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Along with her husband and their four children, Emma Williams has lived in New York, Jerusalem, Senegal and now Belgrade. Their travels have had some unexpected repercussions for family life ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2010 My daughter, who is ten, is talking about her new classmates. “They’re friendly, Mum, but they will keep lapsing into Serbian.” I’ve just collected her and her younger brother from their new school, L’Ecole Francaise de Belgrade, and it feels very new, even now, at the end of the school day. At their last school, in New York, I almost had to show my passport before the teacher would release them, but here in Belgrade they bound towards me from their classrooms, virtually unmonitored. The Montenegrin taxi driver taking us home laughs out loud. “This is crazy,” he says. “You’re British, you’ve arrived from America, you’re living in Serbia, and your children go to school in French!” I admit to him that the picture looks complicated, but add that the pieces all fit well enough and the family has learned to adapt to its itinerant life. I don’t remember signing up for the peripatetic existence; it just happened. Not that I hadn’t dreamed of it, but I did little about making it real. My husband’s job did that for us. He works for the United Nations and can be dispatched to political hotspots with hardly any warning. Sometimes the family goes too. Sometimes it’s a short-term mission, a couple of weeks. Recently he returned from a six-month posting to Baghdad which ended up lasting two years. Since we married in 1991, our home has shifted from Asia to America, the Middle East, Africa, back to America and now to Europe, with short stays elsewhere in between. My career has adapted: I started as a doctor, morphed from clinician to a medical researcher and educator, and then into a writer. But my primary role has been as a mother of four children, and mothering around the world—our locations have included a war zone, a tropical paradise, big cities and tiny communities—has been full of the shock of the new. Along the way we have collected much that would once have seemed foreign: cultures, ideas, stories and scars. We began in Pakistan, 19 years ago. On joining Andrew in Islamabad, I worked at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Science (PIMS) as a junior surgeon. Islamabad was the base for the UN mission to Afghanistan, where I had been working the year before for the medical arm of the Halo Trust mine-clearance operation. The cases I saw in Kabul and the north were often extreme; no less in Pakistan, where the first case I came across at PIMS was a planned trans-lumbar amputation (ie, of the lower half of the body). Although the plan was dropped, it was an introduction to the range of pathology and treatment I was to see. But not for long. Andrew was posted to New York, where we arrived in late 1992 with nothing more than two suitcases. We had our first child in October 1993, and more babies followed in 1996 and 1999. Each birth was at my then workplace, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre, where I was researching the transmission of HIV in women. Each time I went into labour, the nurse led me to the same delivery room, Room 101, oblivious of the Orwellian note (which went nicely with the first words when I arrived to give birth: “Do you have a number?”). I had a longing for the British National Health Service that I learned to keep quiet about in certain company for harmony’s sake; the idea of universal health care, sold as “socialised medicine”, was widely demonised. If I had suggested that America would take a step in that direction within 20 years, people would have laughed. Following the HIV trail, I took a four-month research job in Durban. I signed up our nearly two-year-old at the local day-care centre, recommended by my new colleagues and not far from the medical centre at King Edward VIII Hospital. On the first day I introduced him to the staff and asked, “What’s your separation policy?” They looked at me blankly. In New York parents typically sat in class with their offspring for days, or weeks, until the children were comfortable with being apart from them. Here in Durban, the director said simply, “Well, we just…do it,” and she took him from me, showing him the newly hatched crocodiles pickled in formalin on a shelf in her office. “Cro’dile,” he said, and, with my new job waiting, I said goodbye and left, trusting in the director’s professionalism. A few hours later that professionalism was all but erased, as she held my howling son in her arms, unable to put him down until I appeared to reclaim him. We worked out a compromise whereby I could stay with him until he settled down, which he quickly did. The change was clearly hard for him, though, as I saw when a friend from London came to visit. As he sat down my son said, not entirely amicably, “That’s Daddy’s chair.” I kept Andrew, still in New York, in touch with this and our encounters with things South African, from lions and fleas to flying ants and hadida birds, via a new medium: e-mail. Once we returned to New York, our son swapped weekend safaris for weekends in Connecticut, a Durban garden and pool for the concrete playgrounds of Union Square. While new communication technology had become indispensable, I found myself re-examining old customs. During one autumn weekend in New England with an American family, we tried to share the traditions of Guy Fawkes Night. This traumatised the children, who found the idea of burning a man at the stake horrifying.THE PERIPATETIC PARENT
In August 2000 we moved to Jerusalem. We rented a house in a Palestinian village on the Hill of Evil Counsel, with a view of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock, glimmering across the valley in the Old City. The children, who were then six, three and one, roamed the wooded hillside among the fragrant thyme bushes, enjoying their freedom. There were two olive trees on the terrace, and each of the bigger two adopted one of them, climbing it, pronouncing it his own and fighting off intruders: the conflict over the Holy Land, writ small. We took them to see the Old City, walking through Suleiman the Magnificent’s majestic walls into a convolution of alleyways and bustle, churches and mosques, shops selling embroidery and religious souvenirs, and heady with the scents of coffee, carpets, coriander, fresh figs and the press of human flesh. “Why are they carrying machine-guns?” our eldest asked loudly at his first sight of Israeli policemen patrolling the crowd. We muttered the beginnings of a reply about Jerusalem being a divided city, but the children ran on, heedless, along the worn limestone streets towards the Western Wall. They watched, briefly, the Jewish pilgrims at prayer, wondered aloud why the women were separated from the men, and then carried on to their promised destination: the Roman excavations below the Al-Aqsa Mosque. A few days later the second intifada broke out, and machineguns (and helicopter gunships, tanks and F-16s) quickly became commonplace. Some families we knew left Jerusalem, others were forced by employers to evacuate. Believing we weren’t a target, we stayed on. The walls of the Old City allowed the two boys to be crusaders and Saracens; Bethlehem offered something more spiritual. A short drive from our house—as long as the Israeli checkpoint soldiers let us through—Bethlehem was also a popular place to buy meat, fruit and vegetables. I could combine the shopping and their re-enactments in one trip if I took them to Manger Square, where they would duck through the tiny door into the Church of the Nativity and scamper off to “see where Baby Jesus was borned”. These trips became less frequent as the IDF’s (Israel Defence Forces’) control of the West Bank tightened into a full-blown siege. One memorable trip was to the zoo in Qalqilya, a Palestinian city walled in by the 24-foot concrete Israeli Separation Barrier, with only one exit, a few metres wide. This is an animal zoo, the children pointed out, inside a human cage. In 2001 we had a fourth child, this time using the European model of childbirth as practised at the Holy Family Hospital, which specialises in maternity. Here, in Bethlehem, four days before Christmas, the welcome was, “Hello Dr Emma, we’ve been expecting you.” The midwives were cheerful, despite living and working under regular bombardment from the weaponry that was now part of the background music of our lives; even the hospital had been shelled by IDF tank fire. In labour during a ceasefire, I watched from my window as a team of Bethlehem builders made repairs to the buildings holed during the bombardment. It was in Jerusalem that we made the leap into the French educational system. The only other international school available was heavily evangelical. One American child ran home at the end of the day asking, “Mommy, do these cookies come from Jesus?” “No, honey. We’re Jewish,” came the exasperated reply. A British family found themselves coping with their three-year-old’s nightmares, induced by that school’s theme of the week, “The Slaughter of the Innocents”. The Lycee Francaise de Jerusalem had an education system that was not only secular but maintained much the same syllabus all over the world, and offered flexibility in our travels. Plus the children would grow up bilingual. As a result, one of their adopted cultures is French. Sociologists would label them “third-culture kids”, or TCKS. The “first” or “birth” culture is, in our case, British; the second is the culture in which the children find themselves growing up. The third refers to the blend of the first two, elements of which are integrated by each child into a third culture which is unique to them. When we chose the lycee, some people criticised us for choosing to impose another culture—a fourth?—on our children, who would, they said, find themselves at sea in an alien world. Attending a lycee is not simply learning in French, they argued: “It’s all about being French.” In 2003 we moved to an ex-French colony: Senegal. This time the house we found was on an island, Goree, just off the coast from the capital, Dakar. The children kicked off their shoes and took to running barefoot from the house to the beach to the fort at the highest point of the island, and back home again. The island has no roads, no cars, no tarmac, only sand, sandy paths and smooth paving stones between pastel-stuccoed colonial buildings. Why, they asked, wear shoes? This was a permanent holiday, even though they still had to go to school, which did mean putting on shoes. They would trudge sleepily across the sandy beach at dawn in summer, or under the light of the moon in winter, to catch the first ferry to the mainland. Home, on the other hand, was holiday—yet none of the island children went barefoot. Even if shoes meant mismatched, ill-fitting plastic sandals, children wore them. It wasn’t just to guard against sharp objects—being shod, however thinly, was an attempt to appear less poor. There was a football squad on the island and the two older boys joined it. Wearing football boots with soles and full sets of laces, they were welcomed with enthusiasm by the island boys in their plastic sandals. Some played in flip-flops—no less skilfully. The squad met on Goree’s single football pitch, a drunken heptagon consisting of six inches of coarse sand on a concrete base, overlooked by crumbling 18th-century buildings that provided a home for dozens of the most impoverished islanders. Three large baobab trees stood in the middle of the pitch like giant bollards. The game of fast-flying Senegalese soccer simply ran round them, with no quarter for half-hearted dithering or polite cries of “Pass!”: it was every boy for himself. Our two boys’ blond heads appeared in the squad photo, taken when Patrick Vieira from Arsenal made a celebrity visit to his native country. In the picture they look exhausted. But they had understood that the pace of play came partly from the other boys’ determination to excel at football, thereby escaping the poverty—and country—they had been born into; if a European soccer scout dropped by, it was a ticket to wealth and stardom. When our daughter was four, she started going out every morning to get bread for our breakfast. The bread shop, a small wooden shack under a baobab tree near the football pitch, was a stone’s throw from our house, and she would trot along the sandy alley to the tree, clutching 150 CFA (about 15P) to give to the baker. He would smile down at her and hand over a baguette, wrapped in old French newspaper. She would lay the loaf over her arms and trot back to the house. One day she didn’t come back, and I ran out to look for her. The ladies sitting under the mango trees threading beads into necklaces saw my worried face and pointed me towards the beach. My panic rose. I could see the end of the beach where the sand gave way to boulders and shingle, and the old fort with its cannons pointing out over the ocean. Among the rocks was a group of young men in swimming trunks. I hurried towards them and noticed a small fire burning in their midst. Smoke trailed upwards and there was a faint smell of cooking. Among the rocks and the dark limbs was a tiny, pale form with a head of silvery curls: my daughter, chatting away to her new friends.
“Hello, Mummy,” she said as I approached. She stretched out her arm and said, “Try this, it’s really good.” In her hand was a sea urchin, plucked from the sea minutes before, its quills trimmed, and roasted on the open fire. I didn’t feel like it. I lost her a few more times after the episode of the sea urchin, but soon learned that the islanders would always keep an eye on her, as they did with all the children of Goree. They had the freedom of the island and I tasted the confidence that communal living can provide. Our daughter soon learned a few words of Wolof, notably “Na nga def? Domma jangal feey?” (“Will you take me swimming?”). We would see her beyond the gentle breaking waves, on the back of one of her athletic young friends, or “black boats”, as she called them. Her dad was her “white boat”, a vessel which, she decided, was slightly slower. We are slower out of the water, too. While the children plunge in wherever we are, I have a harder time of it, because my cultural convictions are set harder. When we were in Jerusalem, a Canadian correspondent there used to say, “the great thing about living abroad is that it confirm!!s all your prejudices.” The children will be sampling local life in depth when I’m still objecting, pointlessly and even peevishly, to aspects of our new life that I’m finding tricky, like the slow internet connection on Goree (dial-up), or the road signs and food labels in an alien alphabet—Hebrew, Arabic or Cyrillic. But some things sink in, and well before Goree I learned that there are other ways of seeing yourself as a parent. We had become part of the Palestinian community in our Jerusalem home: three extended families in one hamlet. The mothers and aunts helped me, as they helped each other, with child-minding when we went out to work and cooking tips when we came home. If their children, even as young as five, saw any untended laundry on entering the house, they would instinctively fold it. If we had a faulty engine or broken heater, the sons would appear with tools for the job. It wasn’t simply a question of roles, assigned as they were by gender, birth order, family precedence or wealth. The whole notion of the individual was different. And I’ve stopped measuring our life in suitcases. Somewhere along the road our two bags evolved into a 40-foot container, and my self-image has also undergone a transformation. Having grown up on a farm in Staffordshire, I think of our family as modern hunter-gatherers, with one of us often away following the “herds”—journalism, a UN posting, or now a British education—while the main group forages locally. The idea of circling away and returning is liberating and, at the same time, comforting. And yet we are disconnected from the natural world: it’s not the clasp of winter or the whiff of spring that has us on the move, it’s the whim of head office filtered through the demands of the local schooling system. When we went back to New York in 2006, the children would scoot along the sidewalk, pursued by shouts of “Hey, kid—where’s your helmet!” I would be left trying to convince the shouter that I had tried to cram a helmet on their heads but…I would tail off feebly. “Safety measures” are now, to my offspring, annoying Western affectations. In Jerusalem trees had been for climbing; no one would contemplate cutting off the lower branches to prevent climbing accidents. In Senegal they saw even younger children diving off the jetty in the wake of the approaching ferry, in defiance of the churning engines. Children balanced toddlers on their hips and walked up unbanistered stairways. Large families lived in the gun emplacements of the old fort, and our children ran through the tunnels with the island children, oblivious of the rusting metal shards. Our elder two begged to be allowed to fly home to Britain unaccompanied—because it involved changing planes in Madrid in the middle of the night, which sounded like fun. (We said yes.) Moving a family to another country has its difficulties. It’s easy to pretend, after a few months in a new place, that the transition was all excitement and thrilling discovery, but the moving and arriving are hard, however much you try to smooth your path. By the time he was 11, our eldest had been at six different schools on four different continents. At 12 he very determinedly opted for boarding school in Britain, a country he had idealised from his reading as a place of holidays, extended family in permanent homes and, most importantly, as the place of his history. In 2000, belatedly seeing the need to set down some permanent roots, we found and restored a house in rural Dumfriesshire. All four children have locked onto it, finding a sense of belonging there. I am enjoying Belgrade. The Serbs are welcoming, the city filled with interest and energy. There is history, from Illyrian to Ottoman to NATO bomb damage; music, from turbo-folk to gypsy to classical; escape, from cafe culture to festivals to nightclubs in the city and on the Danube in summer, and winter sports farther afield: compared with Senegal, the choices are endless. But I get irritable, from the weariness of packing up our lives and then living out of suitcases until the shipment arrives, the tiresomeness of bureaucratic wrangling with the phone company or the shippers, the not knowing where to find double cream, or even how to ask for it, or how to use the oven properly when I do find it. The irritation multiplies with the impotence I feel some of the time. For the children, there are occasional tears at the end of another day at the new school (the loneliness, the missing their old friends), and the disappointment of not being allowed to adopt the latest stray dog they’ve encountered—we have adopted one, a yellow curly-coated footstool of a dog, and that, I argued, is enough. I lost: we now have a Husky, too. I retreat into a person I don’t know very well but recognise from previous moves. She and her fears will be gone and forgotten again, soon enough. Technology is a big help: e-mail and the web keep all six of us connected, not only with each other but with the friends we have left behind. Older media help too: local movies and novels pad out our knowledge. Moving is easier when you read other people’s stories of changing countries. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is de rigueur in Belgrade, but reading lesser memoirs can be more helpful. They remind me of the perils of the small-mindedness I showed in the supermarket, and any reluctance to see with fresh eyes and ideas. Judging with a small-town, inhibited attitude will lock me into resentment and failure to grasp the nuances of our new homeland, and I will leave again, in two or three years, none the wiser. I might as well throw myself in, drop my petty concerns and locate my sense of humour. The sooner I get on with it, the more I will enjoy my accidental, wandering life. The children get it. The message isn’t “Do as I do”, it’s “I’d better do as you do.” Picture Credits: Amar Grover, Sharon Abbady, Emma Williams, Laura Kullenberg
(Emma Willams is a doctor and the author of "It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street", published by Bloomsbury.)
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