My Tribe

Everyone who knows me knows what a people-person I am. Ever since I began living outside the U.S. in 2005, I have talked about how isolated we are as Americans---all of us living in our individual bubbles, driving around in our individual cars. You don't see people walking on the streets, taking the bus (at least I don't), chatting in tea houses. If you go into Starbucks, everyone is staring at his or her own computer screen or talking on the phone!

Well, I've hit the jackpot here. The other eight teachers and I who are working on the English program together live in large rooms, with individual bathrooms, on the second floor of one of the old hotels here in the compound.

I don't even come close to most of the other teachers in the number and variety of places I've taught. Kathy, a woman about my age, just finished a contract in December in Kabul, Afghanistan. She said she was able to travel fairly freely throughout the city, although she did dress according to local custom (scarf and long coat, not a burqa) and knew which areas to avoid. Another teacher, Ann, lives in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where she and her husband teach at the university. Kent has taught throughout Central and South America, including five visits to Cuba, and John just spent two years in the Republic of Georgia followed by a year in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Among the nine of us, one is married to an Egyptian Jew, one to a Yemeni man and another to a man from Cape Verde, and a fourth to a woman from the Phillipines, while I, of course, am married to a Turk. I have found my people, you could say: men and women who don't think my life is weird or that I'm crazy. How wonderful!