When people learn that I lived my entire life in the Third World until coming to Princeton four years ago, I am met with looks of amazement and disbelief.
How do I know the "Full House" theme song, they ask? Any kid that actually grew up overseas couldn't possibly remember horribly injuring himself with a snap bracelet and couldn't possibly be able to recall specific "Fraggle Rock" episodes.
It's true folks, the guy who can recite all of the lyrics to the first Kriss Kross album grew up in Bangladesh, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt, naturally followed by Princeton, New Jersey.
A learning experience it was indeed, and I would like to share my observations about the main differences between living in America and living in what most Americans think of as Elsewhere.
There are things about living in America that are better. You have no idea how amazing fast food is until you are deprived of it for a large portion of your life.
I vividly remember a classmate of mine bringing a Big Mac from the States to Kenya by plane (a trip which takes many, many hours), and that same classmate making excellent money by selling slices of the Big Mac to us that were hardly bigger than the bacteria which had been growing on them since somewhere over the Atlantic.
Whenever I visited America, I had my route off of the plane planned out: first hit the bathroom to deal with my little airsickness problem, then hit the airport McDonalds (sometimes followed up quickly by another trip to the bathroom).
Another great thing about America is that there are television shows, and those shows are on at normal times of the day. For a vast majority of my life, there were no television signals to be received, forcing me to watch, time and again, the same tapes of Saturday morning television and awful sitcoms that my aunt would send to us. It got to the point where I could literally move my mouth along with Uncle Jesse for an entire episode and we would be in perfect synchrony.
When, in Egypt, we finally got satellite television and picked up some American television, the time difference of seven hours quickly became an issue. Let's just say that Super Bowl Sunday has a nicer ring than Super Bowl Monday Morning.
Of course, there are things about living overseas that I would not trade for anything. My first driving lesson involved running over a warthog's head in a game park. My high school graduation was at the Pyramids. Instead of a mole in our yard in middle school, we had a monkey which would not leave one of our trees. I had my first kiss in a tent on Mount Kenya, and had a baseball tournament cut short by a sandstorm.
Another great thing about living in the Third World is that one does not, except for the rare exception, meet hippies, who tend to irritate me immensely. I never had to worry about running into teenagers who claim that democracy is dead or that President Bush is a dictator, because in countries where democracy is dead and where there is an actual dictator, people understand what that means.
You will never run into someone in Bangladesh who will turn down meat on moral grounds. There's also, interestingly enough, not a whole lot of lactose intolerant Bangladeshis.
The other amazing thing about living overseas is that there tends to be no such thing as just and uncorrupt law enforcement. The benefits of this are amazing, as the stories one collects are truly fantastic. In high school, my friend traded a police chief Viagra pills for his driver's license. I think in America the penalties for that would be — umm — "stiff."
In Kenya it was a frequent occurrence for the police themselves to hijack cars. One Kenyan knew his car would be stolen and put a bottle of alcohol laced with rat poison in the backseat for his lucky thieves to enjoy. It worked.
Moral of the story: Appreciate America, but also get out of it once in a while. Don't forget the Big Mac. Cullen Newton is a politics major from Washington, D.C. He can be reached at cnewton@princeton.edu. His column appears alternate Fridays.
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