Growing up as a Dip Kid
KidBursary Winner: Tara Molloy
It would require volumes to summarize all the ways that being the daughter of a Foreign Service officer has formed my life experiences and influenced my personal development; I have only half a page. So I must be brief. Overwhelmingly, I feel incredibly lucky; but of course there have also been drawbacks. What life is not a mix of both positive and negative? Only in the details do we find differences.
The details of my life include an early childhood in Minneapolis then a few years in an Ottawa suburb, followed by a tough move to Geneva. I eventually settled in there, and remained while my parents were on posting to Amman and Damascus, rejoining them in Nairobi two years later. All this by the time I was thirteen.
My parents made sure that I felt loved and knew I was important to them, but the nature of their work also taught me how unimportant my little concerns and comforts were in the grand scheme of things. I like to think of it as a healthy dose of modesty. All that travel, experience and knowledge could lead a girl's ego to swell, it required some deflation occasionally.
Being a Foreign Service Brat left me with a near-Buddhist sensibility. Thanks to the moving, I learnt to embrace impermanence and practiced adaptability. I rejoiced daily in my interactions with other people, learning different languages, gaining insight into different realities. Although I knew I was from Canada, it was not from some specific place, just a general sense of what my passport declared. On the other hand, I recognized the entire globe as my home; each place full of equal promise and possibility, each people potentially my people.
Returning to Canada was the oddest posting ever. I was a "local" but had an outsider's perspective and manners. I learnt the realities of this nation's culture, contrasting it to what I had believed I would find here. It was a little disappointing; I thought this place would be full of fair, honest people with an innate sense of justice. But like everywhere else, I found both reassuring acceptance and frustrating close-mindedness. So, as I did everywhere else, I continued to seek out good and foster forward thinking wherever I find it. It was quite possibly the hardest move I ever made, but a dozen-odd years later, I'm still here. This is my home and I try I to bring to it all I have been able to learn thanks to my unique upbringing.
Tara Molloy