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Sandro Calvani |5 september 2013
In January 1985 ‘We are the world’, one of the century’s most famous song, made a strong global call for help and love for the hungry people in Northern Ethiopia during the worst famine in decades. At the same time, Dr Sandro Calvani was working in Makallè (Ethiopia) as a humanitarian relief coordinator for Caritas International. With children dying in his arms, he found that the lyrics of the song were dreams worth turning into reality.
He then dedicated his entire professional life to deepening the understanding of what ‘love the world’ actually means.
‘We are the world, we are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day. So lets’ start giving. There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives.’
‘Love the whole humankind like yourself and your family’ is a sublime message proposed by most religions, by great leaders, by inspired songs and poems. The process of transforming such a timeless dream into everyday reality is the amazing experience of most expatriates in all parts of the world. The art of loving other people more than your own people is the common character of extraverted expatriates.
Extraverted expatriatism is the whole complex system of ideas, lifestyles, experiences, values, aspirations, economic and social policies that are expressed – or at least are inspired – by people who live and work in countries other than the one in which they were born, who grew up and were educated in yet other countries. Expatriates do not move to another country for good, as migrants do. Instead they strive to live and work in as many countries as possible. Be they missionaries or corporates executives, university professors or United Nations officials, doctors without borders or globetrotter artists, modern extraverted expatriates are truly the most genuine expression of expatriatism when they know well and feel at ease with the culture and the life of at least a dozen countries where they have lived and worked.
Wall Street
Extraverted expatriatism is both an ideology and an idealism. The ideology of expatriatism proposes the belief that there is no credible reason to love your own people more than other people. The idealism of expatriatism is the hope and the vision of a truly peaceful humankind where all the human beings on Earth have equal rights and love and respect each other, irrespective of their nationality.
Everyday’s life experience – be in a remote African village or Wall Street in New York – gives evidence that, today, all the personal choices and situations on an individual or of a country affect other people in other countries without stopping at the nations’ borders.
Therefore, the distinction proposed by old-fashioned political science and practice between home affairs are de facto disappeared. All the most relevant issues which affects people’s quality of life and their pursuit of happiness in the modern economies and societies are already international. To characterize global interdependence as a ‘foreign’ matter is just a poor attempt to hide the evidence that all ‘homelands’ are already amalgamated in only one true homeland, which is our planet.
The world has become globalized faster than most people’s capacity to perceive and understand how many old borders have vanished. Many people are uneasy or afraid of exploring the thousands of connections that have transformed the old ‘us’ and ‘them’ into a unique togetherness of the human race. Since no country can hope to be wealthy, happy and safe alone, the dream of loving other peoples as much as their own – like any other of love among humans – has become a convenient must. Extraverted expatriated do not preach about elimination of fear and hatred among peoples: they just live togetherness as an everyday normality. Where they succeed to effectively teach love for all, they do it by examples.
Third Culture kids
A great majority of expatriates fall in love with and marry a person of another culture.
Children of expatriates couples are called third culture kids’ or 3CK. 3CK youth have spent a significant period of time in cultures other than theirs parents’ nationality and, often, they are unable to answer the question ‘where are you from ?’, a label that many 3CK consider obsolete. 3CK integrate into their personal culture elements of all the cultures where they have lived and therefore naturally feel able to love many different peoples whom they feel to be their own.
Extraverted expatriatism is the art of learning and live universal love. It is a form of love easy to learn. If you truly love your own family and your country, you can easily learn to love other people too. To love other peoples contributes effectively to your happiness and maximizes the joy you will experience in loving your own partner, your family, your country. Expatriatism is an expansion of patriotism, not its contrary. Radical and extremist patriotism cause conflicts. Extraverted expatriatism expands people-loving attitude beyond borders. When you love a person, you want his / her happiness and never forget about him / her. When you love everybody on Earth you become happy to forget about yourself.
The keys
- There is no credible reason to love your own people more that other peoples. The world has become globalized faster than people’s capacity to perceive it.
- Extraverted expatriatism is the art of learning and living universal love. It is easy to learn. If you truly love your own family and your country, you can easily learn to love other people too
- To love other peoples contributes effectively to your happiness and maximizes the jy you will experience in loving your own partner, your family, your country.
