Intangibles

When we move overseas and I begin a new posting, it’s hard to convey just how completely my life changes—let alone to describe what those changes look like. My social media may offer glimpses of where I’ve landed: snapshots of a far-flung place, unfamiliar foods, and me appearing happy and at ease among a group of strangers.

Yet curating outward appearances can give the impression of being in a kind of faux-vacation mode, masking the reality of what it means to settle into daily life in a new country. A picture can be a worth a thousand words and still not fully capture how radically everything has shifted—from your commute to your surroundings to your diet. From the outside, it might look entirely positive, or, depending on one’s perspective, overwhelmingly negative. Lately, I’ve been trying to find a way to write that describes the intangibles of this period—so that I can more accurately depict life here from afar.

When you move across town or even to another state, you and your belongings usually arrive together in the moving truck. You step into your new home, unpack, and begin settling in. Decisions about where to put things and how to organize the space can all be made within a short time.

A Foreign Service move is more drawn out. We have now been in Rangoon for over six weeks, and have yet to receive our Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB). Even when it does come, our Household Effects (HHE) and Consumables shipments that travel by sea will remain several weeks away, expected in early November.

V and I are living with only the items we packed in our suitcases the weekend after FACT ended two months ago, in mid-July. That hasn’t been too much of a problem since we packed well, but it’s not ideal either.

Throughout August, we stayed in a temporary, sparsely furnished apartment. But during the first week of September, we finally moved into our permanent housing—a 4,000-square-foot residence that can only be described as a British colonial-era mansion.

With the move, my commute and work schedule shifted once again. I was no longer bound to the embassy shuttle—no more rushing to the lobby each morning, and every afternoon racing to lock up the office and catch the van back. Now, my routine means walking along sidewalks slick with algae from the monsoon rains and varying my schedule as much as possible from day to day.

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Upon moving into our house, we received an embassy welcome kit stocked with basics: garbage cans, kitchen items, a small dining set for four, four bath towels, and other necessities impractical to pack in luggage or wait weeks to receive. Since our 80-year-old house is USG-owned, without a property management company as we had in the apartment, the welcome kit proved especially welcome.

Even if you’re not particularly attached to your things, wearing the same clothes to work day after day gets old. Cooking with just one pot and pan—and none of your usual appliances—quickly becomes frustrating. I’ll make a cake when my cake pans come, you think, finding cake mix in a box at the commissary one afternoon and scoring a tub of frosting on your next visit. You buy them, and hoard them away.

And when you’re putting items like socks into a small drawer, you wonder if you’ll just have to rearrange everything once the rest of your effects arrive and you realize you have way more socks now and they require a bigger drawer, setting off a cascade of reorganization you feel like you should have seen coming. This kind of random detailed stuff both isn’t important and occupies brain space. It leaves you feeling like you can never quite tick the box—because task completion isn’t fully up to you. So you leave the socks or whatever in a big pile somewhere until you get pissed off with yourself and remember not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

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Even though I try to put all the socks away as quickly as I can, having to set up house in stages — at least for me — has always felt like a distraction that drags out the settling-in process. The in-between of feeling neither here nor there can bum you out and feel punitive in a petty way.

I try to notice these things but then let them go for the most part. I see the welcome kit towel on my bathroom floor and it registers for the umpteenth time that our bathroom rugs and towels are coming in UAB. I try to focus on gratitude. Both my suitcases made it. I’m fortunate I can order things I need in the interim from Amazon while we wait for our household effects to arrive. In the face of the grinding poverty I see every day here, it seems almost absurd for me to be excited about the appearance of familiar items like our nice towels and additional work attire options (or by contrast, to be disappointed by their temporary absence).

This tour has been far and away a positive experience thus far. It’s just that the changes come almost too quickly to capture meaningfully in writing, and many of the details of my life and work are not suitable for a public blog. Even for me, as the days and weeks slip by, it becomes harder to recall how I felt in the third week, the fourth week, and so on—and the distinct impressions and emotions I carried during each of those periods.

To the extent it matters, or is necessary to know: we are safe, we are happy, and some days are more fun than others. I saw a sign written the other day in Burmese, and wondered what my faraway family would think about the adventure I’m having. I concluded that they would probably think it was pretty neat.

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Among the challenges I faced earlier on in my time here were related to technology. I received a local work phone the first week of August, but struggled to install any apps on it. I had to change my number because the previous assignee hadn’t disconnected any of their multi-factor authentication settings before departing Post. Simultaneously, I spent about 10 days locked out of consular systems and unable to get up and running on new work responsibilities.

V and I finally managed to download Grab— which functions here like Burmese Uber—but a few attempts to use Grab Eats only resulted in cancellations of our dinner deliveries. We still don’t know why but plan to try again. And much to our dismay, the Internet we had arranged with the previous occupant of our house was not working when we moved in due to a disconnected router.

On the plus side, we got a glimpse from the beginning of how wonderful the embassy community is at this post. We went to a whiskey tasting at the American Club and toured the grounds. We went out on a few evening excursions with colleagues. We started to make new friends among the foreign diplomatic community. Our neighbors had a barbecue right after we moved into the house. And V settled quickly into his Domestic Employee Teleworking Overseas (DETO) assignment which has allowed him to accompany me on this tour, despite being 10.5 hours ahead of Washington, DC and trying to align his hours as closely as possible to his home office.

In the last week or two, we have made some progress in accelerating our settling in. We hired a housekeeper and negotiated her work plan. (The idea of a housekeeper and my overwhelming angst about it may well become a blog post all its own.) I found a nail salon I like and have started to look more like myself again!

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And those tangible, everyday markers of life back in the States—my Volkswagen keys, my metal coffee thermos, my work tote bag—once so constant over the past three and a half years, are temporarily out of sight, packed away and left behind, their absence reminders of my American life paused midstream.

In the end, our fifth international move to a new assignment has been measured as much in the intangibles—the shifts in rhythm, identity, and independence—as in the boxes and belongings. The cartons and crates will catch up with us soon enough; it’s the unboxed feelings—the loss, the adjustment, the slow reshaping of daily life—that take the longest to sort and put away.