[Borrowing from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43 "How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways…"]

I have always been proud and happy that I had the fortune to be born in the United States of America.

We, as a family, lived overseas in two different third-world countries. Both countries have regressed to being more socialistic and under the thumbs of more dictatorial regimes in subsequent years, so we were happy to be there when we were.

It was a time of calm and "stability" in the countries in the 1980s. But that stability came at the cost of freedom for the residents. They were allowed to go limitedly about their business, and poverty was extreme, with the rich being in control. And really no way for the poor to better themselves, unlike America, which offers the right to work and gain property and wealth, no matter your birth circumstances.

In order for anyone to move around the country, the people had to carry "papers." We, too, usually had our passports with us. We had to get permission to leave the country, whether to leave the country for medical reasons, or to travel on vacation either for recreation or back home to the U.S. for a time in the summers.

One time, we were going to travel to Germany for Christmas

Our company always had to make sure that our passports were stamped with the correct visa for our travels.

We, husband, two daughters and I, arrived at the airport. Someone from the company met us with our passports, in which they supposedly had gotten the departure visas. However, only my husband's had the correct stamp to depart. This is a long-booked flight and paid for. But three of us cannot travel.

Fortunately, when we went to the airline desk, they managed to find seats for all four of us on the flight the next day and the "someone" from the company went into high gear to get us the departure stamps for the next day. So, it worked out well, but if we had not had the backing of the company and had been an individual or family on a trip, the results could have been quite different.

As an American, you do need your passport to enter most foreign countries, but you have never needed to have a visa to depart from the U.S. Although I note, during the current pandemic, people are sometimes being turned away at state or municipal borders for health reasons.

We used to receive the International Herald Tribune delivered to the company office. Often some article on the front page was totally blacked out, because censors did not agree with it.

I clearly remember the very first time we came back to the U.S. and I saw the U.S. flag flying over the airport. I cried I was so happy and proud of our flag and my country.

I am always proud of our flag and our Constitution.

In the second country we lived in, we shopped on the economy, as the company my husband worked for was small. I had to quickly learn the vocabulary for items I needed and wanted. The tiny stores down the road from our local apartment, had owners who spoke a minimum of English, but you have to realize these are not our supermarkets where you take a basket and pick out what you want. These are very small stores, with a basement full of goods. You tell them you want a large can of tomatoes, a kilo of flour, half a kilo of sugar, etc. The owner, or one of his sons, disappears into the basement and comes back with what you want.

And with small kids, we needed peanut butter. None available in the entire large city, so I bought peanuts and crushed them in the mixer. Yummy, but at first the kids stuck up their noses, but they got to where they liked it.

And water! We turn on the faucet and fresh potable water comes out of the taps in all but a few places in the United States. The water that came out of our foreign taps was not only NOT potable, but during more than one year of our stay in the second country, it was rationed to 1 hour in the morning and 1 ½ hours in the evening. We were lucky that the apartment house we lived in had a tank in the basement that could save the water and meter it out to us. We were the only non-native folks living in the building.

To wash clothes, I learned how to wash three loads on one load of water. We did have a washing machine, which was a luxury in that country. I would load the whites first, then when it got to first spin, I would dump the dripping wet clothes into the, fortunately, nearby bathtub, put in a load of the colored clothes that weren't quite as dirty, start the wash and rinse over again, dump then into the other end of the bathtub, then wash the really dark and really dirty clothes. They would get to spin out, and be hung up to dry, all over the house, followed by each batch of clothes.

The air in the winter was so full of coal smoke in the winter that we couldn't do much of anything outside. 

One eye-opening story that brought home to most of us expats how different things are in foreign countries.

A Canadian family had a teenage son. Because of where we lived, we had nothing beyond 8th grade, so the son attended a boarding school in Singapore.

He was caught smoking a marijuana cigarette in Singapore. His penalty was whipping with a lash to his bare back. Not only that, but his father lost his job, the family lost their visas to remain in country and had their passports permanently rescinded, so once they were accompanied back to Canada, they would never be allowed to leave the country again to enter another foreign country.

Just to remind you, we were among the privileged in the countries we lived in. We supported the local economies with our spending, so they appreciated us, and we were treated well, but we did have to follow THEIR rules and live on THEIR economies.

Maybe the troublemakers in our society at the moment need to be required to LIVE on the economy in a third-world country under the rules of that country for at least six months, not just a quick visit. Maybe that will open their eyes to how privileged they truly are to live and be a resident in a free country, where they are allowed to protest what they don't agree with, where they are allowed to go from state to state without carrying "papers," where they can go into a supermarket and buy almost anything from anywhere in the world, where they can read the paper or watch TV without censorship, and so many other rights and privileges we take for granted.

Believe me, that's why so many people in other countries are clamoring to get to the U.S., where they, too, will be free.

I can think of so many other stories to show how privileged we ALL are in the U.S., but these show you a small part of what we experienced, and which has made our love of OUR country, the United States of America, so profound and deep.

—Mary Alice Murphy