Ruth Wickham

My early years were spent in Nigeria, where my parents were missionaries, and then the UK, where I completed high school. Then my family moved to Perth, in Western Australia, where I trained as a primary school teacher and met and married my husband, Peter.

After a few years of teaching my husband and I embarked on a career in linguistics and Bible Translation. We lived and worked for eight years on Mer in the Torres Strait (between Australia and Papua New Guinea). The lifestyle was primitive, without electricity and plumbing, and our four children were born during this time.

With our children’s education in mind, we returned to Western Australia, and I returned to primary school teaching. Rather than just teach all the basic subjects in a regular classroom, I became a specialist Arts teacher. For fifteen years I had the pleasure of teaching children of all ages, watching them grow and develop right through their primary years. In my classroom children learned to express themselves in many ways, and to respect and value others, as well as to simply have a lot of fun with music and drama.

My children are grown, and I have four grandchildren, and so my travel and adventure continues. After training in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) we moved to China where we taught for two years. The first year was in a rural area in central China, the second in a busy city near Shanghai.

Turkey was a country which had always fascinated me, so then we moved to Istanbul, where we taught for a year. We took time out to look at amazing ancient places like Ephesus, and Cappadocia.

Now we have returned to my homeland, the UK. After teaching summer school at the English Language Centre at Sheffield University, in Yorkshire, we moved down to Torquay, in Devon. We are now taking students for private tutoring and home-stay tutoring.