Fear and Foreigners

In a month and a half I’ll leave my friends and family, quit my job and move halfway across the word to Jerusalem for a year.

What scares me the most isn’t missing my friends, money or the language barrier (I already know some Hebrew), but the fact that I’ll be a foreigner, an outsider.

I’m 21 now and in that time I’ve lived in two cities crowded with foreigners. I grew up in Oxford, which was full of tourists who’d always stick out because they were the only ones staring at gargoyles that dangled off of buildings that looked liked castles.

No matter where they were from, or what they looked like, we always called them one thing, wankers.

Spending the rest of my childhood in Bloomington, I consider anybody who hasn’t lived here for more than five or six years to be a foreigner.

Most students come here for four or five years and create a connection to Bloomington filtered heavily through Indiana University. There is nothing wrong with this; it just doesn’t mean you’re from here. For you, Bloomington is just a temporary home.

I came to America when I was ten during the worst possible time, midway through fifth grade. This was when young, patriotic hoosiers were learning how the British had tried to deprive them of their liberty, freedom and tea or something.

As a British person, I thought that the issue of the Revolutionary War was a little more complex, but as an anxious 11-year-old I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I was British.

When learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights, I became confused as to why this ever had to happen. I had thought Americans achieved freedom and liberty by defeating the British; I must have missed the clause that excluded blacks, women, Native Americans and permitted slavery.

I also failed several math tests, a tract that has persisted through my academic career, because I was never taught the imperial measurement system. Clearly the British school system had failed me miserably and now I’ll never become a rocket scientist or the Green Lantern.

Soon my Hoosier identity, the fact that I’m a townie, will not be able to stop me from transgressing into the one thing I’ve consciously grown out of being, an annoying foreigner/wanker. I know that no matter how well I situate myself there, in Jerusalem, I’ll be going back to Bloomington in a year unless I choose otherwise.

I’ve been to Jerusalem before and I’m mainly going back because I want to live there for an extended period of time. I’m fairly impulsive, therefore I might just stay and decide that I’d like to be an Israeli.

Until then, I plan to travel across the Midwest as much as possible to visit friends and do various crazy stuff, like four person bike/camping trips to Bonaroo Music Festival, because let’s face it, gas is very expensive.


­— mokerler@indiana.edu