Travel and Personal

The Ties that Bind

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ February 7, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

A friend recently commented that I had become an expat. This is someone that has lived in Kenya for several years. She mixes with the UN crowd with the same ease that she visits Eastleigh, Kangemi, or Kibera – the rougher neighborhoods of Nairobi. I do not take her comments lightly.

She offered to take me into Eastleigh, but laziness won. I told myself that I preferred not to be a ‘poverty tourist’, feeding on the misery of others. But was the real reason that I just did not see the relevance? And why is it that most places I hang out at are, indeed, full of expats? I look at my last two months in Kenya and there is much truth to her assertion – I have indeed become an expat.

That does not bother me much. What I must ask is, am I more than just an expat?

My roommate, another long-time African resident from Europe asked yesterday over a beer if I could relate to the Indians in Kenya. This is someone that avoids expat bars and cannot stand the company of too many white people. As another friend, with much experience outside his country said, he has ‘gone local’.

But the answer to his question is that I do not know many Indians. The few I met, I lost touch with after a few meetings. I had the sneaking suspicion some were measuring me out as potential ‘marriage material’ for their daughters. With others, we just ran out of things to say. There were a few that I could, indeed talk to, but these had at least considered traveling abroad.

Worryingly, that seems to happen more and more frequently. Worrying because that means I have become simply a reflection of where I am going, not where I come from. But, for me, the measure of an expatriate should be the extent to which he, or she, can bridge the two – past and future.

Everywhere I’ve been, Indians stick together within their ethnic group. Here in Kenya, it is the Gujaratis. In the USA, the Bengalis stick together. It is a characteristic not just of Indians, but of every country – from Japan, to Georgia, to Germany and Canada. We divide ourselves neatly into categories –Indian, Kenyan, American; expat, local; rich, urban middle class, rural poor. And we stick to them. The ties that bind us within, are the very ties that divide us. Therein lies the dilemma for every expat.