the high life II: not happy with how it shapes my kids' view of the world

From afar our expat lifestyle looks like paradise.  We’ve usually lived in a spacious house or apartment in a tropical country. We pay one or two hundred dollars a month for a full-time housekeeper who also cooks dinner.  She cleans every room every day, does the laundry and ironing, buys all the fresh produce, meat, and fish, and manages anyone who comes in for maintenance.  Depending on the country we’ve also had a driver and, for a few months, a nanny.  The kids’ international school has small classes and great facilities with wide green lawns.  We usually have membership at a club or local hotel where there are pools and exercise rooms and playgrounds. We take vacations at resorts we never would be able to afford in our home country.  We attract attention, usually friendly, everywhere we go.

Look a little closer: The nature of my husband’s work means that we’re living in a developing country where the majority of other expats live in upper class neighborhoods.  A European or American, with help from local aides, teaches my children.  The counselors, principals, and other higher-level administrators are European or American and the secretaries, guards, and maintenance people are local.  Likewise when we go to the medical clinic, the doctors are nearly always European or American and the technicians are local.  Local people wait on us, guard us, and clean up after us at hotels, clubs, and resorts, though the manager is often foreign.  

The pattern bothers me.  The leaders and experts in my kids’ world are all foreign to the country in which they live and the local people, whose skin is usually a shade or two darker than ours, appear to have the sole purpose of serving and assisting and following orders.  It’s not like I’m raising my kids to be tyrants who can’t help themselves but it still worries me that they will start to take as normal a world in which they are served and made to feel special just because they are European-Americans.  

Though we’re living in the US right now, driving and cooking and cleaning up after ourselves, I am thinking about how I will handle this when and if we move back abroad again.  What I can do now is point out similar patterns that exist here, are maybe more subtle, but ever-present, and encourage them to show respect to all people they encounter.  Work in progress.