WHAT EXPATS CAN DO

…. to bring hope to the world

The Expat Life “Gifts”

Cristina Baldan Categories: Articles Latest Post PostHomepage
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An expat survey.

 

In my experience, I’ve realized that most expats are not aware of the enormous potential they have. Nor are they aware of the skills they’ve gained from this kind of life.

I suspect the reason is probably lying behind the psychological challenges and fatigue they are obliged to overcome every time they face a new assignment. When you start from the beginning over and over again, often by facing challenges that you would never expect (some very hard), you develop the belief that you are not an expert – you instinctively know how much you still have to learn every single time you approach a new country and a new culture.

However, I firmly believe that expats are an incredibly positive source of energy and of great value to current society: I have seen with my own eyes what they are capable of, and I am determined to help them to become aware of this… But how?

 

The Survey

I decided to start by running an experiment. I enlisted the most qualified people I know in this field: the editing team of Expatclic.com.

The group of 7 women who answered my questions had all moved abroad as adults and had collectively lived outside their passport country for a total of 131 years, with an average of 18.7 years per person.

They lived as resident of a total of 31 countries (4.4 countries on average for each person) and they visited an additional total of 197 countries (28 on average for each person). All of this with accompanying children – some born abroad, some not.

Even knowing about the experiences of my colleagues, those numbers were still a surprise to me, and I think they constitute a solid group as far as interviewees.
 

Flexibility / Open-mindedness / Ability to network

The answers to my question about how much the expat lifestyle had changed the interviewees contained many similarities. Gaining the ability to be flexible and to adapt to changes – in situations as well as in relationships with unknown people – was probably the most frequent common theme. There was clearly a lot of self-awareness, and interviewees seem to have gained an open mind towards new cultures, to new ways of “doing things”. Furthermore, common to all the answers was the acquired ability to know how to better deal with people and how to build a network of human relationships in a foreign environment.

The most difficult challenge has been…

Loneliness, isolation, loss of identity, a sense of not-belonging, being forced out of a comfort zone, and feeling uncomfortable in a culture far from your own one. These are the strongest challenges these women reported having to face during their life abroad.

This result may not be surprising to you, but it is for me because I know that among these women there are some who have lived in really difficult countries and have faced some extreme challenges in terms of securities issues, discomfort, lack of basic services (like clean water), war danger, etc… It is surprising to me that those challenges weren’t listed as the most difficult ones.

Instead, challenges that threaten personal identity, our sense of belonging, and the possibility to have meaningful human relationships have been the most difficult part of the life abroad for these women.
 
 

Which of your personal resources was most useful in facing cultural shocks?

The women in this group are all happy with their experience overall. Despite the difficulties and hard times, they are still satisfied with the choices made, in fact, they offer their time and energy to help other expat women. Expatriation, however, is not always as successful as it was for them. So, I was curious to understand if there was a common starting point, a personal resource that helped them to overcome their challenges.

And indeed, I found some common skills in their answers:

  • Positivity, sense of humor, meeting others with a smile
  • Being adventurous
  • Flexibility
  • Empathy
  • No judgment attitude, modesty
  • Respect
  • Above all curiosity: never being tired of learning about how other people live and understand life.
  • Determination

The impact of expat life on human relationships with strangers and with familiar people

In all the contexts of human relationships (family, children, friends, colleagues, strangers, etc…), there is a common characteristic among these women: there is more desire for and attention given to the quality of the relationships. The expat life brings some peculiar and specific teachings in regards to how select your friends, how to educate your children, how to evaluate other people’s behavior, and how to relate to it.

By living abroad, you see and come into contact with other realities. You discover that things can be done in a different way and children can be raised and educated in different and unexpected ways, and the results can be as good as your own traditions. This develops an attitude of being open to learn from other cultures, to develop a feeling of freedom and wisdom in picking up and adopting what you evaluate may be good for you too. Most of the women interviewed think they would have been totally different mothers if they had raised their children in their home countries.

The expat life also teaches you how to face adversity: the wide amount of difficulties an expat family experiences provide the training ground to learn how to screen out troubles, to identify the real priorities in life, and to become effective problem solvers. Most of the time you are alone to face your adversities without the support of good friends or family members. The reality is that you simply don’t have the time and/or the energy to make things complicated, and so become skilled in quickly finding workable solutions.

These women all see themselves as much stronger and resilient. They have acclimated to adversities in such a way that they face them when the time comes and fix them. This stands true despite things you would never plan for in a normal life like wars, serious illness, grief, criminality, and so on.

In addition to those hurdles, there is the learning about what is happening around you.

“Moving to different places, with different cultures, we necessarily learn, I believe, about the politics of the countries in which we live, of the neighbouring countries, of global issues, and of our country of origin. This, together with the capacity of understanding cultural differences, gives us the tools to be able to read and understand what is happening around us in a much better way”.

This sentence summarized the gift of being an expat in the best way possible. The expat life brings the gift of a special “lens” to see the world. This lens comes from having experienced living life in another country (or countries) first-hand. The ability to evaluate people and situations by automatically applying self-awareness and trying to avoid bias and judgment is one of the most common and valuable consequent skills.

Based on responses from these women who are currently working, I would also like to address some benefits of the expat experience that impact relationships in the professional environment:

  • Knowing what to prioritize and when, and the ability to evaluate and solve problems
  • Being able to analyze and quickly understand an unknown situation or environment
  • Being able to adapt and work in an unfamiliar environment
  • Constantly applying an attitude of self-reassessment to find solutions that may work
  • Being able to relate and work with people coming from different cultures
  • Being available to continually start from scratch and think about the future with an “out-of-the-box” attitude

Are there any Human Resource specialists reading right now? Would you agree that the list above encompasses some of the most wanted skills in a professional environment those days?
Unfortunately, it is very hard for a woman to have this kind of experience properly expressed in a resume (but this is a good topic for another article).

Change of life goals and self-awareness

When you choose this kind of life, you accept the unpredictable. Some are aware of this reality, but most are not. I asked the question: “Has the expat life changed your life goals and inspired you to do something totally different from your initial plan or dream?”. This is certainly a query worth an in-depth analysis.

What I first noticed in their answers was that when the expat life began in an early stage of their life, the goals didn’t change too much. For the ones who left a career, a job or a university degree in the home country, the change was in some way mandatory: all of them had to change perspective and adapt to new realities.

I wish I could have continued working and reaching my goals as a woman in the fields of finance.

I was a lawyer and I am a coach and facilitator now!

I wanted to be a scientist, now I’m considering becoming a teacher.

The ability to reinvent themselves to face a new situation is common, but it also brings a certain measure of suffering.

The last question

… if you could put three values or skills you gained in the expat life in a time capsule for your descendants which they could use in their own life, what would you choose?

empathy

  • Flexibility and adaptability to new situations and to changes
  • Curiosity of the world, for the people – Respect for others – Sense of adventure
  • Ability to learn from your mistakes and don’t be ashamed to make them, they are part of our life
  • Optimism – Empathy – Tolerance
  • Ability to accept life events, the loss, the loneliness, the hard times
  • Courage to keep going in front of adversities
  • Gratitude and appreciation for what you have
  • Knowledge – Sense of justice – Capacity of relativize

I don’t think I need to add any comment to this.

Conclusion

My research is not complete: this survey was just a first experiment. I want to dig more into the expats’ personal characteristics. There is still a lot to discover and to speak about.
I want to conclude this reflection with one last point and a question for you.
While I was reviewing their answers, I constantly found myself thinking about the richness these women can offer to society: not only as individuals but also as a group with their collective life experience.
That being said, I invite you to think and ask yourself:

What would the entire expat community be able to offer society if their experience is considered a whole?

If this reflection moved something in you, please share it with us! You can do this privately or through our Facebook page. All feedback helps us to improve this research and is evaluated with deep appreciation.

Many thanks to my interviewees, the Women behind Expatclic: you are simply and incredibly amazing!

 

 

Cristina Baldan
April 2019
All photos ©Expatclic

 

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The trailing husband (of an aid worker)

Claudia Landini Categories: Articles Latest Post PostHomepage
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We sincerely thank Federico Bonadonna for allowing us to publish the translation of his moving account of what it means to be the trailing husband of an aid worker.

 

I have followed my wife for ten consecutive years in places I had barely heard about (and some places I’d never heard about), not to mention other countries where I had sworn to myself I’d never set foot, so strong was their reputation of being dangerous, dirty, or miserable.

On our first date in Rome, I told her I hated to travel, I hated the “Chatwin-like mysticism” of the journey, and I did not completely understand the point of international cooperation “with all there is to do for the poor in Italy”.

aid workerAt that time my work focused on extreme urban poverty and I had never experienced being stuck in a besieged neighbourhood during a civil war, resulting in hundreds of deaths – practically ignored by media (apart from the local ones); and I was physically allergic to ethnic fashion (I still am, a bit). My future wife looked at me in silence… and less than one year later I was beside her in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Since that moment I have done what the character of a song of Sergio Caputo (Italian songwriter, ndr) does: “I will follow you to show you something more, I’ll come with you should this be my work”.

Together with my wife in these 10 years, I’ve had stones thrown at me (even if the stones were for her, in Yemen, because she had unwillingly worn a colourful veil from which strands of hair protruded), been spat at (the spitting was also for her, for the above reason), and contracted intestinal and skin parasites. I fasted for days in the desert while she ate local food sitting on the ground, for weeks I only ate junk biscuits and drank Coke, I slept in infamous shacks among rats, cockroaches and snakes. A couple of times I threw up my soul as a result of serious food poisoning.

My wife and I have passed on a road a few minutes before it was shaken by a bomb attack and for years have breathed toxic fumes because of open air dumps and the constant burning of trash.

With her in these years I have visited orphanages that provide meager amounts of food to scrawny children – intentionally ensuring they do not appear well fed in order to discourage parents from abandoning their children there to give them a future. I have seen children looking for worms in the earth to eat. I’ve stared into their eyes: some were full of hate, others of pleading. Those eyes have tormented me for months.

I have seen China advancing in Africa, blowing up mountains to pave landscapes, build railways, bridges, motorways, or to extract minerals. I have seen the new colonialism, and the future shapes of the world: “Cindiafrica”, with her 3.6 billion people – mostly young. I have visited pristine places, and other landscapes definitely destroyed by pollution.

aid workerI have followed women on a three-hour trek to fetch water from the only well accessible to them, and trek 4 hours back, loaded with overflowing carboys. I have seen the result of the aid workers job: the joy of inhabitants in remote areas that celebrated the opening of new wells, the building of schools and health posts.

I have come dangerously close to contracting malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and bilarziosis. I have understood that danger is part of the job: traveling on Russian helicopters that have fallen (and fall with alarming recurrence), driven by not-always-sober Ukrainian pilots to go to South Sudan, where there is a war – which means they shoot, kidnap, and rape… it means they have kidnapped, killed or raped people you know. Places where lodging outside of Juba are huts where poisonous snakes and rats live, infested with malaria-ridden mosquitos and cockroaches (I know an aid worker who fears nothing… except what I just listed: she has a phobia of beetles and she insists on going to those places, because that’s her job).

I have seen refugee camps with lean women and children as far as the eye can see, thousands of exhausted people, massed in camps between Kenya and Ethiopia, sitting on UNCHR rice bags. Being an aid worker is not a job for those who work for agencies that spend 70 or 80% of resources in staff (the aid workers I value and talk about are not only able to write projects and make ends meet; they dirty their hands – they risk). Aid workers do not think that the danger is always the fault of those who are kidnapped or attacked, or that you can always avoid danger. No, cooperation, in some places, is physically and psychologically dangerous work.

I met hundreds of people, extraordinary volunteers and aid workers, and then others too busy with looking good. Sensible entrepreneurs and infamous bastards. Elegant diplomats and others who cannot be described.

In these 10 years I have understood that I had understood nothing: that is to say that I, and all the people I know, have been born in the right place and at the right moment in history, that we have a material luck we cannot even understand because we are so far from the daily tragedies that the vast majority of people in the world go through every single second of their existence. And that even if unperfected, improvable, and modifiable, international cooperation – in all the shapes it assumes and has assumed in the course of history – is the most democratic tool for development. Cooperation, however, is made of aid workers: people of flesh and bones, with their dreams, passions, and ideals; but also with refined skills and knowledge that merit the utmost respect, because aid workers do not love danger, but their work by its very nature implies danger.

 

Federico Bonadonna
February 2019
Photo Credit ©FedericoBonadonna

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The ‘Other’ Expats; an initiative by Mariam Ottimofiore that fills us with hope

Claudia Landini Categories: Articles Latest Post PostHomepage
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Mariam Navaid Ottimofiore is a Pakistani born expat who grew up in Bahrain, New York City and Karachi. She has been living abroad for 17 years, with her husband and her two children. She has presently just left Dubai and moved to Ghana. I met her at the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) conference in The Hague, Netherlands in 2017 and was delighted when I realized that at the 2018 conference (which I unfortunately could not attend) she held a session to introduce the topic of The ‘Other’ Expats – Diverse Voices from Dubai; How Race, Class and Privilege Affect Our Mobility Experience. I talked to her on the phone about it over the summer and our conversation confirmed the impression I had after meeting Mariam: she is a very empathetic, highly motivated person, who believes in the power of our expat lives to change the world around us. Thank you Mariam for your time and best wishes for your next assignment!

Mariam had been an expat for many years, but it was only when she moved to Dubai in 2014 that she realized that a huge portion of expats were not part of the mainstream discussion on global mobility. These were the construction workers, the labourers, the gardeners, the maids, the nannies and the taxi drivers who hailed from countries like Pakistan and the Philippines. Many of them had migrated to the United Arab Emirates as foreign labour. She started researching and writing about these ‘other’ expats in 2016 to give a voice to this group of unheard and unseen foreigners who, like her, had settled down in Dubai, though under very different conditions.

Mariam started precisely from the fact that both she and these other expats had one big thing in common: they had both left their home countries and were living and working in a foreign land, which they both had to adapt to. In this process, she found out, that despite the big gap in economic conditions and socio-economic statuses, the ‘other’ expats faced many of the same challenges as the traditional expats: dealing with homesickness, culture shock, transitional pain, hope for better conditions, were all commonalities that mark all adaptation phases to new countries.

And yet, these people were not considered expats. In Dubai, an expat was a German marketing executive, not a Pakistani construction worker. The latter was called a ‘migrant worker’; a term that in the Middle East is used widely to denote individuals with blue collar jobs who come over to work for time-limited periods but are never integrated into society. They lead a very different life from the richer expats who arrive in the country with a solid working contract and loads of benefits. The ‘other’ expats have no access to relocation agencies, financial services or any form of governmental assistance. They leave their families back in their home countries and work hard to send money over to them every month. The financial conditions of the groups are striking, says Mariam. Whereas an expat working for a big international company is likely to earn 12,000 USD per month, the ‘other’ expats, mainly employed in construction and the labour industry earn around 190 USD per month.

Mariam was surprised when she realized that in Dubai, the two parallel worlds exist side-by-side, but rarely do they ever cross. Most expats live in their cocoon, and they might find it difficult to register that other people live in such difficult conditions. Mariam had been deeply touched by Amanda Bates intervention at FIGT17 when she had asked “who is not at the table?”, where attention was driven to the fact that those who own and lead the discussion about mobile life issues are mostly Third Culture Kids (TCK’s), diplomats, missionaries, expats, relocation agencies and international corporations. What about the refugees, the displaced and the migrant workers? Didn’t they deserve to be at the table too?

She decided to give a voice to the ‘other’ expats and set out to interview them and write about them. I asked her how she approached them and talked to them about sharing their stories. “I speak Urdu and Hindi which helped a lot, to break the ice. I started in my neighbourhood, telling people I was a writer and was interested in their experiences of moving abroad, to gather different points of view. They all reacted with enthusiasm. No one ever asks about their experiences. They wanted to share their story, in their own words.”

Mariam presented the results of her work at FIGT18 (click here to see the full video), but that was not the end of her work to bring awareness to the ‘other’ expats. She continued writing about the ‘other’ expats, blogging about their stories, advocating that the word ‘expat’ be redefined to include the ‘other’ expats (read here). She also collaborated with local initiatives such as the growth platform RISE who help these ‘other’ expats in the UAE to open up bank accounts, manage their finances, learn new skills and build a better future. You can read her article on RISE on And Then We Moved To.

Her writing and efforts have created a wave of consciousness in the expat community in Dubai. Even the Dutch ambassador to the UAE who read one of her articles on the ‘other’ expats published in Global Living Magazine tweeted this in support: “These voices deserve to be heard.”

“All this has spurred a lot of expat writing, and organizations that help “other expats” have gained exposure. New collaborations and ideas exchanges have been born. Many expats in Dubai have approached the discussion, and ask themselves what they can give back to this country”, says Mariam.

I am delighted to hear all this. It is high time that more expat voices get together to realize how privileged some of us are, and how much we miss in not taking into the picture the stories of other expats. “We should start by bringing equality in the language”, says Mariam. “If you give them the same name as you call yourself, you open the way to find commonalities, and not differences”.

I ask Mariam if and how she intends to continue the project. She tells me that she will continue to do whatever she can to break down barriers, to challenge people’s minds to open up and embrace differences. There is a lot of work to do because the inequalities are mind-blowing. I am confident that Mariam will find her way to help people move forward wherever she goes. And I thank her from the bottom of my heart for this.

 

 

 

 

For more of Mariam’s work and writing, head over to her website And Then We Moved To (www.andthenwemovedto.com)

Claudia Landini
September 2018
Photo credit ©MariamNavaidOttimofiore

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Children’s Hope In Action: Improving lives, saving futures!

Claudia Landini Categories: Articles Latest Post PostHomepage
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Nikki Cornfield is one of the Parfitt-Pascoe Writing Residents 2018. She is a British expat, yoga and meditation teacher, currently living in Australia. She blogs at https://nikkicornfield.com/. We thank her for this great article.

 

In July 2016 we joined two other families in Hanoi in the north of Vietnam to begin our adventure traveling south with Intrepid Family Holidays. Arriving in Hoi An, we were given the opportunity to visit CHIA – a grassroots charitable foundation for helping disadvantaged children in Central Vietnam. We donated packs of milk cartons and baby formula and were warmly welcomed by volunteer Jeanne Grant, who today is still generously giving her time as CHIA’s Marketing and Communications Manager. Jeanne Grant arrived in Vietnam on holiday in 2013 and after several more visits fell in love with it and decided to take long service leave from her job as a social worker and family therapist in Victoria, Australia, to volunteer her services at CHIA. “I was hooked and so excited to begin. I began the process of jumping all the hurdles at home to make my dreams come true.”

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela.

Jeanne and the CHIA staff

We knew we would be meeting children whose problems and disabilities would stab at our hearts; in Vietnam children with special needs are deemed ‘useless’ to their families as they cannot work or go to school to learn. But as we sat and played with them, their smiles demonstrated that these were the lucky ones: they stood a chance of having an education and a future thanks to Jeanne and the volunteers who came from all over the world to offer specialized care.

Life as a volunteer

Arriving back in Hoi An on 15th of January 2016, Jeanne secured herself an apartment and a motor scooter – “even though I had never ridden one in my life.” Her work began immediately at CHIA and her experience has proved “remarkable, fulfilling and so much more than I could ever have imagined.” Jeanne’s courage to start this new life and to give her time making a difference for these children and their parents came from her love of working with children and families, her love of traveling the world and a close family who supports her in everything she does. It’s this foundation of ‘home’ back in Australia that she says gives her the grounding to be able to offer her all in Vietnam and use skills acquired from 20 years of work with abused children. “It is a pleasure and honor to work with this great organization and the staff and children. The greatest satisfaction is that I can make a direct difference in a child’s life, which is an amazing feeling.”

Chia children, staff and volunteers

Jeanne introduced herself to our group of five adults and ten children and spoke about the work that CHIA does, not just in the center but also in the community. As the children crawled into our laps for a cuddle or to show us a toy we all melted at the love we immediately felt for them. We were all moved to tears at the stories of just how difficult it is in Vietnam for families to survive and feed their children, let alone educate them. We were humbled at how much we have at home in comparison. In Central Vietnam’s Quang Nam province families are directly responsible for the total cost of sending their child to school. With most families surviving on less than $2 per day – yes that’s less than your average take away coffee -, it is easy to see that school fees and supplies are so huge that this large financial burden becomes unsustainable and children have to quit school. They are forced to work at an early age to help their family. Jeanne explained to us that if the child has learning and/or physical disabilities they cannot do this which leaves them abandoned at home, of no use to their families or society. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room at this stage.

A doctor from our group was emotionally stirred to help immediately and set to work assessing the children. The center relies on volunteer doctors to diagnose the mental and physical disorders in order for them to receive the correct care. We were inspired by Jeanne to act and do something to help this incredible organization, which had made her turn her world upside down to help “change the world of Vietnam’s children.”

 

Nikki Cornfield
July 2018

To support CHIA please visit www.ChildrensHopeINAction.org

 

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FIGT Conference 2017 – What Expats Can Do presentation

Claudia Landini Categories: Articles Latest Post PostHomepage
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This is the presentation Cristina gave at the Families in Global Transition conference in The Hague in March 2017.

I will start by sharing my feelings, so that we can practice empathy straight away: I need your empathy to help me, since this is the first time I speak in a conference and I have to do it in English (apologies to have to make you suffer for more or less10 minutes).

Without repeating information that is already available on the website, I would like to introduce you to what is behind the project What Expats Can Do.

Everything started one year ago, while I was sitting on the other side of this table and TheManThatIWillNeverThankEnough, Christopher O’Shaughnessy, was talking about the critical mission of the expat community.

I lived abroad for 16 years, in 8 different countries, faced some serious cultural shocks. I quit my job and threw away my master degree and my career in order to pursue this kind of life, (I would say without being totally aware of that at that time). I am the stereotype of the expat spouse who sacrificed her social identity on the altar of mobile life. For several years I had been thinking of how I could recycle myself and how my experience could add a valuable contribution to society, apart from being a spouse and a mother. Everything I was considering to pursue, implied starting from scratch, and my experience not being evaluated enough. And that hurts, it really hurts, doesn’t it?

Then there was that man, TheManThatIWillNeverThankEnough, saying something that was touching me deep inside. It was a simple concept: as expats we have gained skills that the world desperately needs, and one of them is particularly important: the ability to feel and create empathy and bring hope to other people.

All through my life abroad, I was aware I was acquiring special skills, but I had never thought those skills could be useful for society. That was a new concept, a new way to see my life experience.

So, I started to think. And talk. I involved Claudia and the Expatclic team, my expat friends, I practically bothered everybody. I worked on this new concept, and my reflections were more or less the following:

Expats are generally not considered as a RESOURCE in society. Companies consider them a resource, but society doesn’t.

 

figt

 

Immigrants are considered a social entity and it is understandable: their goal is to settle down, they have a significant financial impact on society (positive as an economical resource, negative for the cost of integration), they tend to integrate their families in the host country. There are governments’ programs to deal with their integration so that they can give their contribution to society.

Expats are generally not considered as a social entity or, if they are, it is a kind of temporary consideration, strictly related to the nature of their assignment (military members, diplomats, executives, etc.). Outside of this role, they practically don’t have a social identity, their families are considered only as “accessories”. It is understandable: expats don’t bring social issues or problems with them, their financial impact on society is limited or controlled. Their integration in society is not an issue: they will not stay for long. In some countries expats communities are also “physically” confined inside specific areas to keep them separated by locals.

And this is a waste. It is a huge waste of potential, because mobility is globally growing even if in different ways; the global expat community is growing.

An expat family IS a precious resource for the local society.

Why? For the following reasons:

  1. Our cultural level is generally high, partly because many of us have a high level of education, but also because during our traveling and migrations, we open ourselves to different cultures and we acquire new knowledge on the way (history, geography, antrophology, …)
  2. We are raising TCKs that are mostly educated in international schools, with a high awareness of the value of diversity, the ability to understand the perspective of others (as Anne Copeland brilliantly illustrated this morning) and the capacity of perceiving very naturally how the world is ruled and works.
  3. We gain special SKILLS and we learn how to practice EMPATHY.

figt

 

To better explain this concept, let me tell you about an experiment done by a ceramic teacher in an art school and reported in the book “Creative Confidence” (pag.123) by Tom and David Kelley:

A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during his first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw pots nonstop in every session. And althought it was counterintuitive to his students, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent the most time actually practising their craft”.

Like in arts, it is the repetition of the creative process that develops human skills.

Apply this concept to the migrating process and think of how many times you went through:

  • overcoming cultural shock
  • helping your children integrate in schools
  • finding logistic and social solutions
  • finding ways to communicate and deal with different cultures and different kinds of people, with different values systems.

We are definitively EXPERTS in this field !!! Consider all of this, not only from an individual point of view, but as a community of people (our tribe!!!).

Maybe we are not considered socially, but we know how to deal with diversity and find workable solutions.

We know how to deal with diversity and find workable solutions.

Can you feel the importance of this?

In this historical moment, with all the things that happen around us…

Do you realize the responsibility we have towards future generations, towards our children?

The world desperately needs our skills in its societies.

At this point of our reflections, we faced two questions:

  1. Are we really AWARE of our potential?

I personally don’t think so.

Claudia and I have been talking about this with friends and people since last March. People usually say “Yes, it is true, I never thought about that”, because this is mostly an aspect they never rationally considered before.

Then, assumed that we are becoming aware of this, the second step is a conscious assessment that if we have such a potential and richness in our cultural and social luggage, we have a responsibility to share it, especially in a world that needs to hear words of hope now more than ever.

 

figt

 

Second problem, honestly speaking, with the kind of life we have, between one move and the other,

  1. What can we really and practically DO?

We need to find WAYS to value our contribution and get into ACTION, we need to create spaces where to share and transform our community into a social resource.

Something must be done.

And at this point … What Expats Can Do was born and answering those 2 questions is the main goal we have at the moment.

 

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