Finding Expat Friends in Unlikely Places
“One might call us an unlikely pair, and they’d be right. But the expat life has forced us together and I’m a better person, and a better follower of Christ, because of it.”
I could sit on the porch of the coffee shop just outside of the farmer's market forever. As long as I've got something to sip on, I'm content to sit and watch the myriad of expats pass by with their totes full of things to make dinner with, or to share with friends. I spot several Trader Joe's shopping totes and look down at my own and grin. Some of the passersby and I come from the same place. Most of the expats around me are clearly from other places. They look and sound very different.
Although I’m from the USA—which is known as a “melting pot”—my immediate circle there, unfortunately, has never been very diverse. Perhaps that was my fault. To befriend someone different from me would be to step outside the norm. No, no, I thought. I was better off staying in the section I always sat at in church. I was better off keeping it surface level with the coworker who's into the weird stuff, better off not engaging too deeply with the girl who's led a very different life. I built a shelter for myself from the greater world around me.
When I moved to Kathmandu, I became very obviously different from most people around me. I had expected as much, immersing myself into a place where I can be called nothing other than an outsider. But it has been in connecting with the other outsiders that I have learned the most about myself and my understanding of God.
When we moved into our flat I knew there was another bideshi—the Nepali word for foreigner—living above us. She was a mystery to me. I saw her from time to time bringing her bike in through the gate. At the time I knew only two things about her: that she was from Eastern Europe, and that she confident enough to brave the roads of Kathmandu alone on her bike. Whereas I hadn't so much as ventured to walk across one of those roads by myself.
We eventually met and exchanged numbers. After texting her about a visa question one day, she responded with "Do you want to come upstairs? It would be easier to talk in person." A couple of hours later—my visa question answered in the first 5 minutes—I left feeling like some empty part of me was beginning to fill. A kindred connection was forming.
After that, our counters were rarely without her baked goods. We celebrated holidays together, and she always brings the most amazing Romanian cabbage rolls with her. We just expect it now. She attends (and practically cohosts) Monday game nights religiously, even when she moved an hour across town. I’ve taught her the important things I know like how to make salsa and hummus, and she’s taught me sincere friendship can form in unlikely places. She’s family now, in a way that can’t quite fit into words.
Years after we first met, she'd tell me that she didn't intend on becoming friends with us. When we moved in she had already been planning to move out. No need to get attached. I'm thankful that Providence had a different plan in mind. Three years, and I know I wouldn't have been able to survive much of this Nepal life without her.
While I'm starkly different from the locals around me, it is my Romanian friend’s subtler differences that have caused me to take a second look in the mirror and a deeper look at some of my understandings of the Bible. She comes from a conservative church background that's lacquered in tradition. You always know what to expect when you go to church in Romania. I, however, come from a non-denominational church where they once placed a bed on stage as a prop for a series about marriage and purity.
Her high school had romantically large, old doors and stained glass windows. Mine was built in the ’70s and was a drab, one-story square building on a street lined with palm trees. More than once, we've looked at each other with a strange sideways glance and wonder at each other’s choices. For example, we drink alcohol and she doesn’t. I have piercings and tattoos and she would never dream of such a thing, nor would her parents.
One might call us an unlikely pair, and they’d be right. But the expat life has forced us together and I’m a better person, and a better follower of Christ, because of it. The impact of our friendship has caused me to reevaluate what really matters in the light of eternity. Her faith has helped grow mine and led me to realize how God can be reflected in other, different, traditions and cultures.
In the beginning, a lot of assumptions were made. There were things left unsaid, coming from our mutual uneasiness when we felt that the other had made a choice which wasn’t right. But friendship and grace have paved a way to understanding. I love that we’ve been able to nurture an honesty between us that doesn’t have space for judgment. We’ve learned so much by talking through our differences, including the different ways we encounter God.
I love the wisdom of Paul's statement to the Corinthians, "Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial” (1 Cor. 6). In coming to Nepal, encountering people from all walks of life and manners of faith, I feel the mind and heart of God unfold before me—He doesn’t care what we wear, what we eat or how we speak. He’s not concerned with our surfaces, but with our hearts.
My home culture had built up in me invisible boundaries and prejudices that I’d never recognized before moving to Nepal. In a lot of cases, you don’t get to choose your friends when you opt to live in a foreign county. You spend time with whoever is around and speaks the same language as you. Those people could have grown up in an evangelical charismatic church, or never gone to church at all. Either way, it’s a gift. If I had been given a choice, I might have chosen someone who looked, acted, and believed exactly like me. In that case, I would’ve missed out on recognizing the beauty of the abundant diversity in God and the people He’s created.
I hope now after all this exposure to people different from me, I can look at the people around me and seek to see the beauty of the Divine within them regardless of our distinctions. God’s made every one of us in His perfect image. Connecting with others—differences and all—brings that truth home to me.
What friendships have you made in your host country that never would’ve happened in your passport country? How have those friendships helped shape your understanding of the world, yourself, and God?
