“Settling into an Expatriate World”

Focus of the United Nations development assistance is primarily on the developing countries most in need of support. The result for a resident expatriate UN Director and Ambassador\ is that one is likely to live in a quite unfamiliar cultural and social world. Stephen takes you with him as he engages with this world. Jakarta, Indonesia, his Regional Office base, surrounds its residents with exotic, tropical flora, and jungle wildlife right to the doorstep. But then there was the chaos of traffic which followed alien rules, floods that suddenly descended onto daily life from the deluge of tropical storms, and a city culture that was still deeply penetrated by possibly having a local village over the back fence. Meanwhile, governance was deeply mired in corruption and authoritarian rule which, apart from anything else, exercised total censorship over what could be known via the media. And deeply set into the culture was the magic of a spirit world—where people commonly even purchase an appropriately ‘good’ spirit for their home, and dukans or rain pushers were hired to protect most public events, even of the Institute of Sciences. An enchanting world but the cultural frame for one’s own action.