For wives the American women’s association organization organizes group expeditions into the old city of Delhi to buy jewelry and go sightseeing. “A lot of women don’t feel comfortable going out, even shopping, alone.” Says Diane Hughey, the coordinator of embassies Community Liaison Office.
American land seems to fulfil a certain need. It is a study in how people grapple with culture shock…Judy Hansen, wife of a World Bank economist, remembers bursting into tears when she couldn’t find an open drugstore to buy medicine for strange, itching welts that had appeared on her legs. It was June. 110 degrees “I came back to the house.” she recalls, “and she said: I just want to go home. I can’t take it anymore.
If you are at all inclined to withdraw from the local culture, as anyone in the throes of country and culture shock surely is, these communities provide the perfect haven. Indeed, even for expats who are not inclined to withdraw, the lure of the expat world is almost irresistible. In their most completely developed form, these communities are the answer to every burned-out, culture-bashing expat’s periodic prayer: living abroad without leaving home.
A Save Harbor
While expat subcultures are a decidedly mixed blessing, at right moments and in the right dose they serve legitimate, important needs. Every expat, no matter how earnest and sincere about crossing cultures, needs to get away and from the craziness of Bangkok or New York. After another day of culture “experiences” –eight or nine hours of offending and being offended by people, not understanding and not being understood by people, causing scenes, and otherwise making a fool of yourself, and all the while trying very hard to be a sensitive, nonjudgmental, open-minded, and genuinely decent human being –who doesn’t need to unwind in a setting where everyone speaks your language, comes from your culture, and thinks you are normal? This isn’t avoiding the local culture; it’s just resting up from it. The expect colony can also be a welcome refuge for nonworking spouse who, unlike working expats, have no ready-made structure to slip into overseas or an office full of people waiting to interact with them. They have no structure expect what they can cobble together themselves, and no one waiting for them. Moreover, as we noted in chapter 1, spouses typically spend much more time in the local culture than do employees, getting a much bigger dose of country and culture shock. Isolated, lonely, and bored, spouses find an oasis of calm and much-needed companionship and support in the local expat subculture. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to read a newspaper from home, swap stories or compare notes with compatriots, or play a home-country sport that’s not played in your overseas post. Expat subcultures can also be a great boon at holiday time, when traditions from home can be celebrated and maintained, and during important rites of passage, when expats feel a special need to connect to their own culture somehow. They also meet a number of important needs of the teenage children of expat families.
If avoidance always leads to spending more time in the expat subculture, that is not altogether a bad thing. At certain times, under certain circumstances, the foreign subculture offers expats a lifeline that keeps them from sinking beneath the weight of all the foreignness around them.
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