The Global Staircase
The Soft Part Is the Hard Part of International Relocation
An Audio-publication by Mary MacKinnon
Expatriate Issues Network, 1998
mary.mackinnon@sympatico.ca
Once upon a time Mary MacKinnon took her extensive international experience as an overseas student and then a Canadian foreign service spouse and turned them into both a long-term commitment and a career. Describing her experience in the vocabulary of a fairy tale makes the process sound smooth and direct, but this passage involved rough roads, detours and dead ends before she reached her present destination.
In 1985 Mary MacKinnon chaired the first FSCA conference on the issues that are involved in rotationality, then she and two partners, also foreign service spouses, started a briefing company based in Ottawa. After they were spread to the four winds by the very rotationality that had provided their expertise, she found herself in Geneva. MacKinnon teamed up with a Swiss colleague to initiate yet another company, one that still exists. Then, in Vienna she took advantage, with another business partner, of an opportunity to establish the United Nations' international mobility programme and learning resource centre at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the first in the entire United Nations system.
Mary MacKinnon would be the very first person to tell you she was in the right place at the right time, eventually. She would also point out that an entrepreneurial attitude, the ability to see a challenge instead of a problem, and a degree of determination that might be termed stubbornness have also been absolutely essential to her growing success. Above all, she possesses the skill to see an opportunity where others might not, and to grasp it.
As she was finally leaving Vienna in the autumn of 1998, Mary MacKinnon was also completing preparation of an audio publication called The Global Staircase, subtitled The Soft Part is the Hard Part of International Relocation. It is designed to assist those who travel internationally, whether on a once-in-a-lifetime assignment, or as part of an internationally rotational career. The clearly written material is supported by graphics and cartoon-style illustrations, and an audio tape, all of them encased in a three ring binder. There is a lot to be said for the support that comes from knowing your experiences and your reactions to them are shared by others. Never patronizing, the material examines an international assignment on a continuous spiral that includes preparation for the assignment through to all the elements of re-entry. This publication highlights the issues that are inherent in every relocation, and some that happen less frequently. It is a reminder of the tasks that must be accomplished, the processes involved, and the relief of knowing that new beginnings needn't close the door on past experiences. An important element that is addressed is that, no matter how often we have relocated, or how successfully, each experience finds us at different life stages. This publication acknowledges all those realities, and is valuable to anyone who is even contemplating a posting. To those who are in the midst of the process, it can only provide support when all the others seem to have disappeared with the moving van.
Nancy Fraser