Families in Global Transition

I recently returned from the Families in Global Transition http://www.incengine.org/incEngine/?site=figt&art=about_us conference in Houston, Texas. The conference pulls service providers from every sector in which ex-pats are made (missions, foreign service, business and military).It was three days of the kinds of interactions a Third Culture Kid dreams of: intense, highly relational, straight to the point, shoot from the hip, we- must- have- been -separated- at -birth type connecting. I realized that my propensity to stare deeply into people's eyes while grabbing their arm before we have even exchanged names is culturally acceptable and indeed highly practiced at this conference. It was a wonderful reminder to me that as a "global nomad" I do indeed have a distinct, cohesive culture. It can get a bit cold out here in the margins or as Pico Iyer says "as one of the In-betweeners". It was a balm to my soul to slide so easily into a group of people as diverse as the crowd at the FIGT and to feel an ease of understanding, an ability to track and flow and operate with intellect and intuition in tandem instead of with my poor, overworked intuition continually scanning for cultural cues. In short, I felt as at home as someone without a geographically based sense of home can feel.

One of the best descriptions I have found of this feeling of coming home is in the novel, The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. The character, Biju, is arriving home to India from New York city.

"Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home-he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing- that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly."