What are we doing here?

What are you doing here?

The question is the go-to conversation starter for the expat crowd. It’s an important one. But it’s also crushingly tiresome. I’ve found that the banter that follows is often forgotten, explanations rolled off the tongue to blank eyes.

“That’s really great, good for you!” etc.

What’s more interesting is who you are, and why that may have gotten you to where you are. Process is interesting. Justifications are drab.

I suppose the short of it is I’ve ended up in Cambodia because I’m involved with an MA program back home that includes an internship component. I was accepted by a very hardworking peacebuilding NGO that does very good and balanced work throughout the Southeast Asian region but is based locally out of Siem Reap. The organization’s work lines up directly with my academic program. Cambodia isn’t a bad place to spend time so I said yes and sorted out the paperwork and bought a plane ticket.

There are connections to be made though.

Some years ago some events happened that pushed me around the Canadian North and then to East Africa and back around again before finally landing back in my undergraduate program at the University of Winnipeg. Throughout the rest of my time there I developed some powerful relationships with fellow students and professors that changed how I thought about the world I live in. I suppose I had the university experience that anyone in a normative arts program should have, and I owe a lot to that.

Maybe that explains, generally, the source of my personal beliefs, some of the things that ground me, if not what exactly those beliefs are.

Other life events then had me back North and then to the West Bank and in and out of Winnipeg. Those post-undergrad years were a time of great loss and confusion for a number of reasons. I didn’t really have the wherewithal or the immediate interest in applying for grad school at the time but a very good friend and mentor basically handed me an application while we were in Ramallah and said,

“You should do this.”

And so I did. And I was accepted. And so I went. I wasn’t up to much else except working construction and I figured it couldn’t hurt. Another year or so back in the classroom sounded like a good way to spend that time. And it has been.

Maybe that explains, generally, the circumstance of how and why, if not exactly outlining all the details.

I don’t, by any means, mean to be flippant or discredit my grad program or my internship. They’ve both been wonderful, worthwhile experiences that are shaping me. They’re an important step to whatever it is that’s next. But if I wasn’t here then I’d be somewhere else that would also be shaping me.

To be honest, I’ve spent much of my first six or so weeks in Cambodia wondering what I’m doing here. The internship has been great, the people I work with are fantastic. The work they do is fantastic. The location is also quite interesting, although Siem Reap’s proximity to a spread of astonishing archaeological sites can make it a tourist-gap-year-four-dollar-bucket-of-vodka nightmare for those of us who are sticking around for longer than a weekend. It brings about an edge of colonial guilt and self-disgust about being yet another White Person In Asia, particularly in place such as Cambodia that has been so disgustingly rattled by the Western sabre. What do I have to offer here?

Devin, my first question to you and I don’t want to beat the topic to death but, having traveled a fair bit yourself, how have you dealt with that edge of guilt? Again, I’m more interested in process than justification. How have your thoughts and actions changed over the years?

We begin.

“What are you trying to prove this time?” my father asked me, via skype, a couple of weeks before I returned to Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan. It was a good question and one that was not entirely without merit.

There comes a certain point, say, when you have finished all the schooling you think you need to do (two degrees are enough), and you’ve tried and failed to find employment in your own country on at least two occasions (both post-Master’s, which seems fairly ironic, and a little bit unfair), and you’re an internship expert because you’ve done so many, when you start to wonder if the path you set out on years ago, the path you were so sure was the way forward, is maybe not your path at all.

But I didn’t come to Kurdistan this time to prove anything to anyone else or myself. I came back because I was sure this was the place I was supposed to be. And I hadn’t felt that way about any place in a very long time. Every choice I’ve made in the last six or eight years has been because I came across an opportunity I did not expect and that I couldn’t pass up. Nothing was as satisfying as buying a return ticket from Sulaymaniyah to Winnipeg earlier this year. I wasn’t starting from scratch again, I had a place, and it was here, in Suli.

The strange thing about making the shift from living in post-conflict zones to living in, technically, a conflict zone is how once you’re there, conflict still doesn’t quite seem like a tangible thing. Yesterday I watched the full minute of footage from inside Canada’s Parliament, of the shots that rang out again and again and again as the camera only jumped once. When I hear gunfire in Suli, I listen with a sort of detached assumption that someone is celebrating something (it’s a thing you do when you’re excited here). But for that minute as I watched YouTube in the dark, I was overcome by a deep sense of dread and nausea. It’s not supposed to happen, there.

Our expectations of what to be afraid of and of what to let go change when we live in unfamiliar places. But these places, no matter how unfamiliar, are no less ‘real’. It’s easy to feel like it’s not your real place or your real world, that you can remain untouched by the dangers or violence that touch that place. Or that your actions in that place won’t have an effect on the people who surround you there.

I still want Suli to be my place, but it’s different now then before, before when there was stability and a salary and a job. Now there are different stories to be told, and I hope that I can keep at it long enough to tell the ones I want to.

James, what’s the biggest misconception about where you are, now?