Ceding Control

Americans are, I think, used to being in control of their lives to a certain point. You decide what you eat, where you work, what to go to school for, what you can wear, who you can associate with, how conservative or liberal you want to be, how you transport yourself around your neighborhood. When you live in a developing country you lose some of that control. Things don’t always work, transportation depends on unreliable cars and badly maintained roads, you can’t eat the things you’re used to, you can’t wear what you want to, the weather is not what you’re used to, and you have to manage your views or ideas to control the level of safety you may have.

So you tend to cling to things you can control – personal hygiene, hanging out with other expats to have a chance to speak like you did back at home, depending on care packages for food versus going to the market, buying things for your home, communicating with friends back home online (but even that is difficult sometimes).

I think the key to living abroad (not in an expat community, but more integrated into culture) is finding the balance between what you’ve realized is out of your control, and what you can fight for. When you first arrive, you decide you’re going to fight for everything. Call people at home everyday. Spend lots of money at restaurants designed for foreigners. Shop at supermarkets versus the local market. Spend lots of money on internet to live the life you did at home. But at some point you realize you’re not at home anymore, and even when you’re on a limited contract, that you’re not going to be home again for a while. You start to let go of things which simply bothered you, and start to focus on the things you can control.

How often will you see your expat friends? How often will you spend money on comfort food or comfort items? How much work can you expect to get done now that you’ve seen the systems and their limitations?

Grassroots work is hard. And change takes an extremely long time. But you focus on the people and the things you can affect, and that helps.