3 mistakes I would've preferred to avoid as an expat

When my parents decided we were moving from Venezuela to Peru at the end of 2017, they were certain that continuing to live in a country experiencing hyperinflation was not on their agenda.

In January 2018, just two weeks before my birthday, our life was about to change, hopefully for the better. Or at least that was what we were thinking.

Peru was a reasonable bet. In the previous 25 years, it had become one of Latin America's most stable economies¹: disciplined monetary policy, strong commodity exports and $88 billion in international reserves. For someone leaving Venezuela, where the economy had contracted 35% in four years and annual inflation had crossed 800%, the contrast was stark. Lima felt like a different planet.

At that point, I had recently graduated from high school, still heartbroken about what was happening in my country and the impossibility of staying there. It was the first time I officially changed my residence permanently. Peru was a country I had visited many times before, but always just for holidays, specifically to stay in Huaral² and Chancay³, the towns where my parents were born and raised. This time our new home was in Lima⁴.

One of the first things I loved about being there was the freedom to just walk around new neighborhoods and streets. Surco⁵ was a vibrant and expanding area, and relatively safe at that time. That privilege had been far more restricted in Caracas, which then had the highest homicide rate in the world: 130 victims per 100,000 inhabitants⁶, compared with 0.91 in the EU. Stories of friends and acquaintances who had been victims of theft, violence and sometimes kidnapping were not unusual. Fear of being outside was common in my family. Reality was very different in Lima, and I really enjoyed it.

But I must admit that I made some mistakes that, in retrospect, I would've liked to avoid.

1. I assumed that speaking the same language meant sharing the same culture

We all speak Spanish, right? My intuition was partially correct: the language was the same, but culture, customs and social codes vary a lot across Latin America. I knew this rationally. What I really needed was a dose of experiential reality to internalize it.

I remember walking into a restaurant near our new home to order takeaway. In Venezuela, you greet the person behind the counter warmly, with a quick chat, like two old friends saying hello. In Lima, the person looked at me and said, “Hi, what's your order?”

That was it.

Peruvians are kind in their own way, especially within family circles. But compared with the average Venezuelan, who is genuinely an outlier in social warmth, that reserve is easy to misread as rudeness. My mistake was generalizing in those first weeks instead of trying to understand why things worked differently. After a few months, I gained enough perspective to do that. I really sympathize with fellow Venezuelans who never did, and I suspect a lot of the early friction between both communities came from exactly this kind of misunderstanding. Today, 1.6 million Venezuelans live in Peru⁷, one million of them in Lima alone. Learning to understand each other is still very much a work in progress⁸.

2. I was physically in Lima but mentally still in Caracas

As an expat, it is normal to carry a kind of mental baggage: memories, people, places and situations you left behind. This happened to me too, and it reinforced my first mistake. I was so convinced that what I had left was better that I isolated myself. I had no real drive to meet new people outside my family. Instead, I kept clinging to friends still living in Venezuela. I spent a lot of time calling, texting and trying to feel part of a life that was no longer mine.

Being physically somewhere new helps, but only if you have already accepted that your new life belongs to your new environment. I realized I was still mourning Caracas. I would've liked to be more open about that with my family, but I did the best I could with the tools I had at the time.

Eventually, things shifted. I met interesting people at work (I was the guy who called you every day to convince you to switch mobile providers, you're welcome) and through other activities such as church, drum lessons and French classes. Looking back, asking for help earlier and being more open about how I was feeling would have been the smarter move, for me and for the people around me.

3. I confused “safer than Caracas” with “safe”

Do you remember the beginning of the article, when I mentioned that the first thing I enjoyed in Lima was the freedom to walk around? This is going to sound ironic, and it still does to me, but the only time I have ever been robbed in my life was not in Caracas. It was on a bus in Lima, on my first day of work.

I had just found a job at a call center in Miraflores⁹, about 20 to 25 minutes from Surco, and I was determined to figure out the best bus route. I walked to the bus stop and waited while listening to music on my phone. On the bus, I was standing between two seated passengers. A few seconds after it started moving, the ticket collector came over and sharply touched my elbow to ask for payment in cash. At exactly that moment, his partner, one of the people sitting in front of me, used that split second of distraction to lift my phone from my pocket. I did not notice anything.

After paying, I reached into my pocket. I felt nothing. My brain immediately went into denial: maybe I had left it at home, maybe it had fallen somewhere, anything except the obvious. I got off at the next stop and ran home as fast as I could. When I walked through the door, my parents looked at me, puzzled. “What's wrong?” I replied, “My phone, where is my phone?”

It was gone. My mistake was simple: I had stopped paying attention precisely because I felt safe. Relative safety is not the same as no risk.

Looking back at all three, the pattern is the same. In each case, I was holding on too tightly to something: a past version of a culture, a past version of my life, a past version of what danger looked like. That attachment stopped me from seeing what was actually in front of me.

That is probably the most common expat mistake there is. And the hardest one to catch.

Have you ever moved somewhere new and realized, only later, that you had been seeing it through the wrong lens?

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Sources

1. World Bank, Data360: Peru · Economic and development indicators for Peru
2. Wikipedia: Huaral · Background on the city and province of Huaral
3. Wikipedia: Chancay · Background on the town and district of Chancay
4. Wikipedia: Lima · Background on Peru's capital
5. Wikipedia: Santiago de Surco · Background on the district of Santiago de Surco
6. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2017: Venezuela · Security and human rights conditions in Venezuela
7. UNHCR: Peru · Data on refugees and migrants in Peru
8. Psychology in Russia · Research on Venezuelan migration, integration and social cohesion in Peru
9. Wikipedia: Miraflores · Background on the district of Miraflores