... that's exactly how I feel at the moment, overwhelmed and accutely Australian. If you read the last post you'll remember it ended in a rant.... well, I must warn you to prepare yourself for another. This not a "feel sorry for me" post or an "I'm homesick" post, but I had to get a few things off my chest - some thoughts that have been building up for a while now.
Firstly, the news from home is just all bad these days. The European and British news services are constantly showing dramatic pictures of floods, cyclones, bushfires back home. First it was south-east queensland drowning after praying for rain, then the far north holding on to its hat as a cyclone the size of Italy (as the euro news points out) bore down, then Perth is suddenly ablaze and finally, as I'm sitting in a pub in Luxembourg, I glance up at the BBC broadcast on silent on the flatscreen and see the headline "Melbourne awash in floods" and bicycles and kids toys floating down the street. I can't imagine how people are feeling at home (and that's half the problem, being so far from it all) but I wonder when our country is going to get a breather. It is all a bit more than an expat can handle at the moment. People here ask about the "unusual weather" in Australia, is my family anywhere near the danger? oh, no? well that's ok then right? But it's not ok - its still my country, my homeland, on fire, under water, being blown away literally. And its affecting a lot more than I realised...
However, as I think about the devastation Australians are facing, the next news item comes on and its even worse somewhere else in the world. When the first Queensland floods happened there were floods in South America which killed hundreds of people and swept away entire villages in seconds... just in case I'd lost perspective. And of course, we hear about such world events at home, but to have it juxtaposed in that way had a completely new impact on me.
Living in Europe has made me receptive in a new way to the impact of world events. There's always something happening somewhere and its usually bad. While I see international news back home, here it's not international, often its nextdoor! And there is something far more sobering and real about being geographically closer to these once merely abstract problems. Conversely there is something harder about being so far away from the problems I know to be very real and familiar back home.
Australia is one country, an island surrounded by vast expanses of water and - eventually - some other islands. Here, I am living a 10 minute walk from a country that wants to ban the burqa, I'm a stonesthrow from the unrest in Egypt and Tunisia, the recent terrorist bombing just above my head in Russia, an explosion in Ankara to one side and money problems of countries failing to support their most vulnerable all around. And speaking of, I was also approached the other night by the first homeless person I have met in Maastricht. Apparently here the welfare system is quite good but I still felt a pang of guilt that I, a rich little Australian off glavanting abroad with enough money to be heading out for coffee, didn't spare more than a few coins for this man who was homeless (clearly) but still managed to greet me and hold a conversation in English (the thought struck me that even the homeless in Europe are bilingual... ?!)
Particularly the unrest in Egypt is weighing on my mind tho - its literally always on the euronews channel, live footage of crowds which sound like packed football stadiums yelling to oust a President they've had for 30 years (longer than I've been alive!) and this is the only way they can get rid of him?! And the cost to foreign journalists has brought up all sorts of feelings about the career path I and many of my friends have chosen. These journos - like any I know - are just reporting. Without them, I wouldn't be able to turn on my TV and find out what's going on in a land Iv'e never visited. And there they are, being subjected to hotel room ransackings, harrassment on the streets, knife wounds, even death in the case of one Egyptian reporter. And on top of all that, it seems as though the foreign journalists are being blamed for "stirring up" some of the unrest in the first place. It makes my blood boil honestly.
And the worst thing about all of this is that there is absolutely nothing I can do. I can't put out fires in WA, I can't soak up Queenslands watery streets or its misery, I wouldn't even know where to start with Egypt and giving a couple of Euro to a homeless Dutchman doesn't go nearly far enough. It's enough to make a girl feel utterly helpless ... overwhelmed, as I conceded at the start of this rant. I'm not talking about wanting to being able to control or "fix" things, but the combination of all the above as confirmation that I, that most of us, have such a small impact on the world is only making me more accutely aware of the impact the world is having on me right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment