This isn’t meant as a political blog so I’m not going to get into the politics of it too much, but I figured I’d provide our experience from afar. Like everyone else, we expected that Clinton was going to win, so when things started to turn on election day it was a shock for us too. The difference was that it was clear that Trump was probably going to win by early evening here so we had all night to think and read about it.
We shared in the shock and disbelief that a lot of people experienced. The connectedness of the modern world mean that it was easy to read about and hear from friends (ex via Facebook) about what was happening. Like a lot of people we had a sense of helplessness, which was exacerbated by living so far away. He is extremely unpopular here, and being an American, it can be hard to escape having to talk about him. Now that we have a week of Trump’s presidency behind us I think we still share in the disbelief and disgust at what is happening, if anything, even more so. There is still a little sense of helplessness – we can’t go to marches or anything like that, but we can still make our voices heard by writing to our representatives and we can still vote when the time comes.
On top of the sense of despair, sadness, disgust and anger at what is happening though, I’d also say I have a bit of survivors guilt. We know that no matter how bad things get in the US, we can still provide a good future for Hopscotch here. We had no idea anything like this could happened when we started the application process, and we have no idea what the situation will look like in 4 or 8 or 12 years, but for now we feel grateful to have the options that we have.
To that end, we’ve been getting out and taking good advantage of the Wellington summer even though the e=weather hasn’t always coooperated. It’s a fun city and it seems like there’s always something on. Last weekend we went to the Birdman festival where people dress in costumes and jump into the harbour. Today we went down to the night market for the Chinese New Year, and next weekend is a holiday weekend so we’re hoping to get out and go camping.
Kiwi Bound 