Topic: Navel gazing
'Where is your accent from?'
'What are you doing in Australia?'
'What are you studying?'
'What's that, exactly?'
'So, are you going back to America when you're done studying?'
I can't tell you how many times I've had close variations on that conversation since February. It's all pretty easy until we hit Standard Questions #4 and 5. With practice, I've developed a shallow but comprehensible summary of what studying gender and development entails, which has been a great help with Standard Question #4, although dealing with the occasional unfunny attempts to make jokes about studying gender hasn't really gotten any more bearable. But Standard Question #5, that can lead to interesting and thorny places.
Most of the time I just say 'I don't know.' Because I don't. A lot is going to depend on what jobs are available in which locations a year from now. I've got student loans to pay off, so I'm not going to rule out any reasonable jobs. I think I could be happy to stay in Melbourne for a couple more years. I like living here. But if it's a comfortable job in Melbourne vs a challenging job in say, an African or Asian country, all other things being equal, I'm outta here.
That's the bit that people tend to get stuck on. Studying in another country is normal enough. Even working abroad for a few years doesn't raise many eyebrows here. But even though Aussies in general are more cosmopolitan than Americans in that respect, for the most part, the expectation seems to be that people will come home after they've had a few years abroad. So I get some strange looks when I say that ideally, I'd like to work somewhere in Africa or Asia, and don't see a long-term return to the States in my future.
Some people choose to pursue things beyond SQ#5. One of the more interesting follow-up questions I've been asked was 'So what's wrong with America that you don't want to go back?' And it's not that I couldn't provide a laundry list of reasons, but really, they boil down to 'I don't feel like I fit in.' Viewed from that perspective, the question becomes less 'what's wrong with America?' and more 'what's wrong with me?'
It's not that I expect to find some other country where I do 'fit'. It's more that, if I'm not going to fit in, why not have a very obvious reason for being the fish out of water? It makes my difference, my sense of dislocation, more comfortable in some ways. Because its a very awkward sensation. But it's absolutely no reflection on my friends and family in the States, because I know how fortunate I am in the relationships that I have, and I know that I'm missed as much as I miss them. But even being among people who know and love me and understand me as far as one person can understand another is at best a temporary buffer from that sense of nebulous 'not-rightness' I have in the States.
That's not the whole picture, of course. I like to experience life in other places. And that experience actually makes me appreciate things about the States that I never would have before. Living in Skopje made me appreciate the value of orderly lines and respect for pedestrians. Living in Melbourne, I'm seeing how the sheer size of the US means that even the fringiest people can find a community if they look hard enough. A large population makes lots of things possible. So I appreciate certain things more, but that appreciation still isn't enough to lure to me back.
But I'm being forced to think about what it is about development and the expatriate experience that appeals to me because a fair bit of my research this past semester was focused on the ways that development flat-out fails, reinforces unequal power relationships between countries, and generally tends to work every bit as much (if not more) to the advantage of 'Western' countries as it does to 'Third World' ones. And I've had to ask myself if this is something I want to be associated with - do I see benefits that outweigh these problems? I'm still working on that question, and probably will be for a long time to come.
It has unquestionably been valuable to me to begin to examine why I think I want to be involved in development, especially now that the idealism that started out with early in my career has been tempered. This is a field where people on the outside tend to see altruism and idealism at work. And I don't mean to imply that they're absent, but I think it's important to acknowledge that there are plenty of selfish factors in play as well. My sense is that if I ever stop acknowledging that, I'll be setting myself up to make a lot of mistakes out of serious self-delusion. I know I'm bound to make plenty of mistakes for any number of reasons, but I'd really like to limit those that could be caused from a lack of self-awareness.