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

What I want to write about

This is what I want to do here: write about moving and what it was like to settle into each and every place. Write about what you say to people that tell you to put down roots or that you really aren't settled into a place until you have lived there for a year or five years or ten years. Write about how the grass isn't greener anywhere and it's gorgeously greener there too, in moments. Write about how freeing it is to look entirely foreign so people hopefully don't expect you to abide by the unwritten rules of society, within reason. Write about how it feels to step outside your gate those first few weeks, how it feels like you're totally naked, until you get so used to it that you have to remember that you are different and not transparent to everyone after all.

Write about moving as a teenager, as a single person in her twenties, as a girlfriend, a partner and finally a wife, as a new mother, mother of two and then three children.  Write about hiring staff and letting them go, about learning how to make friends and how to readjust my expectations in a hurry.  Write about trying to find peace with living in a country where my lifestyle as an expat contrasts starkly with the poverty right down the street, even if we moved there to work with a humanitarian agency.

Write about moving to Taiwan, France, Italy, Belfast, Kosovo, Eritrea, Guinea, Decatur, San Francisco, Putney, Brattleboro, Dhaka, Cameroon, Hanoi, and Burlington. Write about leaving, about the honeymoon period and when, exactly, the realization hits that you could leave and not be too broken by the leaving. Write the magic and the heartbreak.