Expat Alien: My Global Adventures: Chapter 4
By the time Kathleen was 18 she had lived on five continents. When she starts college in California, she experiences severe “reverse” culture shock. She talks about traveling around Europe, seeing the sites from London to Athens, hiking up Swiss mountains, and living in Africa. She survived a plane crash, a coup d’etat in Burma, earthquakes in Mexico, driving through the Andes in Columbia and army ants in Nigeria. Her college peers talk about football games, high school proms and television shows she never heard of. She can’t relate to them at all and they think she is bragging about all the places she has been. It is like an alien landed in their dorm room talking about visiting the rings of Saturn. Follow Kathleen on her journey through the ups and downs of being a Third Culture Kid. Read the previous chapters here.
For the next few weeks we will publish a few chapters of her book. We encourage you to purchase the entire book. You can get the paperback or digital format for Kindle, or the Nook from Amazon. and Barnes and Noble.
- Paperback edition sells for $15.95
- Kindle/Nook editions sell for $9.95
Elephant Camp
The Shwe Dagon Pagoda was a landmark in Rangoon and its golden spire could be seen from anywhere in the city. To get to the pagoda itself, we climbed what seemed like a million steps past peddlers hawking wares like incense, books, and prayer streamers. Shoes were always removed before entering Burmese temples. We wore shoes the Burmese called p-nuts. Americans called them thongs or flip-flops and they all looked very much alike. I always wondered how anybody could ever find their shoes in the sea of waiting sandals left behind. When we got to the top of the stairs, there was a large open area with little shrines around in a circle. People would buy sheets of thin gold and rub them on the pagoda and the Buddha. As was common in Burma, two Chinthye statues stood guard outside the pagoda. Since there were no lions in Burma, Chinthyes were the interpretation of what a lion might look like: very fierce.
My kindergarten year, we also took a trip up the Irrawaddy River on a boat that had a small cabin area, but was mostly open-air, with people packed onto it like sardines. We travelled to an elephant camp on Lake Indawgy, about 120 miles southwest of Myitkyna near the Chinese boarder. The Ford Foundation Representative we had known the last time we lived in Burma had returned as the US Ambassador. We travelled to elephant camp with the US Ambassador and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Everton and another family friend, Celia Griffiths.
The boat stopped occasionally so people could get on and off which gave us a chance to visit a village or buy something from peddlers. We quickly decided exiting the vessel wasn’t worth the trouble because we had to either wade off the boat or try our luck on a treacherous plank. There were six people in our group and everybody dined with the British captain in his private dining room except me because I was too young to be allowed to sit with the adults. All I remember eating were vanilla wafers and Lipton’s dried tomato soup. Yum.
At elephant camp, we stayed in tents and slept on cots with mosquito nets. I remember it was miles to the outhouse – at night we had to go with a flashlight down a rutted mud road—very scary for a five year old! We watched timber being cut by workers and then hauled by the elephants into the river where it flowed downstream. The elephants all wore wooden bells that were hand-made and had a unique melody. At night the elephants were left to wander the forest, and in the morning the handlers could find their elephants from the sound of the bells.
While kids in the States were probably learning to ride their tricycles, one afternoon I learned to ride an elephant. In order to get up onto its back, we climbed onto its knee and then to its shoulder and up its neck, behind the ears. We were supposed to go down the same way. My mother was impatient and decided it would be quicker to slide down the back, instead of waiting her turn for the elephant’s knee. You should have seen the look on her face. Elephants have long, stiff hair that stung her as she slid down. The highlight of the trip was one of the elephants had just given birth to twins and we spent hours watching them play.
In 1962, General Ne Win led a coup d’état and took over Burma. Within several months all foreigners were asked to leave. Ne Win ruled for nearly 26 years and during that time, Burma went from being the breadbasket of Asia and an exporter of rice, to one of the most impoverished nations in the world. To this day, Burma struggles for freedom and human rights. I have happy memories from my kindergarten days in Burma and my heart goes out to those struggling for civil rights. It now looks like it may slowly be moving towards a more open society.
Kathleen Gamble was born and raised overseas and has traveled extensively. She has a BA in Spanish and has worked in publishing, printing, desktop publishing, translating, and purchasing. She also designs and creates her own needlepoint. She started journaling at a young age and her memoir, Expat Alien, came out of those early journals. Over the years she has edited and produced an American Women’s Organization cookbook in Moscow, Russia, and several newsletters. Her first book, Expat Alien, was published in 2012 and she recently published a cookbook, 52 Food Fridays, both available on Amazon.com. You can also follow her blog at ExpatAlien.com.