Graduation speech from ex-Tabeethan.

It gives me great pleasure to post the transcript of the speech presented by Dr. Belinda Copitch at our 2011 Graduation ceremony. Dr. Copitch was a pupil at the school in the 70s.

Tabeetha

Tabeetha gave me a good solid educational grounding; it taught me to be a good citizen, gave me good values and ethics. It gave me a bunch of strong friendships all over the globe and across the religious and cultural divide. And, as a Jew, Tabeetha gave me the chance to make solid genuine friendships with Palestinians to whom I could talk and with whom I could debate politics and discuss serious issues and still remain friends even if we disagreed (although I actually think we rarely did). The school gave me an insight and empathy for other cultures.

Tabeetha changed my world. It really did. Hey, the school even gave me a sister-in-law.

I came to Israel from South Africa in 1973 at the age of 14. My parents were escaping the oppression of the apartheid regime. Talk about timing! Israel in 1973 was perhaps not the best place to be escaping to. As a Jew growing up in South Africa, I was led to foster warm fuzzy feelings of settling in the Jewish homeland but instead I turned up in the Middle East! Everything was different. Everything was strange. Everything was extremely difficult.. AND there was a war to contend with. I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand the cultural nuances and would have killed to stand in line whilst waiting for a bus.

I spent a year in a local Israeli school, crossing out days in my hand-drawn calendars because I didn’t understand the lessons, writing long letters to my classmates back home. That summer, I determined to find myself an educational institute that would actually give me an education. There were several possibilities. I had heard of the Anglican school - but that was in Jerusalem so not practical, there was the American school but I was not keen on an American education. I even visited a school in Holon which offered a “Bagrut be Ivrit Kalla” – matriculation in simple Hebrew. What an anathema. An education that encouraged you to learn slowly!

When I came to Tabeetha I had found my family. In Tabeetha, I was no longer the outsider. We were all outsiders together. There were children of embassy staff, children of business people located in Israel for a few years, journalists’ children; there were local Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Jews - Youngsters of every shade and creed. We created our own society.

Third Culture Kid

Now I am looking out at a sea of faces that are not familiar to me. I know you - not personally perhaps but I know who you are. I know your thoughts and feelings. Your insecurities and your certainties. You feel like you fit in everywhere but nowhere, that you are an outsider yet on the inside of something very special. You feel like you have more in common with your schoolmates than other people from your passport country. You have empathy and understanding of other cultures and an innate flexibility. You are keenly adaptable, multilingual, and globally-minded. You are more mature than your local peers, have more adult relationships and you have probably learnt to be more independent, autonomous and self-reliant than others of your age. You value your friendships, knowing that they may be short-lived. You are more observant and less judgemental than most. Does that sound like you?

I know you because you are me. You are a TCK, a Third Culture Kid. You have assimilated parts of your passport culture or ethnic culture with parts of the local culture and come together in Tabeetha to create an amalgam of the two, a third culture, a synergy (something that is greater than the sum of its parts) of the best bits of all of your friends’ cultures, assembled to create this uniqueness. I was bowled over when I recently discovered this concept. Academics have been deliberating about ME. TCKs are in every walk of life and on every part of the globe. They permeate every part of society. The most famous TCK is Barack Obama; Binyamin Netanyahu is one too. You have been given a special asset. Use it wisely and take advantage of all that it has to offer.

Tabeetha is a very special school. I have attended many schools as a pupil … and even more since I became a teacher. However, it is only Tabeetha to which I hold a strong affinity.

Failure

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you a failure. Don’t be fooled by the letters after my name. I left school and went to live in the UK with 6 poor O’ levels. I went on to take some more O’ levels in my twenties and then studied to become a dental hygienist. I did that for sixteen years whilst picking up the odd qualification here and there and eventually returned to university to gain a B.Sc., an M.Sc., a teaching qualification and finally a PhD. Tabeetha had given me the resilience and perseverance to knock disadvantage on the head and to regard every setback as an opportunity.

Don’t be scared of failing. The only people who don’t fail are those who never try.

Listen to the clichés. They are all true.

Go out there; make a difference – not necessarily to the world, to the country or to the school. Make a difference for yourself. Be the person that you want to be, not the person that the world needs. Fulfil your dreams by being true to yourself. Tabeetha will be proud of you for that.