2014 FIGT Annual Conference Speaker, Ray Leki, was gracious enough to respond to a few questions for FIGT social media. Mr. Leki is the Director of the Transition Center, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State. His keynote address will be occurring on Friday, March 21st at 6:30pm. Tickets for his talk are being sold separately. In order to register, please visit: http://www.figt.org/2014_conference .
1. What is your expat story?
My parents were immigrants from post-WWII Europe. I grew up within ethnic enclaves in Chicago and had the luxury of lots of cross contact across ethnic groups because of playing soccer in a league that featured teams with bizarrely pure ethnic identities and socializing in clubs that supported those teams: Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Italians, plenty of Germans and Poles and teams from many of the states of Mexico, among lots of others.
2. What made you choose safety/security as the topic for your book?
I had worked on the idea of a book on personal travel security in an international age for some time, but it wasn’t until a publisher came to me to ask for a book on that topic that I forced myself to give birth to the book. As someone intimately involved in the expatriation experiences of huge numbers of people, the book (Travel Wise: How to Be Safe, Savvy and Secure Abroad) provided an opportunity to share what I had learned from their experiences as well as my own.
3. What sparked your interest in resilience?
International lifestyles can be grueling, particularly when the foreign destinations include war zones, areas of civil unrest, conflict, high crime, and natural disasters. Some expats thrive and some grind through losing their enthusiasm, empathy, and ability to enjoy their travels. The idea of understanding an international lifestyle from a resilience framework had obvious applications for the client groups I deal with. How can we inculcate resilience in ourselves and others became a key question that remains the focus of much work, both on the research side as well as in applications to the working world.
4. What are 5 tips for expat success that you could share?
1. Develop and nurture your natural sense of human empathy.
2. When you lose your curiosity, your being is telling you it is time to slow down and recharge your resilience batteries.
3. Drink (alcohol) less and reflect more on you and your experiences in country.
4. Stay out of expat enclaves – nurture a strong bias towards intercultural interactions
5. Read Travel Wise
5. What changes have you seen over the course of your career in the Global family?
The last 35 years represent a huge transition in the expat business. Family structure itself has changed, the emergence of the BRICs, telecommunications – am I the last person who remembers the once ubiquitous aerogram? – the globalization of information, all of these things have had an enormous impact on families involved in international lifestyles.
Contributed by Mary Margaret Herman , a dual-citizen with an Irish and U.S. passport who has taught in France and works in the post-graduate education sector. She is currently serving on the board of directors for Families in Global Transition.