The Foreign Service Journal, December 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2012 101 REFLECTIONS Finding Home BY AMANDA GARDNER T he Albuquerque jail is as far west as you can go and still be in the city. Keep west on Interstate 40 and go further west on the front- age road, then south past the speedway. Go past the city dump and past the big, blue garbage trucks headed back to the city, until you round a corner and reach a large, low-slung granite structure. I had never been to a correctional facility before this visit in 2005. In fact, I had only lived in Albuquerque for a few months when I started volunteering at the jail as a creative writing teacher. It was another new city in a long line of new cities sprinkled over a lifetime. For, you see, I am what is known as a “Third Culture Kid.” My father, Paul Gardner, was a Foreign Service officer whose career led us to Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, Cambo- dia and Turkey, then back to Indonesia and to Papua New Guinea, his last post, where he was U.S. ambassador from 1984 to 1986. “A person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture” is how David C. Pollock defines a Third Culture Kid. Though TCKs can build relation- ships with all the cultures they encounter, Pollock notes: “The sense of belonging is most often in relationship to others of similar background.” Surprisingly, in my case “others of similar background” have turned out to be incarcerated women and homeless people. I first began teaching creative writing at a homeless shelter in Hoboken, N.J., in 1995 and continued there for nine years. Although I have never experienced the tragedy of actually being homeless, I felt immediately connected to the sense of dislocation these people wrote about so eloquently. Their words evoked my own childhood memories as a rootless global nomad. One of the most profound lines from the New Jersey workshop, by a man named Patryck Greene, read simply: “I move because not to move is to loiter, and that is a misdemeanor.” It reminded me of the unquestioning relocation that organizes Foreign Service life. My family never thought about “if” we would be moving, just “where.” And sometimes we wouldn’t even know “when.” Most of the 1,000 women I have met at the Albuquerque jail experience chronic homelessness. At a moment’s notice, they can be ordered to pack up their belong- ings and leave where they are—for home or prison or the streets. And life inside the jail is no less tran- sient than life on the streets. Women are routinely shifted from pod to pod (the large living spaces where they eat, sleep and pass time). As with many TCKs, “home” can be a complicated topic for these women. One, a young woman named Athena, expressed her ambivalence about leaving jail: “Going home…if I had the chance to get out and go home, will I or will I not? Everyone wants out of this place. Sometimes I want to stay, call me crazy if you like. I have my reasons though, cuz before I got here I didn’t have a home, so if I would get out right now I don’t know where I’d go!” For me, the designation of home, once complicated, has become simple. Walk- ing to and from the homeless shelter and driving to and from the jail, the familiar ritual of guards and gatekeepers, rein- forced doors and metal detectors—this takes me home every week. n I felt immediately connected to the sense of dislocation these people wrote about so eloquently. Amanda Gardner is the daughter of Paul Gardner, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands from 1984 to 1986, among many other assignments. A professional writer, she works for cnn.com as well as HealthDay, a wire service distributed by the New York Times Syndicate.