This is where things get hard and beautiful and brutal and inspiring. You get to strip off all you find comfortable, safe, and familiar. You get to ask questions, try things, humiliate yourself, and grow. You get to build friendships with people who are not like you and you get to be changed by them, and to change them, as you sharpen each other into better humans.
This is also really hard and really scary.
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My Articles
- Beyond Culture Shock: Culture Pain and Culture Stripping, A Life Overseas
- All Will Be Well in Djibouti, Outpost Magazine, including yours truly on the print cover!
- A Child of Two Worlds, New York Times Modern Love column
- Faq, Off Assignment
- Somaliland, My First Heartbreak, Hidden Compass
- Pleasure and Pain, the Smart Set
- 6.5 Myths about Expat Life
- 13 Things I Want Americans to Know about Stuff You Give Poor Kids
- 20 Things Expats Need to Stop Doing
- When Rich Westerners Don’t Know They are Being Rich Westerners
- The Proper Weight of Fear, the Big Roundtable and Delacorte Review
- 4 Ways to Stay Content as an Expat Mom
- Don’t Send Your Used Shoes to Africa. Or Maybe Do Send Them.
Books
- Getting Started: Making the Most of Your First Year in Cross Cultural Service, by Amy Young
- Global Humility, by Andy McCullough
- The Locust Effect, by Gary Haugen
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
- Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz
- When Helping Hurts, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert
Resources
- The Culture Blend
- Communicating Across Boundaries
- A Life Overseas Resource Page
- Sarita Hartz
- The Geography of Madness
, by Frank Bures