Cultural dislocation

I was sold the dream that if you worked hard and got good enough grades you can buy into a great new life overseas in a western country of your choice.

At the age of 17, I left for Australia to realise that dream, completely unprepared for what was to come. It was the first time I left home taking a blind leap into the great unknown, terrified and excited as well.

When it is your first time overseas, nothing prepares you for the overwhelming sense of alienation being surrounded by everything foreign. The smells, the noises, the faces and the sights were so alien that I froze in fear. I was desperate to be back with my family and friends, eat familiar food and hear the sound of my language again.

It was my first experience of cultural dislocation. It reminded me of the dreaded homesickness I experienced for the first time when I left my village to visit my cousins in town. I couldn’t help but cry myself to sleep each night eventhough I knew I would be going back home in a week’s time.

If I knew about the culture shock I was to endure in the months ahead, I would have not have stepped on that plane. It was made worse by the fact that there wasn’t a playbook that I can draw from. I was welcome at the airport by a beautiful white Australian christian family whom I was to live with in my first three months in Hobart,Tasmania.

There was so much to process and make sense of and I just wasn’t coping. I was not prepared for the cold, the bland food and the teachers who spoke in their strange English. This was in the days before the internet and cheap telephone calls so I was completely cut off from my family. The only prospect of seeing them again was 12 months away when I can go home for my first holiday.

I had to work out how I was going to survive the next 12 months. I was staring down the barrel of having to either sink or swim if I was to survive. It was a question of whether I would join the heard and be like everyone else around me. To do so wasn’t that easy when I looked and sounded different in a sea of whiteness.

Thus began my journey of cultural dislocation that started with culture shock and homesickness. I was born into a small isolated tribal community in Borneo utterly sure of my place in the world. Now I had to find myself all over again as I was no longer so sure of who I was, alone and lost in a foreign country.