By Suzanne Sprague
Brussels, Belgium – [Ambient sound from a kitchen.]
Adrienne Baughman, American living in Belgium: This is my, I call it my magic sink because it is magic. I don't know how it works. [Ambient sound of water running.]
Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: Adrienne Baughman is standing in her tiny yet highly functional kitchen just a few subway stops outside Brussels, Belgium. In her World War II-era home, the kitchen sink looks more like a toilet tank, and it's slow to deliver hot water.
Baughman: It comes in from the ground source and it fills it up, and I have to turn on the heater at the base to get hot water. I know. I know. It's so embarrassing. It's not very modern. [She laughs.]
Sprague: Baughman is originally from Missouri. She lives near Brussels because her Dutch husband found a good job here. But it's hard to find an employer who will hire an American, so Baughman and her husband live on his heavily-taxed income.
Baughman: And still, when I tell my family about that, and I tell them it's a struggle, they still have this crazy, romantic idea that I'm over here wearing a beret, eating French bread, riding around on my bicycle and drinking coffee all day at a quaint cafe. I do those things, I admit it, but it's not the substance of what we're doing over here.
Sprague: The substance is mostly grocery shopping, working in the yard and cleaning the house, not exactly how shows like the BBC's "The Jewel in the Crown" portrayed expatriate living.
[Audio Clip from the movie "A Jewel in the Crown," in which a British solider tells a British woman that an Indian man will be provided to assist her every need during her stay in India.]
Robin Pascoe, Author and Journalist: People have unbelievable expectations of what the life overseas will be.
Sprague: Robin Pascoe is the author of three books about expatriate life. She also runs the Web site expatexpert.com.
Pascoe: So typically what happens is people set off with these grand expectations. They get hit with culture shock. They usually do a nose dive into a crisis stage, and they go through all the different stages of culture shock, and then they come out the other side of it, and then they figure out how to live their life overseas.
Sprague: Pascoe knows from personal experience. She's lived in Bangkok and other Asian cities as the wife of a Canadian diplomat. And she's seen how many women have difficulty making the transition to being an expatriate, often because they're prohibited from working in foreign countries. Pascoe: For the women who want to work, the career issue is the number one challenge. Not because they want to work and continue in their profession. The career issue is tied to identity.
Baughman: You're just the lady in the blue shoes and the red dress in the grocery store. That's it.
Sprague: Adrienne Baughman admits life here has been hard, and she's been living in Europe for three years. But she and her American friends have also had their moments of comic debacles that give them, if nothing else, cause to laugh. Valerie Schneider grew up in Houston and moved to Europe four years ago, just one week after she married an American who got transferred to Brussels.
Valerie Schneider, American expatriate in Belgium: We brought our car over; and we're trying to get our car out of customs but we didn't have any insurance, of course, because we had just got here. But I went to an insurance agent, and he wouldn't give me any insurance because my car hadn't cleared customs. And I was like, "Hello, they won't let me get my car out of customs because I don't have any insurance, and you [won't] give me insurance because I haven't cleared customs;" and so surely I was like I am not the first American off the boat!
Sprague: Far from it. Nearly one-third of the people living in and around Brussels are foreigners. The capital of the European Union is here, as well as the headquarters for NATO. But according to Robin Pascoe, Brussels can be a tougher city to live in than a place like Beijing. Pascoe: When you move to Europe, it's foreign, but it's not as foreign, so people tend to lead their own lives. The support groups and the natural support mechanisms that kick in in a hardship posting don't necessarily kick in in a posting that's Western, like a London or Brussels.
[Ambient sound of a crowd of people eating lunch.]
Sprague: But those support groups are there, if you've got a car and a free afternoon. The American Women's Club is located in a charming old house outside of Brussels. It's one of nearly 80 such groups worldwide, and it offers, among other attractions, friendship, Jazzersize classes, and lunch. The crowd is a mix of ages and situations; but mostly, the women here are like Joanne Cianfichi. They're married to American executives and they have kids at home. And thanks to subsidies from their husbands' employers, they're often able to afford a higher standard of living than many Europeans.
Joanne Cianfichi, American expatriate: You really do meet people very easily here, especially through the Club. Especially myself, I met a lot of people through the school that my children go to. I got active in the school and really found it easy to meet people.
Sprague: But that doesn't mean life abroad hasn't come with its share of challenges for Cianfichi as well, like the machine she uses to wash and dry her family's clothes.
Cianfichi: It's just smaller. It's just so small. You go to the States and you have these super huge loads that you can do in one load. Here, you're talking maybe two bath towels and some hand towels and that's about it that you can wash at one time; and it takes an hour and a half for the wash to go.
Sprague: So you just adjust. And sometimes, you begin to see the world through European-tinted glasses. Linda Preston's husband works at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels.
Linda Preston, American expatriate: But I do see the gas prices, and I see the amount of taxes they pay on their income, and it makes you very appreciative, and it gives you a lower tolerance level when you do get back to the United States for people to complain about every single thing. And I've often found myself getting on my little pulpit and preaching to people, "You should not complain about two dollar per gallon gas because you're not paying five dollars."
Sprague: In fact, Robin Pascoe says repatriation may be the hardest adjustment of all.
Pascoe: Because you are forever changed by your overseas experience. And when you come home, you find that you've changed so much and your general feeling is that nobody else has changed. Look at that, they've done nothing but renovate their kitchen.
Sprague: Valerie Schneider admits it's easy to fall back into old habits when she visits her mother in Houston. But when she moves back to Texas permanently, she expects to have a new perspective on life in the States.
Schneider: I have a little more, how should I say it, patience for people who might come over and not speak the language and need some help. And I think I'm a little more tolerant of people trying to preserve their culture when they come to the United States and be very aware of trying to keep their traditions alive of where they came from.
Sprague: Becoming more tolerant is what many of these women say is the great gift of living abroad. Granted, in Brussels, the culture divide isn't all that intimidating; but living there does provide a chance to learn what it means to be a foreigner, and for some, when they return, to be a more conscientious American. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
* * * * *Suzanne Sprague's reporting was made possible in part by a fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Photo: Brussels, Belgium/by Susan Han