Amy Mendel Winston

We came to Egypt after a soul-filling week in Morocco to join a worldschooling hub. A hub is a small community of worldschoolers who come together for a period of time for the kids (and adults) to socialize. The Luxor Worldschooling Hub is run by a lovely family where the husband is from Luxor and has a family farm. The hub kids take a van to the farm to spend 4-5hrs each morning doing project based learning activities (NOT school), which the parents have the morning free to socialize, visit temples & tombs without the “how much longer"s, take crafts and cooking classes, and just have some adult time, which is incredible!

This month’s theme is food for thought, so the kids have planted and tended gardens, cooked Egyptian foods, made smoothies with a bicycle powered blender, learned about different crops on the farm, taken care of animals and even volunteered at the local animal shelter. They also put together a family café where they sold foods and crafts and raised money to donate to the animal shelter. It’s a very crunchy, kid-driven, participation optional, but both our very different kids LOVED it!

The coolest part of being at a hub has been the people we met. We’ve all had the opportunity to get to know a Scottish doctor and education consultant and their 11 & 9yo boys who are traveling for 6 months; a British family of teachers with 6&9yo girls who were living in Brunei for the last 5 years and are heading to Sri Lanka; a Kansas City homeschooling family where the dad decided being a lawyer was boring and went into the foreign service, first in China before and during COVID and now in Honduras where they live with 3 of their 5 kids, the other two at boarding schools; and an American dad and German mom, who left their conventional life in Boulder to travel indefinitely with their 9yo son.

While the first week in the hub was probably our hardest week of the trip (due to a variety of reasons, including us arriving a week late in a 4 week hub and the other families already having bonded, our kids figuring out how to be part of a group, us trying to get used to new foods, new culture, new language, new stores with different products, etc…), we all were valuably reminded that it takes time to adjust to new places! The first week in most places we have traveled has been hard, but by week 2, it gets easier. By week 2 in Luxor, we had a routine down, the kids had made friends, we had made friends, and things became quite enjoyable and relaxed. We leave Luxor on Thursday (last day of the November hub) and we are all quite sad to be leaving, but excited to meet up with another worldschooling family with 7&9yo boys to overland in Namibia together for December!Read more