My future friend

Alex and I knew each other while attending the same Master’s program in Paris, but we were never close friends, acquaintances more than anything. Our paths crossed here and there on campus, sometimes in the Restaurant Universitaire, other times in some elective classes. We exchanged a friendly “hi, how are you?” on a good day and on less good ones — due to time constraint?— we would always flash each other a smile of acknowledgement. But our relationship never went further than just superficial conversations about the weather or class material. That was the extent of our relationship when we both jumped onto an hour phone call about being weird culture kids— an event in my confined life that I deemed “a pleasant discovery”. One that I genuinely wish I’d made sooner because I’m convinced, after our exchange, that we could have been very good friends.

We greeted each other on the phone in a very friendly way. Perhaps due to this special situation that we found ourselves in, we knew not to take for granted this moment of contact and communication. The conversation was organic, as if we were old friends catching up after a long time. He talked about his new job somewhere in the United States in a chemical company. I silently frowned and he somehow noticed it through the phone and laughed. We laughed together, not really knowing what was so funny. 

If not for that call a few weeks ago, I never would have known how weird, culturally-speaking, Alex truly is. When I asked him where he was from, he confidently answered “Ottawa, Canada”, but the real story was much more complex than that. He’d given me the “short” answer. Alex is the only child of an Argentinian-born mother, whose family had moved and settled in Guatemala, and a Canadian father. To muddy the waters even more, for as long as he could remember, he was enrolled in the French school system in both Canada and Guatemala. He volunteered all of those weird facts in the most natural way possible — as if he was just reading out loud to me the different elements of his Saturday grocery list. Out of the many different weird culture kids that I’ve interviewed, he seemed very grounded, as if he had made sense of it all.

“Why did your parents enroll you in the French system?” I asked him, mostly out of curiosity, and because I was looking for a reason, myself. As a kid who grew up in the French system as well, my parents had never been able to tell me the reason as to why, other than the fact that my grandparents spoke fluent French. 

As to Alex’ parents, there were several very rational reasons why his parents enrolled him in the French school from a young age. Firstly because his parents wanted him to grow up speaking French — that’s Canada for you, Alex chuckled— and secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it was because they felt like the French education was the most rigidly consistent system around the world. Indeed, as Alex’s parents were working for the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ability to move seamlessly from one school to another was an important factor in his parents’ choice of education system. Indeed, Alex was trained, from a very young age, to be a professional expat, whether he wanted to or not.

And just like that, for as long as he could remember, Alex grew up between two main countries and cultures: Canada and Guatemala. Until he was around ten years old, January to June was spent in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and July to December in Ottawa, Canada. This arrangement was all he ever knew for the first ten years of his life, it was normal for him. And so no question was ever asked.

I, on the other hand, had about a zillion to go through in a space of an hour.

Out of all the different people that I have interviewed, I had never encountered such an extreme case. Not only was Alex figuratively living between the birth culture of his mother, the Latin American one, and that of his father, the Canadian one, but also physically living in between two different countries while growing up, with six months in a tropical country and the other six months in what I considered the coldest place on earth. 

“Didn’t that seem weird to you?" I blurted.

Alex must have been confronted with these sorts of questions hundreds of times before and, like the typical excellent student that I used to hate in class, Alex laid out all of his well-formulated answers to each and every single question of mine. He told me, gently, that it wasn’t weird for him at all because he had a few friends from a very young age— from the maternelle! — who had the same lifestyle as he did so they were his reference point. They were his weirdo-meter and he scored only slightly above-average on that scale. Needless to say, these kids were also children of diplomat families who, together, formed a tight knit community of expats wherever they went. And, like a little tribe, they gave one another a sense of normalcy, a sense of home. Wherever that was.

“Didn’t you find that annoying? Logistically, how did that even work to move around every six months?” I insisted. 

And that was when the French system came in and lived up to its expectation. Academically, there was not much difference since the French system around the world was teaching the same curriculum, so it was never a problem to adapt to the rhythm of the class. He didn’t have to make new friends with each move because the switch, for ten years, was just between Guatemala and Ottawa. He went back to his familiar homes every time. For Alex, it was just a matter of boarding that plane and making that trip — the rest of it was very systematized. 

He felt a lot of gratitude towards the French school system because that was the source of his sense of continuity, growing up. Despite his moving around, he was ‘only’ moving between two different countries, countries that he both claimed as his. Furthermore, goodbyes were only temporary ones because he would always find his friends again a couple of months after the separation. It’s like having two sets of friends. It was never too hard. In fact, Alex didn’t have enough time to miss things or people too much before finding them again.

I imagined the joy that it must have been like. If only real life worked that way, too.

The hardest move, according to Alex, was his relocation to Havana, Cuba. Because this time, things were different for him. He was moving to a completely new country, albeit a very exotic one. His goodbye sounded more permanent this time, since he was going to a completely new place, to start a completely new life, with completely new people. At the age of sixteen — a rather difficult age to start a new anything— he was told that they were to move again. At that moment, Alex had already started building his sense of home with a pretty established group of friends in Ottawa. After all, he had stayed there, stably, like a regular person, for the last six years. He didn’t expect to go back to traveling so soon.

He recalled his arrival to Havana, Cuba and his deep feeling of sadness, mixed with a touch of excitement. Sadness because he had to put aside his previous life and excitement because he felt like he found a part of himself again — the explorer dimension that he had lost touch with for quite some time now. One of the elements that marked him most upon arrival to this new country was his inability to connect to this thing called the internet. He recalled not having either Skype or Facebook or any type of connectivity during his first three months in Cuba. And despite his hating this new disconnected lifestyle because, after all, he was still just a kid who missed dearly his friends from back home, he admitted today, though still a bit reluctantly, that it allowed him to fully immerse in his new environment. In fact, he shared with me that his first couple of months living in Havana, he felt fully and truly there because he didn’t have any other choice. And that didn’t feel half as bad as what he expected.

Things completely changed when the internet came back into his life. His old friends came rushing back through all sorts of technological channels — Skype and Facebook and all sorts of chat messengers. Emails and calls via the internet. This was a new existence: the mind wandering the streets of Ottawa while the body subject to the heat and humidity of Havana. For the first time, he was in intensive contact with people that weren’t physically “there”, their voices,thoughts and personalities immediately available, despite the distance. Or was it the other way around? Was it more Alex trying to insert himself in the world that was no longer his? Was it a little bit of both? 

Was it just a matter of friends who loved one another dearly and who weren’t ready to let each other go?

Fortunately, perhaps, this situation didn’t last long. As time passed, the emails, calls, and messages grew more infrequent.Both sides probably knew that it wasn’t sustainable. Or maybe they just ran out of things to say to each other. Maybe they realized that you actually have to be there physically to partake in the building of a community. Maybe your disembodied voice, thoughts, and personality is only enough for a while and when it was no longer enough, your full presence is then required. Presence is required to live, not merely to exist. Both sides probably needed each other’s full presence — to witness, to laugh without digital delay, to talk about the most mundane elements. To simply be there and live the moment first-hand.

And deciding that he wasn’t going to just live through stories, Alex chose Havana as his new homebase. A bit reluctantly, perhaps, at first. And with time — yes, time heals everything— wholeheartedly.

That probably explains why he gave me a sense of being so grounded as a weird culture kid. He did the tough work years ago already. As I hung up shortly after hearing all of his stories, I thought to myself, maybe when our paths cross again, we could be friends then.