Ten Thousand Kilometres

1st Place winner in the Cash for Christmas competition

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Last week my mother told me she has cancer. She lives 10,000 kilometres away. On Tuesday my mother was poked, prodded, scanned and operated on. She lives 10,000 kilometres away. Yesterday my mother told me they don’t think they got it all. She lives 10,000 kilometres away.

I’m new to this expat lifestyle. I’m only six months on the job. And I was finally getting good at it. From initial months of homesickness, house-hunting, job searching, friend making, acclimatising - then acclimatising again once the rain went away – I had finally found my stride. “Check me out, I live in Cambodia. Those 10k km? They ain’t got nothing on me.”

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Neak ta moves in mysterious ways

3rd Place winner in the Cash for Christmas competition

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We were awakened in the early morning hours by our camp crew banging on cooking pots, yelping “WHOOAH” and whistling. Sticking my head out of the tent, I squinted through the darkness and the smoky vapour trails of the three large campfires that had died out in the night, trying to figure out what fresh hell was happening, when our lead worker Mr Kan appeared through the gloaming to excitedly yell at me, “Damrei!!!”

Oh, right. Elephants.

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What Being an Expat has Done for me

When my husband informed me he had been offered a job based in Singapore I was taken aback. We had never planned for a move abroad and I did not know what to think. As it sunk in I started to wonder how I would cope, if I would make friends, would I be able to get around, would I get a job and many other, at the time, frightening thoughts about the whole thing. In due course I arrived and, of course, settled and I’ve realised that with, over a year here now under my belt, how I’ve developed and what a blessing for me personally the expat experience has actually been.

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Cambodia State of Mind

The girl stepped out of the building, her arms heavy with the weight of the bags in her fatigued hands. She looked up into the gray sky and saw water drip down from the dark clouds. It was a soft rain at first, and then harder. In fact, it was so hard she nearly gasped; she had never seen rain like this before. The airport seemed feeble under the storm, and the little plane that plopped the girl into Phnom Penh, Cambodia from Taipei, Taiwan was already long forgotten in her mind. Her luggage was everywhere—it seemed to have tripled in volume between Los Angeles and Phnom Penh.

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