When you're far from home, domestic politics look completely different
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Version 0 of 1. I first learned about Bubba (American nickname for President Bill Clinton) in 1992 from the Bangkok Post. I spent most of that year in Thailand, fixated on war along the Burma border and poverty on the Issan plateau. The politics of home, even a presidential election, seemed remote and vaguely unimportant. As I recall, the somewhat conservative columnists in the Post mocked Clinton’s accent and questioned whether he was “presidential”. But for me it wasn’t that deep. It was him or the incumbent, President GHW Bush. Bush sent some of my university friends to war in Kuwait and talked like someone’s grandad. Clinton cared about the same things that I did, and seemed young(er) and cool(er). Of course, times were different then. I was young and having a blast riding around Thailand on an old Honda MTX. My aid career was a mere one year old. There were no such things as Sphere standards or the cluster system (pdf) and the internet was mainly in sci-fi films. South-east Asia was my world and I couldn’t think beyond it. I had no intention of ever coming home or going anywhere else. And so, filling in my absentee ballot and running it over to Bangkok’s US embassy on Wireless Road was little more than an afterthought at the time. Another necessary chore. Do my civic duty, participate in the democratic process and all that. It was literally half a morning’s worth of effort, between my second coffee and my lunchtime plate of chicken-fried rice from a shop on Sukhumvit 55. Of course, I did eventually leave south-east Asia – to travel to other posts and to work at home too – and over the years that followed, US politics would occasionally stray into my life. On 4 February 1994, I was in Ho Chi Minh City, the day President Clinton ended the American embargo against Vietnam. You could feel the electricity in the air. There were celebrations. People lit firecrackers and sang karaoke. And there was Pepsi. Pepsi everywhere. I drank more Pepsi in Vietnam in 1994 than in all the rest of my life, before and after, combined. In 1998, a taxi driver in the Yemeni city of Mocha, on learning that I was American, turned around without taking his foot off the gas, to reach back and squeeze my knee affectionately and holler, “Bill K-lin-TON... VERY GOOD! HAHAHAHAHA!” Late in the summer of 1999, an irate villager in Vojvodina (northern Serbia, just after Nato’s “humanitarian bombing”) gesticulated wildly at a large chunk of a metal in his garden, a piece of an oil refinery 2km away that had been destroyed by Nato. He angrily accused Bill Clinton, and me by proxy, of targeting his garden, specifically. My local colleague looked at the ground and in a soft voice said something like, “Next time just pretend to be German.” And then, in 2001, before 9/11, there was the immigration official on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Immigration official: “Oh, you’re American.” Me: “Yeah...” Immigration official: “George Bush...” [shakes head sadly] Me: “Yeah...” Immigration official [brighter]: “But, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton good!” Me: “Yeah...” Somehow, as an aid worker the temptation to somehow disengage with whatever drama is happening at home never goes away. After spending the day thinking about, say, conflict in the Central African Republic or the refugee influx into Jordan, it’s tough to get worked up over changes to local zoning laws. But as I look back the Clinton-Bush election of 1992 — seen from afar, from the back of a bike — is still one of my favorites. What memories do you have of watching domestic politics from abroad? “J” has been working in aid for many years. He blogs pseudonymously at aidspeak.wordpress.com and Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter. |