배 'bae' and 눈 'nun' means. She says 'pear' and 'snow'. But in Korean, bae also means boat and nun also means eye. I tell her that it depends on the context. Context is the concept I want to explain to her today. "Papa what is that, context?" -"Context is a ...
Learning by improv theatre
Dear Miru, You are four years old now. We have real conversations. When I pick you up from kindergarten and I ask you what have you done today (in Dutch) you tell me brief but wonderful stories about making a snowman, observing insects and hedgehogs, dancing or taking the bus together with all the other ...
On Education
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don't accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge ...
Alphabet
Our letter 'A' started his career as Aleph, the first letter of the semitic abjads or writing systems, including Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew. The Phoenician letter was derived from an Egyptian glyph depicting the head of an ox. The Greek alfa has its origin in this Phoenician letter, and it's obvious how ...
The writing is on the wall
An almost three-year old girl draws on everything. Miru takes her color pencils and makes her mark on the vocabulary cards that her mother has prepared for her early childhood education. Her third birthday is less than a month away and we think it's great when she learns a lot now, while her need to ...
Presentation in Khabarovsk
Presentation in Khabarovsk
January 22th. KhabarovskFor an interested audience of young shipbuilding students at a technical college, we hold our presentation of Charity Travel. We are glad to see that our story inspires, and can become a modest part of a student's motivation to learn foreign languages.

On a beautiful freezing January day ...
Ñanta
Fundación Ñanta, Sucre, BoliviaSeptember 19-20. Sucre, BoliviaThere are about 6,000 working children in Sucre, and half of them are independent, working as shoe-shiners, car-washers or selling items on the street. They often work under terrible conditions and drop out of school. Foundations such as Ñanta guide them towards a hopeful future through cultural activities, healthcare, ...