Reviews: Welcome Home: Who Are You?

Welcome Home, Who Are You?

by Kathryn and Gene Schmiel

Reviewed by Melanie Newhouse

When I first read the title, I was intrigued by Kathryn and Gene Schmiel's "Welcome Home: Who Are You?" Clearly, there was something contradictory, quizzical and thought-provoking to it. The Schmiel family spent twenty-four years in the Foreign Service travelling to such diverse and exotic locales as Sweden, Djibouti, Kenya, South Africa, Iceland, and Foggy Bottom, USA. As a fairly recent entrant into the Foreign Service lifestyle I crave any information about what might await me and my family, particularly if it is particularly insightful. I virtually devoured the book. Unfortunately, the slim collection of twenty-five sketches of life overseas failed to fully live up to my (certainly high) expectations. To stretch the culinary metaphor a little further, it left me hungry.

The book is divided into three sections, reflecting on culture, work, and domestic experiences, respectively. Each piece consists of a snapshot of some experience with the foreign, ranging from the gesture of receiving a generous gift of shells on the beach in Kenya, to dealing with a foulmouthed indigent prisoner in Stockholm, to coaching an international soccer league in Djibouti. There is a little of everything, and a lot of the warm personality of the authors woven throughout.

For those completely naïve of Foreign Service life and work, the book may offer a few insights. Our non-embassy friends are still surprised to find out my husband has to deal with criminals and corpses. I am sure they would find the Schmiels' story of the dead captain quite amusing. Having lived overseas a bit, though, I have experienced first hand the foibles of a new language not quite under my control. And after having listened to a year of my husband's consular tales, I found the book's surprises not too surprising, the unexpected not too unexpected and some of the foci not overly compelling.

For the most part, the events described are quite interesting, but they tend to be highlighted with little contextualization: there is a lot of recounting, less reflection and synthesis. The final piece in the collection, for which the book is named, is an exception. It explores the fact that those of us who choose to wander the world are different somehow from those we leave behind. On return, we are unfamiliar, and perhaps different for having been out of the United States so long. I find this idea interesting. We are what we do—so spending time in a completely different social context can't help but change us. Perhaps I found the stories unsatisfying because they failed to stick to this theme. These vignettes largely take the people as given, the culture as given, and try to explain the charm of the unfamiliarity between the two. I wanted more of a chronicle of how the members of the family evolved with the living and working abroad. Perhaps the Schmiels' next book can take on that more ambitious task.

Melanie Newhouse is a Foreign Service spouse and mother in Madrid, Spain. She has a master's degree in political science from UCLA.

Aletheia Publications

CLICK HERE TO ORDER Welcome Home, Who Are You? Purchases you make carry no surcharge from Amazon.com and help support Tales from a Small Planet !