Ready to retire and want
to become an expat?
After working nearly eight months months
to get a special “pensionada” visa, scouting out the correct pet carriers to
bring along her dog and cat, holding umpteen garage sales and finally selling
her mission-style bungalow at a small profit – to retire in Paraguay as an
expat – Bess G. flew off to retirement paradise.
By the end of three
months, Bess returned home.
This native Californian never was quite
sure how to tell others why her move did not work out, but accepts she made
mistakes. Some days wishes she could take it all back -- her current dilemma is
finding a new, affordable retirement solution. For the rest of her life, she
will be living in a small apartment, she rationalizes.
Packing your bags, finding pet carriers,
and leaving for a romantic spot in Belize, Spain, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador,
Ireland or elsewhere may sound quite exciting at first. After all, the notion
of living the rest of one's life near the ocean or next to snow-capped
mountains with new places to visit and new people to meet, is what captured
Bess’s imagination in the first place.
While there are numerous stories of
individual expat success (and failure), especially on retirement blogs and
magazines, there there seems to be few formal expat studies revolving around
retirees.
It may help, though, to pay attention to
what some corporations have learned about placing workers in new countries --
turning their employees and often their families into expatriates.
One human resource manager believes that
it takes a special person to make necessary adjustments, and that when business
expatriates fail to adjust to a new county, they have often been selected by
managers “in a knee-jerk reaction” to fill a new or unexpected vacancy on
foreign soil, and failure is more typical than not.
Sharon Lobel in "Global Leadership
Competencies: Managing to a Different Drumbeat" (Human Resource
Management, Spring 1990) asserts that managers tend to choose the most
technically competent candidates “even though the qualities that made
candidates a success domestically won't necessarily make them a success
internationally.”
With Lobel’s observations in mind, it is
not surprising that a high expatriate failure rate has existed for many
corporations. While studies of failure rates vary, it appears that between 16
percent and 40 percent of personnel generally return early, with aborted
assignments occurring as often as 70 percent of the time in developing
countries, she finds.
So, if talented, educated employees cannot
make it in out-of-country assignment, it is not surprising that a number of
retirees trying to become expats end up returning home, most likely angry and
not understanding why they could not succeed (or simply blaming their failure
on the country and its “weird” citizens).
One answer to expat failure comes from the
field of anthropology – ethnocentrism – a word explaining why people from one
culture often have a difficult time adjusting to a new one. This word comes
from the belief in the superiority of one person over another, stemming from a
variety of sources.
You may have seen ethnocentrism in action,
or felt it. Some expats who have a strong awareness of it say they are
embarrassed when a new retiree moves into their community and begins showing
signs of superiority to the local people.
Are
you certain you have “better manners” than a poor person or someone from
Mexico? Do some people who speak with an “accent” have “poor” English skills?
Are your children “smarter” because they had a better (more expensive)
education? Is
American medicine automatically "better" than what is locally
practiced?...
For anyone answering “yes” to any of these
questions, this probably signals that becoming an expat might be difficult, and
here is why:
Ethnocentrism usually starts with the
belief of superiority in one's personal ethnic group; it can also develop from
racial or religious differences. Conscious or not, people who are ethnocentric
think that they are smarter, better, even superior than others for reasons
based solely on their background and heritage, a practice clearly related to
problems of both racism and prejudice.
Those who have been educated to recognize
problems associated with ethnocentrism, would likely find it easier to relocate
and live among people who are “different,” recognizing that ethnocentrism takes
place nearly everywhere and everyday on local and political levels, and that it
gets in the way of really knowing and understanding people from other groups.
Unfortunately, many Americans are not very
familiar with this term, or that since the beginning of this country’s
conception, the United States has often thought of itself as more powerful,
more economically sound, and just generally "better" than other
nations.
When traveling to other countries, unless
one is very cautious, ethnocentrism often appears as “looking down” on people
of other cultures or behaving in a superior way. Shouting in one’s own
language, rather than taking time to learn the hosting country’s language, is
only one example.
Ethnocentrism can be expressed through
nonverbal signals that are automatic to the person sending them, such as
standing too close or too far away from a person, waggling a finger at someone
while speaking too loudly or interrupting conversation while using a
know-it-all expression, or not taking into any consideration the communication
mores or practices of the hosting country.
(Still questioning ethnocentrism? Consider
that European ethnocentrism is still practiced today in schools where history
courses typically focus on the history of the United States and Europe, largely
ignoring other parts of the world.)
The person who is a successful expat
typically knows that despite cultural differences, we are all still human.
There is no critical difference between a Parguay citizen and a citizen of
Thailand, and so forth. To survive as a stranger in a strange land – a visitor
in a new land – requires education and enough personal depth to avoid unfair
prejudices that result from ethnocentrism.
Dr. Ben van den Anker of Australia, a
cross cultural consultant, advises “While it is tempting to daydream that all
we’ll need to do is find a nice little cottage on a sunny beach somewhere and
our lives will be complete, [social] research suggests that expats
are happiest when they go out of their way to be part of the local community
and also find an activity that they love.”
Perhaps now that Bess is back home, with
time on her hands, she might consider trying again to become an expat, this
time taking Dr. van den Anker’s advice for making out-of-country living
successful:
“All it takes is some understanding and
appreciation of unfamiliar cultures and people who have something of worth to
offer.”
If she does try becoming an expat once
more, not only will Bess lower her retirement expenses, she could experience
something unique that comes from moving into a new and different
culture--learning to appreciate others in a new way and freedom from the defines of ethnocentrism.
*****
To arrange for Susan Klopfer to speak to your organization on retirement topics, contact her at http://susanklopfer.com
*****
To arrange for Susan Klopfer to speak to your organization on retirement topics, contact her at http://susanklopfer.com
