The Dark Side of Being an Expatriate

Ugh…What it means to be an expatriate, away from family and home country? 

Ask an expatriate worker: ‘Is life abroad comfortable?’ Definitely, he/she would express more woes and less happiness. May be in the struggle to become rich, one loses health, and with deteriorating health there’s more worrisome living.

I remember one person who left his home country in his twenties, labored hard as an expatriate for almost a decade. When his company lost a prestigious contract, he was told to search job elsewhere. Simply, he decided to plan a longer vacation to his native place, with an open return flight ticket. After spending a short time in his hometown, he applied for a tourist visa to London, and planned his return to destination country with a transit in London.

On reaching London as a tourist, he was all jubilant. What then? He abandoned his plan to return to his previous workplace, and started staying illegally in London in search of work and bettering life. In fact, staying and working illegally in London was a real ordeal for him. He lived a typical, workaholic life there…daily he shuffled places for work, used to walk long distance daily, slogged extended hours, and felt no shy to do menial jobs.

After spending five years of labor and thrills of making money, he returned finally to his home country. At the end, there were no regrets because all those years, he earned sufficiently, made savings, spent money on his sister’s marriage, sponsored fees for his younger brother’s education in London, and finally he got married. 

“Sometimes, while working in a restaurant, in absence of workers, I used to clean tables and wash dishes,” he grimly recalled.

After marriage and having two kids, he felt again the burden of livelihood. This time, he had one more brilliant idea. Why not move to Canada on migration with whole family. Yes, he succeeded in that. 

Now, after sending back wife and kids to his home country to escape from expenses in Canada, he’s all working hard to chisel his life. So far, he’s happy…and what’s next is still undecided.

Talat, 60, originally from India, has been working as an expatriate since last 30 years. He started his first job as an office boy, and now he enjoys working as a technician. In his hometown, he has built a spacious mansion, earned properties, kept savings, and every year visits his family and kids on a 30 days paid vacation. What a misery of his wife living a lonesome life and caring her children all by herself!

The dark side of being an expat in a country is that oftentimes one feels the biting loneliness. It’s no good and healthy to be away with one’s family and kids. Perhaps, with the maddening race for earning wealth and comfortable lives, we all become blind and neglect our simple, essential obligations.

An expatriate is always an alien in a country, with less or no social life at all. That’s the reason most of them work extended hours and very often skip their week offs for the sake of overtime. Simply, they’ve turned themselves addicted to work and to be alone at their cramped accommodation is all boring and fearsome for them. 

Daily overtime is all they want besides working on weekends, and they stay happy with jingling sounds of machines, spacious workplaces, timely breaks and regular gossips.

By gauging lives of expatriates, it gives an assumption that perhaps people, away from their families, have adjusted themselves to live like ascetics and work like spirited workaholics. 

Away from family and relatives, expatriates tend to make new orbs of friends or gather in groups on the basis of common language, culture or ethnic similarities.

Not every expatriate becomes wealthier, happier and healthier. Some are fortunate, some earn and spend with no savings, some work greedily and lead miserly lives, and some live aimlessly without any bent of mind to return to their homes. 

In truth, I have seen an expatriate who hasn’t been to his home country since last three decades. Even, at the time when his mother advised him to come back, he stayed behind. Finally, she died one day, and after that, he never thought of going back. Annoying, isn’t it?

Ah, when people prefer to live by their gross perceptions, low desires or insensible commitments, then what’s the use of external counsel? Perhaps, celestial guidance alone can do some miracle to bring in some worthwhile, shimmering transition in them.