Inside the Russian Doll

In the beginning, when I was new to Africa, I was filled with awe and discovery. Writing about my experience was easy because I needed an outlet, somewhere to set pieces out and turn them into the logic of a puzzle. I was challenged to get outside myself, out my comfort zone and reach into the world, discover how to be somewhere other than what I knew.

But that was nearly ten years ago. I no longer live with an African family, eat their food, watch their television in the evening. I no longer spend my Saturdays wandering through markets for the sheer enjoyment of the experience. I am in my comfort zone, sheltered in an expat community, eating pizza, choosing my own music, never learning more than a few words of Chichewa, with Malawi all around me. Like nested Russian dolls in the surrounding shell, I am completely enclosed within another culture. We expats carry pieces of home with us. Cheese-Its. Black nail polish. Organic coffee. We hoard them, share them with members of our tribe. We stretch to see how many pieces we can fit in our Russian doll. We return to the motherland to resupply.

A few years ago, I went to visit some Congolese friends who’d emigrated to South Africa. I ate pondu with them and listened to Koffi, making jokes in French, hanging out at the Congolese internet cafe. I shared in my friends’ pride in their non-South Africanness. It was the only time in my life that I have had the privilege of an outsider’s look at someone else’s expat community. What do you chose to bring with you? What do you leave behind? How long are you away before where you are is more ‘home’ than where you have come from?

My view of my own expat community will never achieve that same level of objectivity or even introspection. In daily life, we tend to ignore the opportunities to step back and examine our interaction with the world.

Last year, the Washington Post ran an article about the world-renown violinist Joshua Bell who played in a Metro station at rush hour in ordinary clothes and behaved as any street musician might. His performances were filmed to see how many people would pause to hear his playing. Of the 1,097 people who passed him, only 27 people paused or left money in the opened case on the ground. The rest continued on with their day unmoved.

I wonder how many of us are truly capable of examining the world in which we live on a daily basis. We each live in a Russian doll of our own, embedded somewhere within the bigger world around us. You may be an expat. You may simply be an urban dweller who doesn’t leave the neighborhood much. Maybe you live in a remote area with little access to what else is out there. Wherever you are, whoever you are, we all have the chance to lift our eyes and examine the wider world outside of our self-imposed Russian doll.