Compartmentalisation

Living in a global world, with a global network of friends, comes with its challenges. While teens today apparently suffer from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) if they are offline for too long, I find myself compartmentalising my life and deliberately tuning out.

In the village I can sometimes access facebook on my phone and have found that their messenger programme is one of my more reliable forms of communication. In theory this means I could be chatting away with anywhere, yet that is not what I do. I find that I message with the people who know the context I am in, my fellow workers in Gulf Province. It does not matter if these friends are in their Gulf locations, or home in the UK and NZ, they understand where I am, so are the people that I contact. When dealing with all the cultural stresses surround me, cutting down my communication to ‘those who get it’ makes a big difference.

  The view from where I sit to check facebook 

in the late afternoon. (H.Schulz)

I still scan facebook regularly and am touched by outward events, but I rarely ‘like’ or comment. Part of this is the frustratingly limited internet, where even achieving a ‘like’ is a minor miracle. Most of it is that looking at the outside world, but not joining in with it, is a balance that I can maintain. Similarly, I read my emails (when they can be convinced to download), but leave the bulk of them for when I am out of the village, where I have better internet and clearer head space.

When I am in Australia, I find myself doing the reverse. I am happy to talk about life in PNG for so long and to share my pictures, but then I reach a limit where I prefer to focus on where I am and who I am with. The gap between my worlds is so big that I can only bridge it for a limited length of time before I need to be in just one place. I suspect the same is true in reverse, that my friends can only engage with my strange life for so long before they too need to return to familiar conversational territory.

Compentmartalising life works well for me… most of the time. These boundaries all fell apart when the YWAM medical ship came to visit the area near my village. I am thankful for their visits and the work they do, but I also struggle with cultural clash of life aboard and day trips to villages. The ship is comfortable, air conditioned, has fresh veggies, cheese, lots of people from a similar cultural and linguistic background to me…it is basically a floating outpost of Australian life and culture, which can be a lot of fun. By day though, people visit villages, to a life I am familiar with and usually live in full time, but we only stay for a few hours before returning to the floating hotel. This coming and going so swiftly between worlds was a challenge and I was tired most of the time.

 Two worlds, watching each other, and I belong in both.
(photo: ywamships.org.au)

As I prepare to return to Australia for four months of furlough, I find myself wondering about what this compartmentalisation will mean once I am home. I will need to find good ways to share my story with those who are interested, but still to engage with the life and culture in Australia that is becoming increasingly foreign to me. Compartmentalisation is a survival skill for me, so we will see what it means in a different context.

PS I realise that I just admitted to being contactable in the village, but I also admitted to mostly choosing to limit that contact to a small network. Do not be surprised if you message me when I’m in the village and I don’t write back!