Worldview

Curt and I went to dinner at his boss's house one night last month. There were 5 couples there. All the men were engineers. Naturally, at one point the conversation was about why we moved to New Zealand and how we were getting along. As we described our adjustment, the other couples described their experiences living abroad. We discovered that ALL of them had lived overseas! One couple was originally from UK but had lived in Hong Kong for the last 5 years until they came to NZ. Most couples had lived in Australia or UK for a few years. One guy had even lived in US for 10 years. What struck me is how well-travelled these people were. And they hadn't merely travelled to foreign countries, they'd LIVED there for years.

I don't think it was just because these people were engineers, either, because I've found the same level of overseas living among the teachers at my school and among friends at church. Both my principal and one of the deputy principals lived in the US for a few years. One teacher lived in Canada (near the Arctic Circle!) for 4 years, one lived in Singapore for 5 years, one in Japan for 2 years, etc. And that doesn't even count the teachers who immigrated here from South Africa (2) or India or Malaysia and lived in their home country for 20 or 40 years.

I compare that to America and I can't think of a single engineering friend or teacher friend or church friend who had lived in another country. Even Canada. Oh wait. I think the Spanish teacher lived in Mexico for a while. And Bobbi lived in Finland for a few years because she married a Finnish hockey player. Everyone always thought that was so exotic and unusual. Here, it's not exotic or unusual; it's common. In America, people thought we were pretty crazy and a bit of a curiosity to be moving to New Zealand. Here, someone like us relocating to a new country isn't even much of a novelty.

What is the effect of Kiwis living all over the world? Well, I think New Zealand has a much broader worldview because of all the travelling, immigrating, and living overseas. Admittedly, part of the reason for their broader worldview is because they are such a small country of only 3 million people, compared to 300 million in the US. The US is so big and so powerful that it's too easy to forget about all those other countries. New Zealand is so tiny and so unimportant that other countries are what we think about all the time. As a result, the news here includes far more international stories, especially from commonwealth countries and Asia. Besides being a small country, the news is more international in NZ because there's a high proportion of immigrants who are interested in what's happening in their home countries. Many immigrants come from Pacific island nations so the news always covers events there. For instance, I was talking to Boone last week and told him that there had been huge riots in the Solomon Islands. They'd burned the entire downtown except 2 buildings. New Zealand sent some troops to help restore order. It's on the front page here but he hadn't heard about it in the US.

Besides the amount of international news coverage, in New Zealand there is just a universal understanding at a deeper level that not everyone speaks the same language or uses the same money or thinks the same way. People in the US obviously know this too, but most of them have never experienced it first-hand so their understanding is probably a bit more abstract. I was thinking about Americans from the Pacific Northwest who go to live in New York for a while and what a culture shock that would be. Or living in Mississippi. Or wherever. But in spite of the differences you would experience, you'd at least have the security of pretty much the same government, same laws, same justice system, same rights, same freeway signs, same brand names, same stores, same cars on the road, same sports, same plumbing, same TV, same money, same electrical system, same education system, same measurements, same fast food, same publications, same way of doing business, and on and on. If you move to UK you'd lose most of that security, and if you move to a place like Singapore, you'd lose even more!

Around that dinner table, I could tell that these people looked at the world in a different way because they had given up cultural security to experience life abroad. In that way, they had provided a benefit to New Zealand that the US doesn't possess.