Jerry Kurtz, Kurtz Communications
Basing yourself overseas involves momentous change. It can be an adventure, to be sure, but it is not something to take on casually. If you've grown up in North America, chances are that your life overseas and even your life after you return will not be much like it was before you set out.
Naturally not all destinations will require the same quantity of preparation and wrenching personal growth; if you start from the United States, China, for example, will be a lot more work than, say, Western Europe. And even within regions there are are vast differences between one capital city and another - you may find it to be a colossal effort to get started in Singapore, but Jakarta, a 90-minute hop across the Java Sea, is something else again.
In most cases the main challenge will be coming to terms with the local culture.
But don't underestimate the difficulties even if you think the culture and government are similar to what you're used to!
You will be spending 24 hours a day an ocean away from your "comfort zone," subject to anxieties and frustrations most of which you cannot fathom in advance. You will be tested in ways you didn't expect and may find unjust or improper, possibly outrageous. To hang on in the teeth of such discouragements, to be driven to give up the amenities and assurances of home, you need to have a powerful non-work reason to go.
My own motivation for moving to Southeast Asia was more powerful than average - the woman I married in Switzerland in 1992 lived, as it happened, in Singapore.
Maybe you want as little as "to find out what it's like," to teach yourself something about the world. Maybe all you want is to scout it out, to find out how you might set up there and make a living in the long run. But many who have weighed alternatives will feel that for these gains they would be paying too steep a price. Unless you can get to the point of saying, absolutely, "Yes, I really want to go," stay home for now.
On the other hand, those who take the trouble to explore often find compelling, even irresistible motivation to take Zorba the Greek's advice, to "cut the rope and be free."
. Don't underestimate the difficulties
What will be the chief difficulty? Could it be the fact that the underlying assumptions, the "rules of inference" for conducting personal and business interactions, and the interpretations of what signs and actions mean have shifted, and that no indication appears each minute of the workday or evening to remind you that you must see and do things differently? Is it possible that such a shift, whether subtle or unsubtle, could be disorienting and create anxieties? You bet!
The only way that I know that you can come to terms with a culture that is foreign to you is by giving up and letting go of your requirement that everything and everybody should fit a North American model of culture. Instead of falsifying reality to fit a "theory" - that one-size-fits-all iron Procrustean bed you brought with you from childhood - you can make your understanding of the thing fit the thing. But that's a lot of work.
Learning to change the size and shape of the all-purpose "understanding" - which it feels like you were born with, like a part of your body - to fit the new reality feels like taxing and somehow dangerous work. But that may be the only route to an understanding of where you in fact are and how you do and can fit in.
Keep in mind that we are talking actually about two kinds of difficulties:
If you cannot offer great quantities of time and openness to exploring and evaluating, you are unlikely to be able to make a decision that you will be happy to live with the consequences of.
. Don't underestimate the potential rewards
Basing yourself overseas, and particularly in a Newly Industrializing Economy ("NIE"), can provide excellent conditions for enormous professional development. And the potential for personal rewards may perhaps be greater still. I'll discuss both types of rewards below, under Big Rewards.
Learn about and weigh the difficulties and likely rewards so that you can make a somewhat informed decision.
. Don't Jump Out of the Frying Pan: Story of 3 or 4 Bears
The following anecdote illustrates the plusses and minuses for making a decision to jump overseas for individuals in the most usual positions.
You need to commit to a lot of time and a lot of work.
. My feeling is that you need a minimum of 2.5 years of living in the new place. You need those years in order to have enough time to settle into the new place and begin to understand its charms and benefits before you have to set the back of your brain working on getting home or to the next place.
. Believe it or not, doing what you'll need to do will require 6 to 12 months of pre-move preparation time.
. In order to create a good situation for yourself overseas, you will need 400 conversations, at least one-third face-to-face, before you're involved in work at the new place.
. You will need to work through massive doses of newness.
. You will get to do high-powered stuff
People at the workplace will typically treat you as a key contributor, as if they need you. You are likely to be entrusted with tasks critical to the introduction of new products.
. You will get to wear plenty of hats
One of the most challenging and gratifying results of working from my Singapore base was how the needs of the businesses forced me to wear numerous hats - performing in ways that I'd only heard about at cocktail parties. For example I unexpectedly found myself at the center of a campaign at Hewlett-Packard Singapore that produced a million-selling book in 15 languages - managing projects, negotiating and working with localization and translation companies, liaising with typesetters and other production people in distant parts of the world over the Internet, working on user-interface design, adapting to a speeded-up delivery date because of moves by competitors, interviewing and hiring and becoming expert with state-of-the-art technology in order to meet my deadlines. When I looked back over what I'd accomplished and learned over a short period, I was amazed.
Still another "hat" I had to learn to balance on top of all the other hats was course developer/university lecturer in "Communication and Mass Media," a subject that at that time I knew nothing about. I had to lecture to 250 of these foreign students, a prospect which at first filled me with dread. But I learned how to work with the students, whose preoccupations, training and needs were utterly different from those of North American students. And by now I've learned to teach or work in the area of mass communication.
Having to wear all the hats helped make my years in Southeast Asia the best, most
satisfying period of my 14 years as a technical communicator. I was able to accomplish
things - because I had to do them - that I'd not dreamed I'd know how to do; I carried to
completion tasks experts could have proved to be "impossible"; I came back
thinking that there wasn't anything I couldn't do.
. You will learn about the cultural biases you bring to your work and how to deal with
them
Nancy Hoft provides an excellent discussion of cultural bias and cultural differences
in her recent book International
Technical Communication.
. You can take advantage of business opportunities in regions like Southeast Asia where
the economy may seem to explode
While economies are typically cyclical and never altogether reliable, at any particular
time there are always places where business conditions are better. And while the economy
in Southeast Asia - the region I know best - is not lately booming the way it was back in,
say, 1993, there is nevertheless a burning need to sell products globally. Many of the
companies have discovered that they now must sell globally just to survive. And the need
to sell in North America, Great Britain and Australia, among other places, creates an
insistent, nagging need for English technical communication. At the same time there is a
shortage of writers with the skills to produce the needed documentation, creating
excellent bargaining conditions for the writers.
. In most places your credentials - even the academic ones - finally mean something.
The less "developed" the place, the more "newly" industrializing, the more your credentials, degrees and skills will be valued and even needed.
Academic credentials are especially highly valued in SE Asia, a further help in working
out a good compensation package.
. Maybe even good money - but not so fast!
In recent years there have been a number of disappointed souls limping home from Southeast Asia complaining that they had been lured by the (hasty) conclusion that "endless opportunity" was a polite term for quick money. Although substantial financial rewards are possible there and in other regions, one of the prerequisites is that you must devote tremendous time and energy to learning the lay of the land.
. You will discover that you have a lot to offer
. You will build enormous confidence
. You will have a lot that you can learn
Most dramatically on the personal reward side, working as an independent contractor
gave me enough control over my schedule and travel arrangements that I was able to get to
several regions of China, north and south Vietnam, Hong Kong, Penang and peninsular
Malaysia, Sarawak, Sulawesi, Bali, West and Central Java, North and West Sumatra, and the
Spice Islands.
. You will be able to connect to people of a sort you would not meet any other way
Then there are the people I've met, many hundreds of individuals - many of them of a
sort I would not have met any other way. I like to imagine that I learned something from
each of them, even the hair-splitting bureaucrats. Some I befriended. I now have a network
of business and personal relationships that continues though I've moved on to San
Francisco.
. You will have opportunities to turn yourself inside-out!
On top of all these advantages, my point of view on everything feels as if it has been broadened. I have to an extent emerged from the narrow, parochial American outlook I had been trained with. I feel less disconnected from the world that includes the regions outside North America. I can understand the attitudes of many human beings from other parts of the planet, and I have lost - amazingly - my sense of alienation from them. Far more easily now I can see from the point of view of the set of at least the human beings on earth.
And furthermore, quite unexpectedly, I gained a deepened appreciation of the values and advantages of where I did grow up.
The combination of the cauldron of anxiety, colossal information overload, the hammering of a massive, unremitting workload, a sense that my old life was lost in a haystack a year away on Magellan's boat if I could bear the trip, then unlooked-for help from unfamiliar strangers, and finally my own unexpected ability to bring my resources to bear to make a contribution in so far away a place, so "unlikely," so unrecognizable a culture - comprised for me almost an inside-out transformation.
While there are enormous advantages to basing your technical communication operation overseas, you must also take into account some major difficulties.
. Lots of companies will think small and pay accordingly
. Lots make only components, R&D may be limited
. Many companies are not very interested in user friendliness
. The old paradigm - programmers writing user guides - has many more lives
There are few countries where the job market for technical communicators is as spectacular as might appear, even if the economy is booming.
In SE Asia, for example, most companies, for the present,
Trust is decidedly not automatic in the region and in many countries the government and the culture may be far from tolerating the freewheeling, "hang loose" approach common in the U.S. And they may be especially uneasy with people who can communicate - not to mention people active in organizations of communicators! While this "nervousness" affects local people more than foreigners it can have, at worst, a chilling effect on ideas, creativity and innovation. You may need to learn to watch what you say more than is your present habit.
To counter this distrust, you must invest the time and effort to build relationships.
And you must learn new methods when straightforwardness and/or the (hallowed) Old Ways don't work
In many countries there will be substantial obstacles to foreigners working in the local economy. For example, as in the U.S., the company may have to certify that they can't find a local person to do the job. This is supposed to be a reassurance to the local citizens and a safeguard to the government that opposition demagogues cannot cry "Foreigners are taking our jobs!" In many countries, in practice, these certifications are perfunctory; you will have to learn from the commercial attache of your embassy, the chamber of commerce and other contacts what the real local practice is.
In some countries - especially in the NIEs and developing countries - if you wish to set up your own business you will face barriers more daunting than those for merely taking a job with an existing company. If you want to set up a corporation - the local country will have another name for it - you are likely to need a lawyer and you may even need an "outside" accountant to prepare official monthly reports. In addition, you may be required to have a capitalization that is beyond your capabilities; $250,000 is a common figure in Southeast Asia. Finally, some countries require that your corporation have a local partner who owns 50%, 51%, 90%, etc. Beware of unscrupulous individuals who will claim to serve as your local partner for a fee, who will claim to solve all your problems with the bureaucracy, etc. In fact, beware of everything.
Again, your must depend on your own research to reveal
The requirements for setting up a sole proprietorship or partnership are ordinarily far lighter than for setting up a corporation. Try to keep in mind that what you have to offer is truly something of value in the country and that there are forces which will strive to overcome the ossifying bureaucracy you may find yourself up against. Identifying and harnessing such forces and resources requires effort on your part.
Major accounting firms like Ernst & Young and Peat, Marwick put out booklets to help you grasp the business climate, tax and accounting practices in various countries - e.g., Doing Business in Indonesia. The government itself will offer such materials too, though these - since they cannot tell the truth about which rules are enforced and which are not or how things really get done - are of dubious value.
In general, you must learn to be even more patient and resourceful than you've had to be in your previous life in order to deal with bureaucracy and red tape. In many places you may not be able to go about navigating hassles in the way that seems most straightforward to you. And you must invest the time and energy to build relationships that will make it possible to get past suspicion and resolve such matters and get back to what's fun in this foreign, fascinating place.
In any case, be sure not to exhaust yourself wrangling or worrying over these bureaucratic requirements. The problems are usually much more solvable than they appear, though they often take more time than you would have dreamed possible. Often you can get a temporary clearance so you can get down to work while the authorities review the paperwork ad infinitum. Be flexible and expect to be successful; do not expect speed.
Don't forget to take into account that you may be working long, even very long hours and many or most weekends. On the other hand, in some European countries the outlook is historically more "humanist"; you may be able to take advantage of the longer vacation time that locals have fought for and in many cases can still insist on.
In numerous regions the opportunities for women are less terrific and more problematic. There are financial, dignity and security issues to be worked out. In most of the countries of Southeast Asia, for example, it is harder for a foreigner who is a woman to get a technical communication job. And women will be paid significantly less than men - in some countries substantially less; the pay of men, on the other hand, is often increased if they are married and have children. Benefits like health care, for example, are often pegged to the man, serving to prop up the notion that it is he who is the head of household.
To be sure, there are countless men and institutions in the United States that reinforce the idea that women need to be subordinate. But in SE Asia local men will more often expect a woman to limit herself to playing roles - whether at work or at home - that glorify and support the men. The governments of the region universally recognize the men as their primary citizens and women exercise far less political power than they do in the United States. In much of the region local women traditionally do not drink alcohol or smoke; in many areas they do not drive buses, taxis, motorcycles or motor scooters, and in some parts there are only a few places for them to go outside the home in the evening. At least some of these conditions may be changing slowly.
If you are female and wish to base yourself overseas you have considerable extra research to do. For whatever the target countries you are considering you must explore and evaluate the financial, psychological and, not least of all, safety issues. In some regions you can discover organizations of women. In SE Asia these tend to be informal and politically weak but they can provide important information and/or personal support.
The problems that both men and women must face cannot be dismissed and ought not to be minimized, and for women they're significantly more difficult to solve. It would be understandable if an individual felt overwhelmed or discouraged. But after initial bewilderment, problems like these are - believe it or not - either absolutely solvable or absolutely navigable - and are good training for the future!
If you're excited by a challenge and determined to stretch your resources beyond what you are sure you already know, I recommend the program described below to prepare yourself for living and working overseas. Again, you will need even more time and energy and openness for some places than you do for the "average" overseas destination.
Remember, we're talking about a year of preparation time. Don't skimp!
That's time and work.
First of all, see what countries, cities, peoples, and cultures interest you. Separate these from those that you think ought to interest you (List B) or that others tell you must interest you (List C), then discard Lists B and C.
Immediately, even before you organize a plan, switch on your network, get the support, ideas and advice of your friends, acquaintances, associates, hired help and everyone you can.
Baltimore-based Michael Bryant, the brains and force behind Career Transition Services and best career advisor I've known, provided indispensable insight, strategies and inspiration for years before I'd heard of Singapore. My new destination and need for untried approaches left him unfazed - and merely called out still more creativity and practical ideas.
Keep in mind that it is not only to find suitable clients and work opportunities overseas that you will be working hard. In the process you are also learning about the culture and preparing yourself mentally for living in such a place.
. Settle on your destination country
Select one "target" country. The meter on the 12 months that you have set aside starts running the day you begin research and stops the day you start your first project or job in your overseas destination. Expect to make 400 contacts with individuals, at least half in real time. That way you can hear and/or see the person and experience your own and others' reactions to you being heard and seen.
. Use all your connections - all!
Use all your connections: your employer, if any; your friends, acquaintances and business associates - those based in the target country as well as those in your current town and across your country and elsewhere. Follow up with individuals, agencies and companies that you are referred to.
Even though you're busy at your current business or job, set aside a great deal of time to identify and read books, articles and online material relevant to employment, business conditions and local culture. If you can hire a friend or someone to help you with the research, so much the better. Get hold of newspapers and magazines from the target country. See if you can find out how to obtain membership directories for organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the target country.
Use the Internet! For example, if you are looking for a job (as opposed to trying to set up a business) in the UK, you can get a list of agencies, online services, magazines and newspapers and quite a few ideas from Jill Newton's Finding a Job as a Technical Communicator in the UK.
. Visit the target country
Go to the target country 4 to 6 months before you intend to begin living there. This isn't optional.
. Meet with, talk with dozens of people there
Expect to have three dozen live, wide-ranging job-related conversations. Meet with as many of the individuals as you can; use the telephone for the others. If there is a local STC or a similar organization, meet with individuals and try to learn what conditions are and what approaches to take.
If there is a local STC chapter, you can get the contact information from the Chapter Presidents and Advisors web page.
Keep in mind that no single individual is a fully reliable causeway to the truth. The first STC member I got hold of on my preliminary visit to Singapore told me not to bother applying to one particular department (which as it happened he worked in); I unfortunately believed him and did not wind up with a job in that department until 13 months later.
. Get hold of membership directories
Bring back from your target country directories for the Chamber(s) of Commerce and several business councils. These councils are often groups of "local" businesses (often subdivided by language or culture) or foreign ("multinational") businesses. You may be able to find a book providing background and contact information on American companies, another on European companies, a third on Japanese companies.
Don't forget to leave room in your suitcase for white and yellow pages for cities or regions in your target country.
. Return to your old base and follow up endlessly
Write, fax, phone and/or email the people you've spoken with as well as those listed in the directories, yellow pages, or even newspaper ads - get a feel for how people do business there.
. Help from the STC
Whether or not there is a local STC in your target country, use the international organization for information, ideas about how to proceed, the names of individuals who could be useful either here or there, and technological tricks you haven't thought of or that didn't exist last year.
Carrying out a process like this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. In the end, it was colossally satisfying: I felt almost like I'd been asleep for a couple of decades.
And as far as the initial search for clients went, there was no dearth of results: I wound up with one full-time project and one full-time job. Completing negotiations took 7 months with HP; and 5-1/2 months with the National University of Singapore. And carrying out both jobs for the first several months required something like 90 hours a week. It took me another half year to find someone to help with the manual writing, to make my life more bearable. But in this way I got myself into more and more managing.
You need to commit yourself to being in the country for 2-1/2 years at the least.
You need that time to get into the new place and get something going before you're thinking about the next place.
As the woman says, Worry is not Preparation. Don't exhaust yourself and use too much time worrying or responding to bureaucratic matters - especially once you're there. Spend the preparation time in advance! Once you've arrived you need your time and energy to do what you came to do.
Don't count on having a set of enrolled clients or a job before you arrive - though a job is sometimes a useful and in some respects an easier way to prepare to base a business overseas. (On the other hand, it can be just as difficult to come by such a job as by the clients in the time before you actually demonstrate that you have arrived, that you're there and you "mean business.") But even with nothing firmly in hand, you'll have a decent sense of the lay of the land and how to follow-up, whether you seek clients for your business or a full-time job.
Allow plenty of time for your departure from the old place. Start your main countdown list several months in advance. Get support, organizing ideas and maybe even physical help from your friends and co-workers. Don't expect any particular "reliable" thing to go smoothly: once my Baltimore-Singapore plane had taxied out toward the runway and my friends had long abandoned the airport, the plane returned to the gate so that my fellow passengers and I could deplane and wait for a better-functioning aircraft.
Don't try to "hit the ground running." That's business-buzzword talk for the easily intimidated. Before you reach "full function" mode - if ever! - you need to answer little questions like "Where am I?," "How is business really done here?," "How do you approach people here?," "Who can help me?" You will need to be awake enough to pay attention. And that is a many-step process of opening up, since first you must learn what is it exactly that you need to pay attention to, or even before that, where and how do you need to look? This process of opening the eye wider, then much wider, is part of the beginning of the process of changing oneself.
It may feel at first that you're some kind of tourist - that's a more familiar experience to you than what you're actually doing. Remind yourself, ever so gently, that it isn't quite so. Remember, you're there for more than a week or two, more than a long vacation. In fact you're committed for 2-1/2 or 3 years or more.
To be sure, you'll discover gradually that indeed you're no tourist - you're actually, believe it or not, living in the place. But you need to get used to it without dulling yourself to the excitement of the thing. As Han Solo says, rhetorically, in reference to the possibility of outrunning the Imperial starcruisers, "That's the trick, isn't it?"
In terms of quality of work, the first 6 months in the country the information overload is likely to be so heavy that it's hard to "produce" anything more than versions of what you've done before - probably not your best work. Don't worry. It will come.
. Endgame for the move, Stage One for your new business base
- Still more follow-up, but now you begin to know how to go about it, you begin to believe you can do it "their" way
Keep following up. The more you do the more easily you see the breaks, the opportunities, maybe even you glimpse what looks like, feels like a torrent of opportunities. You're using skills you've always had, it seems, but you discover that they work here too. You discover you can play "their" game.
- Creativity on Mars
On the other hand, you're discovering at the same time that you can also "be yourself." That is, you can also do things with an element that is not local, in a way that may make you and what you have to offer unique. I don't mean imitate all the things you've done in the past. This is, after all, a new opportunity, a chance to try out something different, something that could be fun. So try. See what happens. Yes, such-and-such offer may not materialize (and if it does it will be later, much later); maybe you blew it with your too-much creativity, your un-creativity, with the fact that you didn't eat enough green vegetables the night before, maybe the job was wired to the brother-in-law. Try to keep at least armed neutrality with your anxiety.
- Patience
Remember how slowly these things may move.
It can be half a year from the time a hirer proposes a job or project to the time a deal is actually made.
As I mentioned earlier, it took me 7 months to complete negotiations for a long-term project with HP and 5-1/2 months with the National University of Singapore. And for better or worse, this apparently unavoidable slowness left me with two full-time jobs.
And don't be afraid to call back - sometimes they don't get the fax!
. Mental preparation and maintenance
There are temptations and traps that can snarl your connection with where you are, just as there are "tricks" to keep your sanity and increase your strength and satisfaction.
- Accepting unfamiliarity, anxiety, risk
Biggest trap of all, don't fall for the Procrustean bed - don't mistake what you're seeing or experiencing for what you saw or experienced in that other place where you grew up and learned everything till the cows came home and it all made sense. Don't grasp for the comfort of the way things used to be. Note your desire to do so; then laugh, jump up and down or sit and suffer if you can.
The rolling sea of an overwhelming daily information overload that you struggle to bear with means that you're paying attention and that you recognize that whatever it is, it doesn't fit - it's something that you don't understand. The recognition of the newness of the thing is your strongest single weapon, an all-purpose talisman that protects you.
Keep reminding yourself that it is possible to do something new. Don't be paralyzed because you don't know everything! Feeling intimidated is normal; being paralyzed is deadly!
And work to accept your own anxiety - it's good practice for everything else. It may feel like risking "everything," letting go of all your hard-won continuity and comfort but you'll find you can deal with this too.
- Don't get drunk on received ideas
Don't believe anything that you hear - least of all about a place or a culture. In the end, swallowing such conventional wisdom and "truisms" will exhaust you - and you won't see what's in front of you. Keep all your received ideas at a distance from you with some long barbecue tongs.
- Probing for the truth and enjoying it
Learning what's really true in this new world can be fun, like finding your way through a maze. But don't be too quick to grasp - to "learn fast." Remember, once again, that you don't understand.
If you're going, say, to Asia, don't be taken in by the propaganda about things like the Emperor's new Asian values. True, you can't trust your North American or otherwise non-Asian understanding. Now on top of that you can't trust the "official" local line about what's going on. What's that leave? All your wits and resources!
To maximize your strength, make sure that you are unprejudiced, open-minded. Don't be taken in by the many prejudiced, even out-and-out racist individuals that you will need to deal with. Be prepared to look at your culture of origin in a new light too.
- Finding and using local literature
I would argue that the literature of a region - whether fiction, songs, cabaret, wayang kulit or opera - is a better guide to the underlying nature of experience there than this month's government propaganda. See if you can identify appropriate material and get hold of it. If you can get it in book form or on videotape, you can read or study it before you go and/or after you arrive. The following example may serve to show how important such reading can be.
For Southeast Asia the most helpful single book that I found was Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife - though her Joy Luck Club was dismissed by many Chinese in Asia as "American." I finished reading the book, which takes place in China in the first half of this century, during a long winter trip along the Yellow River.
More than from any other book I got a sense of the scale of the suffering, and the fact that even the well-off were not altogether protected from it. And always in the background is a degradation of women that is staggering, massive, horrific.
Though I'd already lived in Singapore more than two years, I finally began to see why people in that city-state like to keep their heads down, why they don't want to go out on a limb - and how the modern governments of the region can still reinforce and take advantage of these long-inculcated fears.
- Dealing with your ignorance, your feeling intimidated, your doubts about what you can do
Once more, don't be so afraid to try new things that you try none! If you feel intimidated because you don't know everything, don't let that intimidation stultify you. If you continue to take a few risks - like the big one you took by committing yourself to the Big Move - you'll find that you can do more than you would have thought possible.
- Accepting your own courage
All right, you've felt overwhelmed, discouraged, frustrated, stymied, outmaneuvered, defeated, trapped. But you haven't succumbed. In the face of your own fear you didn't run away. Don't minimize what you've done; don't pretend that each of these acts of courage was "no big deal." There is a humility that is honest and increases the strength of everyone. But there is a belittling that is blindness, that degrades and wounds us all. Learn something from your own strength, and from what you've been able to do by employing it.
. Beware the beauty of your own ideas
You're starting a new system of understanding. Work to accept the fact that, this once, you do not understand. Then you'll begin to be able to see things as they are. When the foundation is built correctly, you will make rapid progress. Don't expect miracles.
Keep the ideas that you develop yourself (all your very favorites!) - especially for the first year - in their kennels. Your anxiety is a better guide.
. Stretching out
Now you know you can do it. Try some experimenting, take some risks you felt you couldn't afford originally. Maybe you'll discover great things, or at least short cuts.
. Making friends
Relationships build trust, outflank suspicion and even cut through red tape. And they can break down your feeling of isolation, renew your faith that communication and all good things are possible, and even connect you with the local mainstream.
. Becoming "yourself" again - in the new place
You've gone back and forth between, on the one hand, what you needed to do in the new place, the new culture, your new system of understanding, and on the other hand, what feels meaningful to you. In this struggle and synthesis the uniqueness of what you offer is being forged.
Your base has now become more solid. Many tasks appropriate to the new region are now routinized. You have enough clients to expand the business if you wish to. You know where to go for employees or contractors and how best to select them. You have established the relationships you needed with suppliers. With this latest further confidence, further support, further strength and understanding, further knowledge of when to go forward and when to stand still, you can move ahead to expressing, acting on or according to what is in your own heart. What follows for you and others is then less predictable and may be more gratifying than what had gone before.
So in some part this has become - even as you navigate among the familiar paper clips and pagers and deadlines, the unfamiliar customs and languages and propaganda - a kind of spiritual journey, an adventure complete with tests, new powers gained, new Scyllas and Charybdises to twist your boat between, long-buried terror in the face of the unknown, new goals achieved, vistas glimpsed and further goals set, new selves shaped.
If nothing else, you have at least succeeded in reaching a hill with an incredible view, and from here you can choose with practiced clarity your next move.