RAS TANURA
I grew up in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s and 90s. The compound was its own particular little world: American school system, swimming pools on the edge of the Arabian Gulf, kids from all over the world in the same classrooms and scout troops, an artificial little microcosm with a much larger world just beyond the gates. I went back and forth between RT, the United States and elsewhere often, and learned fairly early that what felt or appeared normal depended enormously on where I was standing at the time.
There wasn’t much language around “Third Culture Kids” then, a term introduced by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1970s. I was, nonetheless, growing up a TCK. I traveled, listened, asked questions, and learned early in life that a sense of belonging could be real without being particularly simple.
What felt ordinary in one part of my life could be wildly unfamiliar in another.
International Relations
+ Cultural Anthropology
Given this upbringing, it was probably inevitable that I would eventually study International Relations and Cultural Anthropology. The study gave me histories, theories, methods and language for examining more formally what I had already encountered through life experience.
Travel remained part of that education too. By my mid-twenties, I had traveled the globe extensively. I became a centurion traveler by the age of 26 and continued to move through places that challenged easy explanations of what was normal, familiar, or universal.
And at the center of it all,
I became a Mother.
Loving him, raising him, and learning beside him changed everything I thought I knew about the world—and my place in it.
There are parts of a life that belong on a résumé and parts that don’t. Mine has included work and long periods when work was not the point; things I have started and things I have left; places I have loved and places I have never quite managed to call home; extraordinary people, ordinary days, mistakes, curiosity, and more new beginnings than I expected.
I still ask many of the same questions.