Love at the Speed of Email Read Online Free Page A

grew up firmly planted on farms in
Australia. My father milked cows before and after school, wore hand-me-down
clothes, and still talks with emotion of the treat that it was to have roast
chicken on Christmas Day. My mother attended the two-room schoolhouse just down
the road from their sugar cane farm. Hers was a childhood full of chores, too,
but also of fishing in the river across the road and caravanning at the nearby
beach every summer. When my parents decided to attend university, they were
treading a different path from most of their peers. They were also leaving the
only homes they had ever known.
    After a childhood of unfathomable stability, marriage to
each other at twenty-one, and seven years spent living in Canberra (a strong
contender for the planet’s most boring capital city) , I can understand why my parents wondered about a different life. I can
understand the allure of a radical new path. I can understand – though still I
marvel at their naïve bravery – why they decided to pack up their three young
children and move to Bangladesh to pursue development work.
    My grandparents were less understanding. My mother’s parents
even suggested that if they must go,
we children should stay with them.
    “Don’t worry,” my parents reassured them. “It’s only for two
years. Then we’ll be back.”
    Twenty-one years and seven international moves later, my
parents finally relocated back to Australia. During their time away, they’d
weathered two government coups and several emergency evacuations and collected
more than their share of interesting experiences. They’d also raised three
global nomads who were equally accustomed to spending time in seaside resorts
and slums and who felt one part self-assured citizens of the world and two
parts outsiders pretty much wherever they went.
    This is why I still don’t fully understand my own perpetual
wonderings about a different life – I have already had many lives in many
places. And the life I now live is the sort of life that my parents left
Australia hoping to find in Bangladesh.
    I am the director of education and training services for a
nonprofit organization dedicated to providing psychological support services to
humanitarian workers around the world.   When I am not delivering workshops on stress, trauma, and resilience in
cities as divergent as Amsterdam or Nairobi, I find myself in Los Angeles. To
outside observers interested in this sort of work, I look as if I have it made
– a meaningful job with frequent travel and a home base in one of the great
cities of the developed world. And when I come across these outside observers,
often students who are longing to find an entrée into humanitarian work, they
all want to know pretty much the same thing.
    How did you get your job? How did you get your life?
    These, I am afraid, are entirely valid questions without
satisfying answers. I often feel as if these students are looking for a set of
instructions they can use to map out a clear pathway for themselves. What they
get instead, if I’m being honest, is a shrug. For the truth of the matter is,
I’m still not entirely sure how I got
this job, much less this life that can still feel as if it doesn’t fit me quite
right.

 
 
    Sydney,
Australia

 
 
    When I have the time to give someone the extended version of
the pathway to now, I usually begin the story in Sydney, around the time I
graduated with a master’s degree in forensic psychology. By this time, after
six years of learning to call Australia home and actually mean it, I had
figured out that a large part of my heart was still overseas and that I wanted
to be an international humanitarian worker.
    At least that’s how I put it to my parents when I rang them
where they were living at the time to let them know that now that I’d invested
all this effort and no small sum of their money into psychology, I wasn’t sure
I wanted to be a psychologist anymore.
    “Why not?” Mum asked