home-not-home turns real after all

Sometimes it feels like real life is on hold in Expatland. We stay long enough to settle in, long enough to make friends and acquire pets and for the clutter to build up in the house, but I never know for sure that I’ll still be here this time next year. It’s a stopover place, with a final vague intention of finishing up in my home country. It’s not quite real, especially when we don’t have to worry about rent or utilities or school fees or shoveling snow.

I make an effort to describe the mundane parts of it all upon friends in the US who might imagine a more exotic lifestyle than it really is. There are the same daily routines as anywhere else, making breakfast, making sure everyone has what they need for the day, hustling books into bags, shoes onto feet, kids into the car, guessing at which will be the least-clogged route to school. Grocery shopping, laundry, sweeping the floor, wondering if I can squeeze in one more school run without running out of gas.

It’s also true that there’s something special about living abroad. There is always the prospect of the delightfully unexpected. It’s hard to get bored as long as I get out of my house regularly. Problem-solving and errand-running can be more complicated than at home and usually require communication with someone with a different home country and mother tongue as my own, usually several.  With patience, it almost always works out in unexpected and often entertaining ways. Even if it was frustrating in the moment, it will make a hilarious story eventually. 

Most expats I know –both the ones who have lived here for 6+ years and those like us who tend to move more often –work hard to establish a "base" for our families, where the kids feel will always be home, and it's almost always the home region of one of the parents, never the country in which we spend most of our time. It's home here, and it's not either. I get this feeling more strongly in Doha than anywhere else I've lived yet, probably because so many of us are from other countries. 

A man who sang with our international community choir died in the hospital here early this morning after having several heart attacks since yesterday.  It seems all wrong, not only because he was a genuinely kind and caring person and loved to sing and was not old at all, but because the end isn’t supposed to come while we’re abroad. Aren’t we here so we can eventually afford to go home? We're just passing through. This is not where it’s supposed to stop. 

And more than anything else, somehow this brings it back to being like everywhere else after all.

Rest in peace, Melvin Mendoza.