Tags
African Expatriate, African in the Middle East, Expat Life, Expatriates Middle East, Life as an Expatriate
An experience shared!
Nothing exciting. Just a Kenyan girl living and working in the Middle East .Trying to make sense of life while driving, working, living and breathing in the desert air. Trying to convince herself that sand, beige and dust can replace the blue skies, green leaves and the fresh cool air. Writing a post dedicated to all the people who have left home to faraway lands searching for greener pastures but have ended up on beige/sandy pastures instead!
Most of us left our comfortable lives elsewhere to pursue a chance at bettering our lives. It wasn’t without fear or without pain. We’re striving to pay off homes, secure our own future, and make a difference where we can. Just like everyone else, we’re trying to run the house, keep bills afloat, drop ourselves off at work, earn a living and deal with daily life. Some expats have opted for a great location with meagre pay, some have chosen to live in a shit part of the world for a chance to earn big bucks. No matter what our choice, it always comes at a price.
More to the point, being an expat doesn’t change who you are and what you experience. This post isn’t about expats feeling ‘more’. It’s about expats ‘feeling’.
My Facebook feed is chocked up with expats posting details of the latest grand adventure: tales of escape weekends to Dubai, videos of snorkeling with whale sharks, family pictures taken on beautiful Islands, stills of a lion chasing a gazelle taken from the back of a jeep while on safari in Tanzania.
My own page is shamelessly peppered with these little snippets of adventure packaged as samples of the wonderfulness of what it must mean to be an expat. Topped off with images of posts from my blog and few images of weekends at the man-made beach.
“We” expats (unabashedly? unwittingly?) use social media to promote and perpetuate the notion that living overseas is one big, happy escapade.
Checking out our feed, you’d think we do nothing but smile, travel, bask in the sun and sip on froufrou drinks.
You’d think the expat life is nothing but one big happy party.
And yet sometimes expats cry.
It’s usually in those moments when the reality of what it means to be an expat hits you square in the gut. Take, for instance, that day you were bullied on the road for being a woman and driving a small car, or the day you attended an official meeting and the meeting was not conducted in English rather in the country’s native language and you were expected to write a report based on that specific meeting. Remember that moment, when you got mistreated because of your skin color? Or hair type?
That time you spoke up because someone cut in front of you at the checkout counter and you got told off in uncertain terms that if you didn’t like it you could go back to where you came from? You held it in ’til you got home … and then you cried.
There was that day you got ill … and the doctor spoke to you in broken English and you got home not really understanding what you’d been told, what you are ailing from and not knowing what to do. You got home, stood in your bathroom with running water and you cried.
These are the messages that don’t get posted to Facebook. These are the moments that can’t be captured in all their glory on a smart phone. You can’t really see the anguish on our faces or in any picture for that matter. You can’t feel the despair that comes with being an ocean away from home.
There are those moments in the months that we cry. We even cry more because we have chosen this life, even though we knew we wanted nothing more than to be home with our family, friends and relatives.
There are all those times we don’t cry. We make light of a bad situation. We spin some tragic affair in to humor. But inside. Inside, we cried.
Because that’s what expats do. We don’t expect a pity party; after all we’re living the life we chose to live. But it’s not because we live a life less ordinary. We make the mundane seem extraordinary. We make the sad seem touching. We make the bad seem fleeting. We make the danger seem adventurous. We make the insane seem funny. We make the best of what we’ve got. We put up with a lot of shit. Alone. Far from home. Then we put up a lot of pretty pictures.
And sometimes we cry!
Lots of Love
xoxo