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Sacrifice on a boat for a decade


One of the challenges facing my childhood, has grown to understand it, is that my father’s novel I looked True – we seemed to be in a distinguished life by being able to sail to wonderful places such as Vanu’u and Fiji in the South Pacific. But the reality was completely different.

For the beginning, I learned early on our journey how dangerous the ocean. A few months after we left England, we had a huge wave when my father tried to cross the Southern Ocean, accompanied only by two novice crew members, my mother (who did not like to sail) and his young children. I broke my skull and broke my nose in this incident and had to withstand many head operations without anesthesia on the small island that we eventually found in the middle of the ocean.

But my life on wavewalker was not physically dangerous. Living on a boat for a decade means that I rarely have friendships, I had little or no medical care and I could not enroll in school.

When I turned into a teenager, I had no special space. Instead, I had to share the working toilet that we had with my family and up to eight or nine crew, and sharing a cabin with adult crew members.

With the passage of years, it became clear that my father had no intention to fulfill their promise to return home. I had no way to leave the boat – I had no passport or money. But more than that, I had no place to go.

We sailed when I was a young child, and then I did not see any of my relatives again. Regardless of my father, I had no adults in my life regardless of the crew members who came and went. The only people I saw in power were customs and immigration officials who took our boat when we reached every new country, and they did not express any interest in the well -being of the two children who found there.

While Wavewalker represented my father’s freedom – they can withdraw the anchor and sailing away whenever they wanted – it was a prison for me.

I finally realized that the only way I would have escaped from ever was if I found a way to educate myself. I tried to persuade my parents to allow me to go to school, and after six years of sailing, they finally agreed to allow me to register in an Australian correspondence school. I was 13 years old.

Although it was clear to me that my only potential Herbi was through education, the study through correspondence on a boat was very difficult. By this time, my father turned our approach to a kind of “floating hotel” to pay the price of our endless trip, and my parents wanted to work instead of spending my nose in my books.

There were also more practical issues. I had no mail address and had no space to study regardless of the small table in the main cabin. Sometimes, I was hiding myself inside a sail at the front of the boat to study, knowing that no one will come looking for me there. I had to fight my father for paper, which was an expensive commodity in the South Pacific. Whenever we got to a large port, I sent the lessons that I completed and asked the school to send it to the post office in the next port of, but if my father decides to change the track, my lessons were lost.

I found a very difficult correspondence lesson, partially because I missed a lot of education and because it was very difficult to learn remotely without being able to speak to the teacher. However, I knew he hadn’t had any choice – it was my only way out.

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