How do you feel about U.S. policies after living abroad? Disappointed.

Moving Abroad: It can change your view of your own country’s policies. The Frau speaks from experience. When she lived in Switzerland and experienced Swiss policies personally, she was constantly contemplating and comparing them with her homeland’s. Her overall conclusion? The U.S. has a lot of catching up to do in its compassion for its people.

Lady Liberty…as seen from a road in France.

Take paid leave. The Frau never considered how important it was until she had her daughter. Sitting on the couch in her Swiss apartment seven weeks after giving birth, tears flowed constantly. She was sometimes still in pain and was also having problems feeding her daughter, who, at six pounds, still couldn’t seem to gain weight. The Frau couldn’t imagine going back to work at that point. And with Switzerland’s 16-week maternity leave (14 weeks of it were paid), she didn’t have to. In fact, by law, she couldn’t. Forever grateful for giving birth abroad, it made The Frau wonder why the U.S. is still questioning paid family and medical leave. And it also made her feel that her own country, as the only high-income country in the world not to grant paid family and medical leave to its citizens, was grossly behind in its compassion for its people. She was glad (but also, in a way, very sad) that another country treated her better as a new parent than her own would have.

Then there was healthcare. In Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory, offered by privately owned companies, and never tied to employment. The fact that health insurance is independent of work means that when someone in Switzerland loses their job, decides to try being a freelancer, decides to stay home with their children, or heck, decides travel the world for half a year, they have the ability to do so without worrying about a loss of healthcare coverage. When The Frau was laid off from her job as a copywriter in Switzerland in 2009, she never had to worry about losing her heath insurance (or paying for it, since Swiss unemployment pays a minimum of 70% of your salary for 18 months). The Swiss healthcare system gives its people a freedom that The Frau, like many Americans who have stayed in unfortunate jobs due to health insurance reasons, had never experienced.

Finally, guns. The Frau didn’t like being surrounded by so many guns in Switzerland (the Swiss are 4^th in the world in guns per capita—behind the U.S., Yemen, and Syria), but they were a part of the Swiss military and civilian responsibility, so she learned to accept them.

Switzerland has similar freedoms to the United States concerning gun ownership. Like Americans, the Swiss have gun ownership rights and the right to carry them in public. Switzerland had one mass shooting in 2001, which killed 14 and injured 18, but even after that, an anti-gun referendum failed to pass. According to a piece in Time by Helena Bachmann which sited government figures, violent crime in Switzerland is 10 times less than it is in the U.S. Maybe it helps that in Switzerland, heavy machine guns and automatic weapons are banned. Another idea a more compassionate America could adopt.

But enough about how The Frau feels after living abroad. Here’s a piece The Frau wrote for VICE last week about how other Americans feel about their own country's gun policies after living abroad.

Six years in Switzerland, Part I

Time flies when you move to Switzerland

Six years ago this week, the Frau descended on Zurich. At first, the Frau felt like she was on vacation. But then, her husband went to work and this career woman was faced with making him lunch in a country where she didn’t even know the word for milk (or why the grocery carts were attached with chains in a place where people didn’t even lock their bikes). Ms. 4.0-Perfectionist-who-was-once-going-to-conquer-the-world-with-her-brilliance couldn’t even grocery shop. Poor Frau. But also, poor Switzerland.

The Frau wasn’t very nice to Switzerland at first. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t more like home. The fact that it was a different country didn’t seem like a good enough reason. Little did she know she would go through the whole expat cycle thing like everyone else until she came full circle and started blaming the United States for not being more like Switzerland.

Anyhow, in honor of the Frau’s Swiss six year anniversary, she’d like to talk about the three things that keep her living in Switzerland. Then, in Part II next week, she'll discuss three things that sometimes make her want to stuff a cervelat in it all.

Three Things That Make Her Happy To Finally Have a C-Permit

The Great Outdoors

Switzerland put the "great" in the great outdoors. You can live in the center of a town, like the Frau does, and be in the woods in a matter of minutes. As someone who grew up in Chicago, the Frau never knew it was possible not to have to get in a car to go to the woods. But in Switzerland, you can jump in the lakes and rivers, you can hike in the mountains–even in the winter on beautifully groomed paths, and you can bike in bike lanes almost everywhere in the country—or enjoy summer Sundays when 30 kilometers of road in various parts of the country are shut off to traffic and opened to bikers and rollerbladers.

Things Just Work

Once you come to Switzerland, it’s hard to go anywhere else. Even home. One look at the disaster that is O’Hare Airport, wait 1.5 hours for your luggage, and visit a bathroom that looks like it hasn’t seen a cleaning rag since 1999 and you can’t wait to get back to Zurich where a digital board will tell you that your luggage will be out in 6 minutes and 53 seconds while you admire a toilet so shiny it would give even Mr. Clean a headache.

All of this makes you start to take things for granted. Trains that are scheduled to leave at 8:38 leave at 8:38. People go to lunch exactly at noon and are back at their desks exactly at one (although this still kind of freaks the Frau out). And paper is recycled in such an orderly fashion that the Frau has developed an inferiority complex when it comes to putting her paper out on the curb because her pile, well, it looks just like her: foreign.

People Are Protected

This is a country where everyone has health insurance. This is a country where unemployment protects you for at least a year and a half by paying you 70% of your salary. This is a country where people carry cash instead of credit cards because they actually have money. This is a country where women must be paid at least 80% of their salary during maternity leave for 14 weeks. This is a country where it’s normal to work part-time—even in highly educated, professional positions. If fact, a lot of new parents decide to both work 80%. They are engineers, lawyers, writers. It’s no big deal. And that’s a big deal when it comes to work/life balance.

Stay tuned for "Six years in Switzerland, Part II," where the Frau discusses three things about Switzerland that make her never want to hear an alphorn at a Tunnelfest again.

What keeps you living in Switzerland?

The Ultimate Hausfrau

I never planned to have a baby abroad, but then again I never planned to live abroad longer than three years. And life does go on—even when you feel more like you’re living in limbo than anywhere else.

One week ago, I had a baby. A beautiful little girl that I’ll call M for this blog’s purposes, for Maedchen, the German word for girl. The birth of M officially marks me as both a mother, and now, as I stay home for the next six months on maternity leave, I will become someone else: a true Swiss Hausfrau. I’ll try to document the ups and downs on this blog without turning it into a baby-centric Internet address that scares off non-mothers and men.

So far, I feel more like a walking zombie than a Swiss Hausfrau but maybe they are one in the same. I spent five days in the hospital and now I am lucky to have found an English-speaking German midwife who visits me once a day for about an hour to check how things are going—or to make sure I’m still sane, I’m not sure which. Swiss insurance pays for a midwife to visit you at home for up to 10 days after the birth of your baby.

The midwife and I discuss enlightening topics like swollen feet, breast pumps, and strange Swiss homeopathic treatments, which I’ll go into more detail in another post.

My husband has taken two weeks of unpaid leave (fathers in Switzerland are typically given only one paid day of paternity leave—mothers get 90 days) to help out and bond with his daughter. My neighbor joked that he is now a Hausmann, but then said he had always kind of been one anyway (she was always amazed that he ironed his own shirts, cooked, and did laundry). So this Hausfrau has a lot of help for now. And she is sehr Dankbar for that.