the high life I: discomfort with expat privilege

I mourned when I found out that our latest move would be within the US- moving domestically is much more work in many ways than internationally and there is not even promise of staff to help you out once you arrive in your new home.  At the same time I was relieved to not have to confront my issues with being supported by a humanitarian organization to live at a relatively high standard of living in the country where we moved in order to help very poor people.

Eritrea was my introduction to 'expat life.'  My first experiences abroad, in France and Cameroon, I was fully immersed, living with French and Cameroonian families.  While I knew that in Cameroon I was getting some special treatment for being a foreign guest, I was still eating with the families, sharing their space, accompanying them on their daily routines.  Suddenly in Eritrea I was living with a family member who worked for a UN agency.  He employed a driver, a cook/housekeeper and a night guard. Our home had once housed the Italian governor and was classic colonial, high ceilings and tall windows in most of the house.  The kitchen, not designed to be used by the occupants, was cramped, low, and dark, as were the servants' quarters out back, though by now these were not occupied by our staff but by the house's owners, because they could make much more money renting the place to wealthy people like us than living in it themselves.  For the first time I attended cocktail parties where the only Eritreans present were taking care of the children or serving food and cleaning up.  While I felt enormous discomfort with this expat world that seemed to keep itself at a distance from the country that hosted it, I comforted myself by telling myself I wasn't really part of it and imagining that after a certain period of time I would move out of the mansion and spend more time with Eritreans.

outside

inside

I  never made it out of the mansion because we had to leave the country ahead of schedule (another story for another post), but my unease with the expat lifestyle continued.  Seven years later I moved to Guinea with my partner and infant son and these feelings resurfaced. Here I was even more struck by the huge disconnect between my lifestyle and that of the poorer citizens of our host country.  Our home was in a white wedding cake of an apartment building in Conakry's Minière neighborhood.  Our apartment was sparsely furnished with a solid wooden table and chairs and some simple cane furniture.  Our shipping allowance had been minimal and allowed for one medium-sized box sent by air, so we didn't bring very many of our own belongings.

home sweet Conakry

Soon our son was crawling and not satisfied with his noah's ark-themed baby gym and its attachments, or his five or six board books.  He took much more pleasure in screeching the heavy chairs over the stone tile floor or messing around with water bottles and cereal boxes in the corner while I cooked dinner.  One day our housekeeper Hannah, who had fled Liberia during the war there, brought along a little girl to work with her, the child of some friends of hers.  That girl sat down on the floor by our couch, took one look at my son's meager stack of board books and exclaimed, "ooooooh you have so many books!" and proceeded to read every one of them for the rest of the morning.  I can't express the shame I felt that we should have so much, and that I'd even been secretly wishing we could get more toys and books for my son so he could be stimulated with bright colors and funny stories.

The shame was multiplied the day I went on a lunch date at Pâtisserie le Damier with my neighbor across street, whose husband happened to be the country director of the NGO that my husband worked for.  We carefully buckled our babies' carseats into one of the office SUVs and headed off.  Halfway there the traffic stopped and a woman approached the car.  She was carrying two grimy babies who had oozing eyes, and she begged through the closed window for money.  I watched her until we drove off, but I didn't make eye contact with her after that first moment, and didn't do anything except sit, immobile in my seat, silently repeating sorry sorry sorry sorry.  This didn't do a single thing to help her and it was the beginning of a great inner conflict that I have yet to resolve.

to be continued...

photo from Bangladesh