Once upon a time, when I first went overseas, I relied on snail mail to transport my weekly aerogrammes home to my parents. These inevitably crossed over in the middle of the Indian Ocean with the most recent one from my mother to me, so that we never quite linked the conversation. I saved coins for weeks to make birthday calls home, that were swallowed up faster than you could say “Hip Hip Hooray”.
Eventually, email sped the process up a little, but it took a while for everyone to invest in a home computer and then how to discover their email addresses?
Today, my children are able to talk to their old friends in Australia, the UK and the Czech Republic on Skype on a daily basis. I have found friends on Facebook I have not seen in fifteen years, and assumed were lost to me forever. Now, our families in Australia may know faster than the average Filipino of bomb scares or typhoons in Manila. We have got so used to the immediacy of communication that I panic if the kids don’t respond to a text message in 30 seconds! And yet, twenty five years ago, I could disappear for weeks on a train through Europe, and my parents had to trust that I was safe.
Modern technology is utterly amazing, and something we are all inclined to take for granted. Today, I was able to watch my sixteen year old son play rugby using a live online feed from his school in the Philippines while sitting with a caffe latte an outdoor coffee shop in South Australia! I told my friends about it on Facebook, had responses from all over the globe within the hour and texted the results to my mother.
Expat life can be having your children scattered around the world so that you often feel the need to be in several countries at once. As I write this in Adelaide, where I am helping our daughter move back into college, I am also watching our son in Manila play rugby with a team from Taiwan, sick that I cannot be there for both of them.
Yet, even as I wait for my daughter to get her eyes checked at OPSM in Rundle Mall, I am watching my son score a try from 5,600 km away, as the entire school lines up along every balcony railing, roaring and cheering in support of their school team, green and gold pom poms dancing in the stands – while texting Hannah to hurry back and bring me her headphones so I can hear the commentary properly. Go the Bearcats!