Going Native

We get a significant amount of email around here along the lines of, "How do I go ex-pat?"  That's akin to asking, "What flavor of ice cream should I like?"  The answer is about as individual as it gets.

What we can do is go over some of the things to consider and hopefully come up with some to-dos when it comes to making such a move.

It happens quite frequently throughout history, where a large number of people up and leave a country for financial, political or social reasons.  Pre-war Germany is a good example.  A great number of folks didn't like the direction the country was taking and decided to bug-out.

It's happening right now in Europe and the States.  A great number of people have, or are considering leaving for more hospitable climes.  If this describes you, then let's explore the options and problems.

The very first thing you need to do is decide to leave or not.  Maybe you think you've done that already, but I mean put all marbles in the circle and see how the game looks then.  You are talking about leaving pretty much any familial and social connection you have.  This is not just moving across the country, this is a major effort to come home, or for folks to come see you.  Are you ready for that level of commitment?

Going ex-pat is a commitment.  You have to want it bad enough that you will suffer pretty much anything to make a go of it.  The first few months will be incredible difficult.  There are a thousand small adjustments to be made in your life, from language to food to people you associate with on a daily basis.  You will feel very isolated and strange until you get enough language under your belt to be able to hold a polite conversation on a variety of topics.  Nothing will go the way you expected and planned for (see planning), and even tasks such as hooking up water and electrical service, or getting a local SIM card for your phone can be traumatic.

You will also be seen as a tourist and treated as such, paying quite a bit more for things than the guy next to you.  Everyone will appear to be digging in your pocket until you can show that you are there to stay, and that takes time.  I've spoken a number of times in past articles about the difference between a traveler and a tourist.  Becoming an ex-pat requires, in no uncertain terms, that you be a traveler.  You have to love the process as much as the product, or you WILL wash out.

As for planning, well, I've lived and worked in five countries (outside of Texas, that is).  The best advice here is dump everything you think you need.  Pack one suitcase with a week's worth of clothes and a few pictures and go.  Don't bring the house.  You can get that wherever you're going.  If you can't leave it all behind, then don't go.  You will want to remain as mobile as possible until you are secure enough to start collecting stuff again.

After you dump all the stuff, triple the amount of money you figure you'll need, excluding transportation to your new home.  You'll need to get set up first, and that's going to take some cash, no matter how you slice it, even if you're going the cheapest possible way (tent, backpack, etc.).  Even then, you'll want a hot bath once in a while, and that will take a hotel room.  Avoid credit cards, as paying bills is a hassle you don't want while you're getting settled.

However you plan to make money in your new home, be sure to have at least three options.  More than likely, you'll be on Plan C before things really start clicking.  I'm already on Plan G in just four short years.  One very good source for ideas on making money is a book called, "Reinventing Yourself Overseas."  It's in the Amazon portal in the right column.  Excellent book with a lot of great ideas and resources.

Some popular ways to go about living are teaching, writing and translating.  These happen to be the three things I chose, with international trading as a sideline, plus whatever other opportunities come along.  Keep in mind that having a large toolbox of capabilities will improve your chances tremendously.  Language and business skills will go a long way, along with some marketing experience (both for yourself and for an employer).  What you need to think about is what can you do that will be rare and/or in demand in your new land.

Using things like LinkedIn helps.  You'll find discussion boards for various countries, with the occasional job opportunities popping up.  BE CAREFUL!  There are a lot of scams offering jobs to ex-pats.  Thoroughly check out any prospects.  One popular source of dependable jobs is the hotel and leisure sector.  Some folks have pretty good luck with the diplomatic route.  Just remember, if the employer is legit, they generally don't ask you to put up any money.  They pay the way.

The discussion boards will help you learn the ins and outs and ups and downs of your destination.  You can get inside information on visas, legal issues, housing, cheap places to get necessities and places to avoid.  You might also make a connection or two so that someone will know where you are and how you are doing after you arrive.  Having one or two phone numbers for folks nearby is like gold.  The traveler's code is that we watch out for each other.

If you're going cold, you'll need to plan on border jumping every so often until you get settled in.  Depending on where you are, this can be a brisk walk or an arduous odyssey.  I've spent many a night in an airport, train or bus station for this little chore.  Keep in mind that most countries don't mind you job hunting (as long as you got bank), but if you start working without a permit or visa, you can scare up some trouble pretty fast in most places outside the US.

A final bit of advice: if you're not willing to dive into the local culture, you won't be long there.  By this I mean avoid tourist places and spend as much time as you can afford learning the language and the social graces.  Being polite and a good sport will open a lot of doors and mark you as one of the gang.  Being a good sport means trying some new food, no matter what part of the animal is comes from, or joining in a social event like Friday night basketball in the neighborhood.  Show that you're willing to be part of things, and let folks get a laugh here and there at your expense.

This is both necessary for your integration, and provides protection.  If trouble comes, your fellow ex-pats won't be much help, but your neighbors will be.  They'll stand up for you and help you should things get a little rough.  This has proved to be an invaluable tactic time and again.

The faster and better you can communicate, the more opportunities will come your way.  If you can politely greet people, ask for things and be appropriately thankful, you'd be amazed at how fast you will fit in pretty much anywhere.  This usually amounts to learning about 10 or 15 phrases, so we're not talking about a major effort for big payoffs.

I've read a lot of articles about going ex-pat, and few have covered these rather important considerations.  They don't often dive into the gritty reality of making a real go of it.  The biggest mistakes I see people make are being overly attached to stuff, not having backup plans, and being afraid to let go and really immerse in the new culture.

Of the places I've lived, I've never gone there before I moved there, and in only two cases (Ireland and Spain) was I fluent in the language before I stepped off the plane.  So it can be done.  It is NOT easy, though, and I don't recommend it for anyone but the most hardcore travelers.

This is not the executive transfer for a year type gig.  This is a serious attempt to leave an old country and enter a new one for good and on your own.  There won't be hazard pay and bonuses and free rides.  This is creating your own opportunities and making your own choices in life.  The odds are stacked against you and the hardships are plenty, but the rewards are indescribable.  It is rugged individualism writ large.

There's plenty of other considerations, and you can find a lot of articles covering them in depth, but as I said, not many bring up these particular topics.  To boil it all down to a nutshell (and mix a couple of metaphors), reduce as many variables as you can, then have as many contingencies as you can muster for those that remain.  In all cases, be prepared for the unexpected, and learn to trust your instincts and your self.

Becoming an ex-pat, or more appropriately, a transnational citizen, can be a richly rewarding choice and one that is bound to broaden horizons and leave indelible memories. If you want it bad enough, it's yours.  But isn't that true of everything in life?

To Everything There Is A Season

As humans, we live in paradigms.  We model the external world around us and come up with concepts that seem to explain what might otherwise be random Universe playing jokes on us.

In science, we had Pythagorean geometry, then Newtonian calculus, followed by Einsteinian relativity, and now Quantum Mechanics, with its sacred Planck unit.

Religion has had as many models as there are cultures.  There have been the multiple deities, the single deity and the agnostic models.  All in some way are anthropomorphic and lead more or less back to self-worship.

Every aspect of our existance has had a model, a paradigm, to explain the way things work.  Our brains are hard-wired to find patterns in everything, and we try to make rules from those patterns, which hold until mounting exceptions lead us to making new sets of rules.  The failure of the old paradigms is rarely pretty.  People cling to them because we fear the One True Constant of the Universe: Change.

In the legal and business realm, we have labored under the Corporate paradigm.  A few hundred years ago, we began creating artificial 'persons' to use in the course of doing business.  The idea was to create entities that would outlast the life-span of the individuals who created them.  If the business model worked, why must it die with the originator?

Over time, those entities acquired the rights of human beings.  They were granted 'civil' rights (those which can be given or taken away by humans) and developed 'corporate' existance.  'Corporate,' of course, means 'in the flesh.'  In other words, corporations became physically manifest, much like the gods of old taking on physical form to interact with humans.

We developed the 'corporate veil,' which shielded the individuals running corporations from liability for the actions of the 'person.'  And what usually happens when humans are divorced of responsibilty for their actions?  They typically lose all moral and ethical balances.  It's the same problem as if removing the concept of 'hell' from religion.  Without punishment, what's to compel people to follow?  Humans will eat their mothers for lunch if there is no punishment for wrong behavior.

By the time we arrive at today, corporations have received supra-human rights with almost no responsibility.  They are, in every respect, merely a replacement for monarchs.  They are run by self-selected autocrats for the sole purpose of enriching the 'corporate' body.  They exist above legal, national and ethical boundaries.  As OJ Simpson showed us, justice is for sale, and there are few deeper pockets than corporations.

Like royalty, they marry and divorce (we call is M&A, but it's the same thing).  They have white knights and black knights.  They have blue-bloods (divisions and subsidiaries) that are beholden to the sovereign.  And they are immune from sanction for their actions.

Throughout history, Mankind has sought ways to centalize power without losing sight of humanity, and it has failed miserably at every turn.  We have tweaked and trimmed so that every conceivable permutation has been tried, and yet the mere act of accumilating power has created monsters that are all but impossible to destroy, a la Frankenstein's Creature.

What we can hope is emerging today is a new paradigm, one in which the finest aspects of communism (with the little 'c'), cooperatives and democracy (again with little 'd') are joined in a new Enlightenment.  I can hear the howls about being a 'commie,' but bear with me here.

Having been a Benedictian monk for a time, I have experienced first-hand genuine 'communism' and cooperative living.  Monasteries could be a model for the future of humanity.  Small, self-organizing communities come together around a common goal, becoming self-sufficient in the necessities of life, while trading with other co-ops for specialized goods and services.

If one looks at monasteries, which are a paradigm that has survived for millenia, they tend to grow and produce enough food and water for the community, and above that specialize in some product or service.  There are monasteries that produce very fine beer, wine and liqueur.  Some are famous for cheeses or cakes.  Others produce fine arts and crafts.  They sell their specialty items to earn the money to trade for yet other goods and services that they lack.

What I forsee as the future paradigm to strive for is a blend of the monastic model with the new age of networks.  Using the internet, there is no need for corporations or any of the trappings that go with them.  If you are reading this article, then the power to sell yourself and your goods worldwide is sitting right in front of you.

All we need to do is dismantle the centralized paradigm of power and wealth, and bring it back down to the neighborhood/village level.  Policing, security and the rules of communal living are all kept at the local level.  Each community sets its own standards and lives or dies by the success of its own paradigm.  If one community sees gambling and prostitution as the Golden Promise, like Amsterdam, then so be it.  If the next community over wants to be pious and intolerant, and it works for them, great!  If you live in one, but prefer the other, you move.  Simple as that.  If you live in one, but prefer to vacation in the other, everyone wins!

Just as in the Old West, each community establishes its own rules and standards.  They then contract someone to act as sheriff, who in turn, can deputize others in times of trouble.  If someone doesn't like the way things are done in one place, then they don't have to go there.  They can still buy the goods and services of the town through co-operative networks.  No need for hate laws over vast populations, because folks are free to associate with whomever they want in their areas, and they must abide by the rules of other areas when they travel.

While all of this sounds very retro, in fact it meshes perfectly with modern technology and communications.  Private companies provide transportation, cargo and freight handling, and manufacturing.  Employees are hired by contract and whatever compensation they get is based on their own negotiating power.  Everyone, from the top down is responsible for the products and services provided.  There is no limited liability or corporate veil.  By the same token, consumers are on their own.  No suing McDonald's because the coffee was hot.

The key to all this is 'personal responsibility.'  We have spent centuries trying to pawn off our duty to ourselves and others by delegating the responsibility to others.  Consequently, the act of delegation has given enormous amounts of power over to centralized brokers, who have used it against the very people who were hoping for protection.

Every effort at security ever tried over thousands of years has failed.  Every one of them.  Rome was sacked.  Babylon vanished.  Jerico fell.  Castles crumbled.  Forts destroyed.  Not a single one has withstood a concerted effort to breach it.  So why do we keep giving away the store for something that doesn't exist?

The ideal situation is the Enlishtened Village.  Folks grow their own food and stores for hard times.  They purify enough water to serve their needs.  They specialize in skills and crafts that they use to compete in a global marketplace.  They have ideas and get others to invest in them by contract.  And for defense, every man, woman and child is armed to the teeth and trained in their use.

It is a model that has served monasteries for millennia.  It was quite successful in the Old West, until the feds came along and stole everything by promising 'security.'  In fact, the united States were conceived as a cooperative of communities, who delegated certain powers to a central entity.  That was their one big mistake.  Keep the power at home.  Though the model was quite successful for a time, there are always those who are not happy until they own all the nuts AND the tree they fall from.  That kind of ambition is what must be checked, and how!

Sure, in its broadest strokes, this is a simplistic idea, and really the concept is simple.  How we institute it and grow it into a world of enlightened people living peaceful and fulfilling lives will be for us to decide collectively.  I'm just one lone nut in the jungles of Borneo here.  But, I see these concepts in practice every day in Indonesia, and I have lived the model as a monk.  I know it works, and has worked since history began.

What is certain is that what we have now does not work.  It always ends in death and destruction, with millions living their lives as slaves to corporate and government interests, which are often at odds with the needs and desires of the individual.

The Libertarians call it Enlightened Self-Interest.  I have to agree with the broadest outlines of the idea.  If you allow me to do whatever I think is best for me and mine, and I give you the same latitude, and we respect each other's rights to pursue Enlightenment, then how can it be wrong?

Let the family first, then the community in which it lives, be the final arbiters of what is good for the individual.  Mass government creating mass corporations that rape and pillage the planet for the profit of the few is a self-defeating paradigm.  History has show us this as long as there has been history.

Time to re-think our weltenschauung.  There are many ideas that have yet to be tried on a global scale  The time is ripe for fresh thinking.