EPISODE 21
February 23, 2022
Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Doreen Cumberford has been an expat for over 40 years. She has moved 37 times living in eight countries on four continents – plus the country moves she and her husband have made more recently as international housesitters! She worked for the British Foreign and Commonwealth office in London, and Cameroon, West Africa. This was followed by three years in Dubai, 10 years in the US, two years in Japan, and then Saudi Arabia, where she lived for 15 years as an accompanying spouse to her American husband and where they raised their daughter. Returning to the US in 2010, she repurposed her expat experiences and launched her career as a cross-cultural trainer, consultant, coach and writer. She is the author of Life in The Camel Lane, a motivational memoir: DoreenMCumberford.com
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:47] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 21 of Women Who Walk.
[00:00:52] Louise: My guest today is Doreen Cumberford. Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Doreen has been an expat for over 40 years. She has moved 37 times living in eight countries on four continents. Plus the country moves she and her husband have made more recently as international house sitters.
[00:01:15] Louise: She has a background in business administration, which she put into practice working for the British Foreign and Commonwealth office in London and Cameroon, West Africa. This was followed by three years in Dubai, 10 years in the US, two years in Japan, and then Saudi Arabia, where she lived for 15 years as an accompanying spouse to her American husband and where they raised their daughter.
[00:01:44] Louise: Returning to the US in 2010, she repurposed her expat experiences and launched her career as a cross-cultural trainer, consultant, coach and writer. She is the author of Life in The Camel Lane, a motivational memoir that includes stories of expatriate women Doreen met in Saudi Arabia. And her belief that living in Saudi, as the spouse of a Aramco employee, would be a relatively easy adjustment for her, and her family. After all, she had lived and worked in foreign countries for most of her working life, including her stint in Dubai.
[00:02:26] Louise: Doreen and I are both members of, and volunteers for FIGT.org or Families in Global Transition, a welcoming forum for globally mobile individuals and families. This year, we’ll both be presenting at the FIGT virtual conference in March. My presentation is titled, “Let’s Talk Expat Men.” And it draws on the stories that appear in my book, The Winding Road to Portugal: 20 Men From 11 Countries Share Their Stories, the sequel and companion read to Women Who Walk: How 20 Women From 16 Countries Came to Live in Portugal. Toward the end of my conversation with Doreen, I asked about her presentation, and her response was rather intriguing.
[00:03:30] Louise: Welcome Doreen. Now you’ve been housesitting in many countries and for many years. In fact, it was international housesitter Jody Burnham, my guest in Episode 7, who put you in touch with me, but I believe you’re now living in Mexico. Can you set the scene for us? Maybe give listeners a visual sense of where you are.
[00:03:52] Doreen: I am in the beautiful Highland city in Mexico called San Miguel de Allende. And San Miguel is about 6,700 feet high, similar to my other, um, hopping spot, which is Denver, Colorado. And, uh, it’s very sunny and it’s an ancient colonial city, which was founded in the 16 hundreds. So it’s a combination of, uh, 2022 and 1616.
Doreen in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she and her husband now live
[00:04:25] Louise: I actually have been there and it is a spectacular city. It’s a Spanish colonial city, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site too. You’re in a very popular spot because I think there’s also a big international community there isn’t there?
[00:04:43] Doreen: Yes there is. And that’s one of the things that really is a solace to us is going back to living internationally, rather than trying to fit ourselves as round pegs into a square hole and, and only interacting with one nation.
[00:04:59] Louise: I also heard you say that you’re in a Highland city, that’s a Scottish term. Now you’re originally from Scotland. Can you tell us a little about your early childhood, where you grew up and whether you had an inkling as a kid that one day you’d travel and live abroad.
[00:05:16] Doreen: I, I knew from the age of 6 that I would travel and live abroad. It was never in question, never any doubt. I grew up in a sort of a brownstone terrace house in Glasgow. And I had a sense that there was other things out there. And what led me to that was the fact that my mother took in Russian lodgers, who were KGB agents.
[00:05:46] Louise: Oh my goodness!
[00:05:47] Doreen: KGB sounds very dramatic, but anyone who worked and lived overseas for Russia at that time would have been KGB agents. They wore big, grey coats and furry hats. They spoke a different language and they wanted my mother to cook different food and they taught my dad to play chess. They taught me ballet and Russian composers from the age of 6 till the age of 10.
[00:06:16] Louise: So then it was because of their presence in your home and this additional cultural education that really broadened your horizons and opened the door to a different world?
[00:06:27] Doreen: Yes, it was. And the fact that my dad had emigrated from Scotland to America as a little boy in 1929. They arrived on the day of the crash. And he lived in the US for three years. So he was very sentimental about the US. He was almost more of an American in some respect, because he was very motivational. He was very aspirational. He was over the top positive. And I think that that combined with the Russians was the imprint in my very early subconscious mind.
[00:07:07] Louise: And then you ultimately did live in the US but prior to living there, you began working for the British Foreign Office in London. And then was it that posting that took you abroad to Cameroon in West Africa?
[00:07:24] Doreen: Yes. Yes.
[00:07:25] Louise: And then opened the door for you living abroad? Or was it something else?
[00:07:31] Doreen: I think that I was really programmed to be moving overseas and going overseas. And when you join the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that is the anticipation. There was sort of a waiting room to go overseas. Um, and they would cycle all of the diplomats and the diplomatic personnel through the offices in London. And at that time Beirut and Iran were the top postings, where everybody wanted to go. So when I was offered Cameroon, West Africa, not a high profile posting; there was no skiing in the morning and sailing in the afternoon – did not happen in Cameron. It was a posting that no one else wanted, but I was a French speaker and I jumped at the opportunity, rather than sit in that waiting room for another one or two years.
[00:08:27] Louise: Can you tell us what is the British Foreign Office?
[00:08:31] Doreen: It’s the equivalent of the state department. It’s just like the American state department and, uh, which houses all of the ambassadors and is in charge of running the embassies and basically oils the wheels of every international relationship that the US enters into.
[00:08:53] Louise: I see. Thanks. That’s clear. Um, then West Africa, that is followed by working for corporate America, followed by two years in Japan. Were you working for corporate America in Japan? And then where did you live in Japan and what was that cultural immersion experience like?
[00:09:15] Doreen: Well, we lived in a beautiful apartment. We were so lucky it was a penthouse apartment and it had cathedral shaped triangular windows that faced Mt Fuji. And it was called the Intelligent and Smiling House and it was a big, heavy block of apartments in the garden of a traditional Japanese house in Yokohama. And I was there as a trailing spouse or the accompanying wife at that point because my husband had been offered a position and was working on a project for Saudi Aramco, biggest oil company in the world. And this was prior to us going into Saudi. We knew we were going to Saudi eventually, and he was working for GGC, which is a Japanese project management company, in construction, and they were upgrading our refinery in Saudi Arabia, um, using the latest technology.
[00:10:22] Louise: So from West Africa to the US to Japan, to the Middle East, where you were for 15 years in Saudi Arabia. These are all extremely different cultures. The adjustments to the countries and cultures must have been enormous.
[00:10:36] Doreen: Yes, it was. And I love to speak and write and teach about that. I think that that is the best, um, education system for anyone is to learn the skill of adaptability and apply your aspirations in a new culture.
[00:10:59] Louise: A decade-and-a-half in Saudi Arabia, I know it resulted in you writing Life in The Camel Lane, but can you tell us, in what ways did it challenge and change you?
[00:11:11] Doreen: I usually talk about it in terms of the 15 years that we were there, I went as an accompanying spouse. I thought I was prepared because I’d lived in the Middle East a decade before, when I lived in Dubai, as a single woman. But Saudi is a very, very unique proposition in so many aspects. And so the first five years were really much more challenging than I could ever have anticipated. And it was hard and I didn’t really like it. But part of that was, I was a stay at home mom and I loved being a stay at home mom, but I didn’t feel like all of me was being expressed. I never felt um, professionally satisfied.
[00:11:56] Doreen: The second five years we were faced with 9/11, the beginning of the war in Iran. It was a very, very traumatic, difficult time in the Middle East for many people. And we were very, very close to Iran so we had F-16s flying over our house three to five times every single day, you know, putting on their afterburners. There were some humorous moments, but mostly it was a very challenging environment to live in. But I grew from that. I learned how to adapt to the trauma and it was wonderful fodder for the book.
[00:12:39] Doreen: And the last five years, I didn’t want to leave because I discovered the value of the lessons I had learned. It was like, whoa, we survived and we’re beginning to thrive. And sometimes it just takes some of us longer than others to get to that point.
[00:12:55] Louise: When you went to West Africa, and many contemporaries were choosing Beirut, that period of time was also very unsettled in Lebanon, so despite that you avoided Beirut you end up in a very unsettled period in the Middle East.
[00:13:17] Doreen: Yes. I was in Dubai when the people in the American embassy were captured. We were just a few miles away. We were literally across the straights, which are just 20 or 30 miles. But it still felt different and distant because in those days we did not have the internet. We did not have, um, access to instant information. And so I feel like I was very fortunate, but I was also very protected by the distance that none of us have the privilege of really enjoying.
[00:13:54] Louise: Would you explain that?
[00:13:55] Doreen: Without the internet and without instant news all over the world, it took time for those events to unfold. And even though we were geographically close, I was in Dubai when the embassy in Iran was invaded and those people were taken as hostages. So even though I was physically close, there was a vast distance and the distance in the old days, I think was a beautiful, protective factor that we no longer have the privilege of enjoying because everything can be seen, heard and experienced in the present moment. And I don’t really believe as humans that we were built to withstand that stimulation.
[00:14:51] Louise: You mentioned that somehow you managed to learn how to, um, adapt to the trauma of living with the conflict. Now, these days we talk a lot about post-traumatic stress syndrome, which is I suppose, a way that we adapt to trauma, how did you adapt?
[00:15:14] Doreen: Well, number one, I feel like time is a healing agent. Um, if we’re experiencing some sort of trauma, it’s important to acknowledge it, recognize it, work with it. And I believe there were years in Saudi Arabia where we were processing trauma, but we processed trauma as a corporation. In a sense, we ignored it as a corporation, but it was always in the background.
[00:15:49] Doreen: Um, there were people in Aramco, in Dhahran who would talk about ad infinitum, all of their stories from the first Gulf war when there were scuds and bombs flying over the compound. And when there was real aggression and they would go on about, oh, this is where you hide, and this is what you need to put away. And so they were prepping us who were relatively new to the place on how to behave during trauma and, you know, I think that we used our sense of humor. We used our, uh, experience that others had thrived and survived through this. We watched, we listened, we did everything in our power to make the best of every single day.
[00:16:48] Doreen: And that was the way my daughter was raised in Saudi Arabia because the day she went to school after 9/11 there was security officials and, um, some of the guards outside the school. And one of the elder guards, his name is Akhmed, went to one of the teachers, cause the teachers and the principal always met the school buses, but that day there were more teachers out there and they were meeting the children off the school buses, and Akhmed came over to one of my friends and colleagues, and said, I am so sorry. I, because at that point there was aspersions that maybe it had something to do with Saudi. And we all thought, oh, what do we do? Do we send our kids to school? Do we leave them at home? Are they safe? And safety was at the top of our minds. And he said, I have to tell you that your children are my children, that I believe your God is God. I am here to be here for your children. Now, those kinds of healing messages you just really grabbed onto those experiences, Louise, and you worked with them and listened to them. And that’s how we managed our trauma.
[00:18:08] Doreen: Hmm. That’s rather lovely. That’s one of those cross-cultural experiences that suggests that, um, we’re all connected.
[00:18:17] Doreen: Exactly.
[00:18:18] Louise: On your website you say that Life in The Camel Lane is a motivational memoir. Is that because of some of these experiences you’ve just been talking about?
[00:18:29] Doreen: Absolutely. I think that I write ‘how to’ books based on memoir. It’s motivational memoir. It’s how to live through this experience; it’s how to live in the in-between. We are always living in between something and we’re always in transition. If we’re alive, we are in transition between birth and death. And therefore it’s learning to manage that invisible transitional space.
[00:18:54] Doreen: I am not sure that Life in The Camel Lane is well positioned in terms of being a lesson delivering system, but that is essentially what it is. And many people have advised me to rewrite it and make it clear that this is really a ‘how to book’. But I like the stories and I believe that we heal from stories. I believe we learn from stories. We listen to them, we make them up, we repeat them and it’s how we make sense of our world. So I didn’t want to give up all of the memoirs and all of the stories of the 60 women that I had interviewed.
Doreen’s inspirational memoir, Life in The Camel Lane
[00:19:31] Louise: Were they all expatriate women living in Saudi Arabia?
[00:19:35] Doreen: Mostly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:37] Louise: From Saudi Arabia, you take on a very different, uh, lifestyle. You begin to housesit and it’s, it’s very nomadic housesitting. So what was it about this peripatetic existence that appealed to you and your husband? Cause you did this together.
[00:19:54] Doreen: This is really a repatriation story. We moved from Saudi Arabia to the United States. We moved from the desert to the vast green trees of the Pacific Northwest. We moved from 119 degree heat to 28 or something. We moved from sunshine to snow. But we also moved to a community that really, I felt, sometimes, did not approve of us having worked for the oil industry, because it was, um, such a beautiful natural community, and there was a lot of activism. And we ultimately left.
[00:20:43] Doreen: My husband, went back to do some consulting work and we moved to Houston. And then we moved to Denver, which is when we found house and pet-sitting. Now we would never have left the Pacific Northwest had we found pet-sitting first. We would have lived there when the weather was prettier in the summer and we would have pet-sat throughout the winter. But that’s not, was not on the cards for us.
Doreen in Denver CO where she and her husband have a home base
[00:21:09] Doreen: We were still keen on traveling so when he retired, we were using pet sitters to come to our house and take care of our dog. We had this great dog Kumi. She was born in Bahrain. She grew up in Saudi Arabia and we brought her all the way back to America. Kumi was our pride and joy and we needed to take care of her, so we had pet sitters in. We were still going back and forth to Scotland a lot because my family is still in Scotland and my dad was alive at that time. And I needed to spend more time in Scotland so we were looking for a way that we could be gone, but have Kumi cared for.
[00:21:48] Doreen: We discovered Trusted Housesitters, and we had about three or four couples come. One couple had previously been diplomats for the Australian and New Zealand embassies. We had a lot in common, we knew the global lifestyle. And they came and they come every summer to Colorado and they spend six months in the US and six months in New Zealand. And one day I said, do you think we could do this?
[00:22:16] Doreen: We set out on our first one, and I would say about 16 out of the 20 housesits we did were all international and we really loved it. We’re on a housesit, a pet-sit right now for a friend in San Miguel. We’re taking care of a little dog. Our connection to ex-pats is so deep and we have such an understanding for what they need and why they need this that we’re just a really natural fit for it.
[00:22:44] Louise: You bought a home in San Miguel, and it looks like you might be settling there. Are you still going to be housesitting?
[00:22:52] Doreen: Yes, why not? We’re simply moving our base from Colorado. Colorado it’s snowy in the winter and it’s become very smoky in the summer because of the wildfires, so we’re simply moving our base from Colorado to here, but yes, we will be pet-sitting. We might not be pet-sitting so often in San Miguel, but we will continue the pet-sitting journey as long as there is a purpose in it, because we feel like this is a very purposeful existence and there’s a couple new books in the making: one is one that I’m working on, on repatriation, and the next one will be, Life in The Pet- Sitting Lane.
[00:23:35] Louise: That’s a great title, not the Camel Lane, but the Pet-Sitting Lane.
[00:23:40] Doreen: And then there’s always the one on Life in The Expat Lane, which has yet to be written.
[00:23:45] Louise: Yes. Actually that reminds me, I think it’s a free ebook on your website, Arriving Well: Stories About Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering Home After Living Abroad. That’s about repatriation isn’t it.
[00:24:00] Doreen: Yes, it is.
[00:24:03] Louise: It’s a great topic. It’s a topic that I often think about because I’ve lived abroad now for 35 years. I’m a little afraid of the idea of repatriating. Do you have any quick tips to give anybody considering repatriating to their country?
[00:24:18] Doreen: Repatriation takes some people from five minutes to 10 years. It is your unique journey. You get to make it up. And if you can wrap your arms around the fact that it is a project for your subconscious mind, as well as your conscious mind to take on and you work at it like a boss. And you really, really apply yourself. You will have a much, much better experience.
[00:24:45] Louise: Some people have said to me, given that I’ve been out of my country 35 years, that if I return to Australia, I’m basically moving to a culture that I don’t fully understand anymore. That I’d have to integrate in the way that I do in any country that I move to.
[00:25:02] Doreen: Exactly. It’s not home anymore. And so much will have changed. As much as I love to spend time in the UK, which is home, and everything feels like wallowing in maple syrup, it’s sweet and it’s easy. Feels very smooth to me mentally, emotionally, physically. Um, I would never choose to go back there mostly for weather reasons, but also the culture there is changing. Like in the US, vast cultural divides. And so we try to run our lives based on values. I think it’s really important to examine your values and the values of the country that you are going to, because you’re going to find that it’s not going to be like home. It is just a whole new place and you cannot make assumptions. And we all do make assumptions.
[00:26:00] Louise: Absolutely we do. And before we started, we were actually talking about country moves and I think you said something along the lines of trusting, trusting what opens up to you or where you’re drawn? What do you mean by that?
[00:26:16] Doreen: I’ve been part of the trust economy and I’ve worked with Trusted Housesitters for six years. But I think that we’ve always just trusted that whatever was ahead of us, no matter how stormy or how difficult or challenging it was that we would somehow be creative enough to find a way to thrive.
[00:26:35] Louise: Well, as we finish up by, oh, I had one more thing I wanted to, uh, talk about. I mentioned in the introduction that, that you and I are both presenting at Families in Global Transitions virtual conference, which is March 24th through the 27th and in the intro, I said a few words about my presentation. What about you, Doreen? What’s your presentation about?
[00:27:00] Doreen: I proposed a couple of things. And then the one they chose was, um, say it in five minutes, talk about the art and craft of improvisation, how to apply it to your globally mobile lifestyle to produce ease and grace. It’s basically, wherever you take your life, whatever you do with your life, whatever choices you make, we are making it up all the time. We’re just making it up. And so it’s important to continue to I live in the moment and to listen really well and to use some of the techniques of improv.
[00:27:37] Louise: Terrific. A great answer about your Say it in 5 presentation. If listeners are interested to know more about the conference, you can find details at FIGT.org and you can attend because it is a virtual conference, it’s not as though you have to travel.
[00:27:56] Louise: As we finish up Doreen, if listeners are interested in connecting with you and finding more about your writing and your travels and Life in The Camel Lane, where can they find you?
[00:28:08] Doreen: My website is Doreen M Cumberford, that’s Cumberford.com. Or you could jump onto Facebook and join Life in The Travel Lane. And that’s a new Facebook community that we’re building for people who are interested in purposeful travel and how travel can brighten and expand and enrich your life.
[00:28:37] Doreen: Fantastic. So I will include all of that in the transcript of this episode, on my website and, uh, listeners can pop on there and find those links. I’ll link to the Facebook page and your website. So, thank you so much for your time today. I feel that we’ve really whizzed through your country moves, but we had to condense an enormous amount of experience and travel into 25 – 30 minutes and hopefully we did that successfully. Thank you so much Doreen.
[00:29:11] Doreen: Thank you Louise. Thanks for having me on. It was fun to walk down memory lane.
[00:29:16] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple or Podchaser, I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.