Fernweh Families: The Pages

We are excited to introduce an interview series highlighting worldschooling families, offered to help inspire current and future travelers and foster a sense of community. We are calling the series “Fernweh Families.” 

Fernweh is a German word coming from fern (“far”) and weh (“pain”) – literally, “far pain,” most often translated to English as “a desire to travel,” or, more simply, “wanderlust.”

Our first travelers are the Page Family – dad Andrew (46), a geologist from the UK born in Indonesia; mom Yasmin (42), an ex-teacher and now co-op facilitator who grew up in Sweden with parents from Finland and Pakistan; and their children Teo (11), Viggo (8), and Avani (21 months). Yasmin shared insights from their family, and to preserve her voice, her answers are provided in British English.

To help introduce your family, please tell us a bit about your journey.  

Andy and I lived in Sweden for a little while and then in the UK together for nearly 12 years before setting off on our trip. We resided in many different locations and really enjoyed our life there. All our children were born in the UK. We lived down south in a village by the Hampshire/West Sussex border for seven years before making the decision to sell our house and travel. After shipping our campervan from the UK to South America, we have been slow traveling in Mexico and Belize. We’ve recently settled in Sattva Land, an off-grid retreat centre in the jungles of the Maya Mountains on the Hummingbird Highway.

(Read a more in-depth story from Yasmin about how they came to be in Belize, published as a “Stories from the Road” entry in the Wonder Year blog here.)

What was one of the most important ingredients in getting your family on the road – what did you do that worked out well? 

The most important practical ingredient was Andy getting the green light from work. Being able to keep his job meant that he could work remotely while traveling and potentially moving to Belize. The long-term idea is to go down in work time, so he can spend more time in the community and with the family. Right now it’s working really well even though he’s technically full-time. 

On a more ideas, or perhaps even spiritual, level is the understanding that we are only here in this particular physical form once. When freaking out about overwhelming life decisions, we try to remind ourselves how fleeting things are and how we don’t have much time together, really. Trying to stay connected to our own mortality, might make us a little bit braver/crazier. We are incredibly happy with the decision to spend more time together, and less time working and having to be away from each other. 

What’s outside your window right now? What fascinates you about where you are?  

Right now we’re inside the wooden Garden House, looking out at the lush jungle outside, with a couple of buildings nestled into it. Nature and all the extraordinary creatures here are awe-inspiring! We have toucans, butterflies and hummingbirds flying all around us. There are also plenty of bugs that we are learning to live with. 🙂 

We feel that it’s a life less sanitised. It’s more intense in every sense, more awe-inspiring and more challenging. All at the same time!

Can you describe a time when learning for your kids or family happened organically and profoundly…when you learned outside the “plan” you started with?

We unschool pretty confidently so don’t have many plans for the children except to facilitate their interests. They will probably do more ‘formal’ academic work as they grow older, and perhaps have a clearer sense of what they want to pursue. During this journey we have all learned and experienced so much that we haven’t felt the need to incorporate much else. The boys have a weekly maths video call with their grandad that they really enjoy, which keeps them in touch at the same time. They also take some online classes with Outschool, such as chess and history. Most of the time learning happens organically, such as when they make a smoothie recipe book, experience a cultural event or attend horse camps. 🙂 

When our oldest son Teo turned 10, he wanted to take the junior open-water diving certification. Never having taken an exam before, we wondered how he would fare with the theory. He did fail the first time, with one point, and got extremely frustrated. Then he got determined and (still studying on his own) finally passed the test. That showed us that you don’t need years of preparation once you put your heart and mind into something. 

What have you discovered about your family by being on the road together? 

That we can do anything together. That we value our connection and our time together. We don’t try to escape each other or our feelings when things are hard, but we deal with it. And really try to see each other. Saying that, there’s still plenty of sibling rivalry and all that! And us parents regularly get overwhelmed and don’t do parenting right, absolutely. But overall we feel pretty grounded in all this. 

Also that we can experience both the joyful and the challenging together. We don’t want to shy away from the realities of life, as there are plenty of difficult things that you will encounter while travelling. To fulfill everyone’s needs can be hard, and sometimes it isn’t possible. Particularly our oldest, who will be 11 soon, needs more friendships and autonomy now. We try to meet that need as best as we can, but it isn’t always easy when living quite isolated, albeit in a community. Most children who are here at the moment are younger than him, so we’re very much trying to invite other families with older kids! The football team and other homeschooled kids we know do provide some of that for now. 

What does community mean to you, and how have you found it during your travels?

Community to us means almost everything. That people who connect with each other on some level come together, and that there is alignment. A community can be diverse, and there must be a welcoming of different perspectives and disagreements, but there should always be a foundation of care for each other. 

We have met other travelling families along the way, and here in Belize we regularly meet with the other families we have gotten to know. It’s a small country so almost everyone knows each other, and it’s a growing community. It is amazing that we’ve found other homeschooling families who want to do fun things and learn together. There is also quite a lot of interest in what we are doing, so we can really feel the potential and the energy that comes with that. The intentional living community is our shared dream, although it took me a bit of convincing Andy to begin with! The kids seem happy for now living here, and if things change we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it! 

Metaphorically speaking, what is something you’ve lost and something you’ve found during your journey? 

It is as if we have expanded. Our hearts, minds, everything. Our love for everyone back in our home countries has only grown, even though we don’t see each other regularly, and has also been extended to the new people and places we meet. Of course one doesn’t need to travel far for this to happen, but it has been our experience.

The other aspect is the more challenging one. The shadows that we perhaps could escape from a little more easily back home (to some extent at least), we are very much faced with here. It’s the way the world is run and the stark injustice of it. The imperialism and post-colonialism that the majority of people are affected by here. Although we’re in no way wealthy, having a ‘western’ salary in a ‘developing country’ (we don’t really agree with the terms but just for clarity here), is a hard thing to navigate. Travelling, worldschooling etc, is a privilege most people in the world can’t afford. Perhaps it’s not the right thing to do. But then again, living in a country such as Britain, we witnessed the effects of world politics and fair share of injustice there, too. We’re hoping that our children will grow up seeing the whole world as theirs to take care of, a deeper understanding of differences, and with an open mind and heart. 

The other day the kids at our learning co-op were setting up a lime juice stand, wanting to earn some money. I suggested they could also try and raise some money for the local ecology centre here. They then decided that they wanted to raise money for the kids in need here in Belize. They have seen real poverty first hand, and heard the stories of struggle from the children themselves, while buying them a meal. 

What’s your favorite story to share about this experience? 

That we basically just visited Sattva Land once and kind of just knew intuitively that we wanted to live there. We’re now renting a home here and are starting our house build. A pretty life-changing decision!

What are you excited about seeing/doing/learning next?

We are looking forward to continuing to build the learning co-op here, which we will also be extending to worldschooling families and others visiting the area in the future. We are planning to host worldschool hubs and similar gatherings. We’re also opening up to those looking to potentially join a community long term. We have a lot of gratitude that we have found people who deeply care and are offering their time, knowledge and love to our children, and all the children involved. We feel so excited to continue on this journey, and to see where it takes us.  

 

Many thanks to the Page family for spending time with us to share their experiences. You can follow along and learn more about their journey at @thefreewheelingfive. And make sure to read Yasmin’s guest post in Stories from the Road to learn more about their life in Belize.