I bumped into an old school friend whilst on a trip back to the United Kingdom. We brought each other up to speed about what had happened to us since leaving school and as I told her about all the places I had lived in over the years and, in particular, the last 34 years in Bahrain she said to me: “I could not imagine living anywhere else than our home town.”
She lives two streets away from her mother and the house she was raised in and that, as she told me, was far enough. Oh! She goes to Torremolinos with her husband and two kids every summer for the obligatory two weeks, but I am willing to bet her suitcase is filled with tea bags and marmalade.
This got me thinking. We were born in the same town, more or less raised the same way, went to the same school and roughly achieved the same qualifications. So why did I roam the world and she didn’t?
It is something in the personality, I was always fiercely ambitious and willing to take chances and all she wanted to do was get married to the boy next door, have two kids and bake cakes.
In general, domesticated goddesses are not really the sort of people who inhabit my social circle.
I am an expat.
I live in a country different from my birth and although I associate with locals mainly, I also socialise with people from the same culture, all expats.
This has then, over time, given me the opportunity to observe who an expat is and what makes them tick.
They are by and large the same as I mentioned above, fiercely ambitious and willing to take risks, also loud and proud.
An evening with a group of my friends is not one where we sit and do knitting and compare cake recipes. Although we did once organise an annual Bake-Off competition … but it wasn’t a tranquil affair.
We travel the world, we use airplanes like buses, we eat exotic food, we don’t need someone to meet us at the airport to direct us to our hotel, mostly when we pitch up in a foreign clime, we haven’t even got a hotel booked, we ‘wing it’. Yes, I think that sums up what an expat is. We make it up as we go!
It can get us into a bit of bother from time to time but we always manage to extricate ourselves if not entirely smelling of roses, then not too much the other way. When we get it right, we reap the rewards, most of the people who I have been friends with over the years have managed to retire to various countries and live very comfortably off their earnings.
This does not just apply to the European expats, but it also applies to nationals from many countries in Asia. Like us, they also took the risk to leave their home village and country and travel to a foreign land and, for a great many, it has also worked out to a comfortable retirement in a nice house in the village with their kids more highly educated.
Immigration seems to be a dirty word worldwide at the moment with many countries trying to blame immigrants for their internal woes but, for us, it was beneficial to both sides.
We have earned enough to retire on and, hopefully, we have left Bahrain with better infrastructure, better industry, better healthcare and education and a higher standard of living.
Cheers!
Jackie@JBeedie.com