ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm Colette

Colette Kirk, in full. I was born and grew up in Zimbabwe, one of the most beautiful and corrupt places on earth. My dad is Danish, but he moved to Zimbabwe when he was 2, so more Zimbabwean than Danish. My mum is Australian, but she didn’t really live in Australia until the end of high school – my grandfather’s job meant that she lived all over Asia and Europe growing up. 
My parents met in Brighton in the UK where they were both working in a hotel to earn money while they were back packing around Europe. My dad was 19, my mum 24. He dumped his girlfriend and followed my mum when she said she was leaving. A couple years later they were married and moved to Zimbabwe to take over the dairy farm from my grandfather. In the last 30 years they have built something of a dairy empire together, as well as growing tobacco and potatoes, and supporting and uplifting our local community. You could say I am very proud of my parents. 
What about me? As I said, Zimbabwe is my home, although technically I’m an Australian citizen due to my mum’s foresight in getting my sister and I Australian passports when we were born. The Zimbabwean passport is one of the worst passports to hold in the world. Getting a visa to almost any other country is a long and expensive process with the ‘Green Mamba’, so in the case of my citizenship I am very lucky. 
Zim was a great place to grow up for a while, I think, especially on a farm. Plenty of space, no neighbours to annoy with making noise (I am a very noisy person), an excellent education system (if a little outdated), incredible places to go on cheap holidays within our country and a lot of freedom – sometimes too much freedom for some people. 
I left when I was nineteen to start university at Imperial College, London where I graduated with first-class honours in Materials Engineering. From there, after some travelling, I went back home for a couple of years to work with my parents before leaving again, this time to Sydney, Australia, where I am now, stuck in lock down because of Covid-19. 
I’ve tried a few times to write a book about my life , as it has been very different to those of the friends I’ve made and people I’ve met on my travels and life in other countries, but I can never concentrate on the book long enough to get it done. So, I’m going to try a blog instead, focusing on some of my wildest, funniest and saddest experiences living in Zimbabwe, and sometimes beyond. Maybe I’ll be able to collect all of this into a book, one day.
I call the blog ‘third culture kid’ because I really don’t have a defined culture – Australian mum with a shady Romanian, Swiss, Moroccan, French and British family tree, and a Danish father with a family that traces all the way back to the Vikings whose parents decided to move their whole life to Southern Africa. This makes for a very mixed up set of cultures, genes and ideals handed down to my sister and I, and so we would call ourselves third culture kids, because I suppose we have developed our own culture, influenced by our genes and the environment we grew up in. 
I know there’s other kids like me around, so if you want to share your experiences as a third culture kid with me, or just get in touch to have a chat, please do – I think we’d get along.