Oh, the Places You’ll Go
The wise traveller leaves his heart at home
– African proverb
The last post, The Act of Giving, focused on giving time, our experience of working for a charitable organisation in Zambia.
Thinking back, VSO sent us on a weekend training course called ‘preparing for change’. We were connected with returned volunteers and afforded ‘survival tips’. We updated jabs. We bought new rucksacks and waterproofs. We researched (a bit) the colonial history.
Everything was about preparing to go.
The weekend before leaving for Zambia, we were thrown a big farewell party. It was a bit of a hoolie. The ale and the conversation flowed. Most of our close family and special friends travelled to be with us, to wish us well before we left. Everything was about the departure, the adventure that was ahead of us. Parting from one culture, joining another.
A colleague gave us a gift at our farewell party, a copy of Dr Seuss’s ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go’. It was a really pertinent present that we re-read many times. And it’s still relatable.
It details great adventure…“You’ll be seeing great sights….High heights”.
And we did.
Yes, everything was about preparing to go. Nothing prepared us to go back.
Have you ever felt this way?
After all these experiences, people and places, the time came for us to return. We had spent so much time ‘preparing for change’. We had given no thought to ‘preparing to return’.
And how difficult could that be? After all, we were ‘going home’, to the place where we had grown up. Going back to all that was familiar.
Except it wasn’t.
We flew back to UK in December, quite possibly the worst time of year to arrive after two years in Sub-Saharan sunshine. That cold hits you. It gets into your bones and it sits there.
I can remember describing London’s Heathrow airport as though it was like someone had hit a fast forward button; the walking, the talking, the travelator. Everything felt frenetic.
We had a little welcome committee of close friends and family at the airport. We were happy to see them all. But before we knew it, after coffee and croissants, we were in a car, on the M25 and catapulted into ‘we’re back’. We felt hit on the head. Where were we?
For me, my family home had been sold just before we went to Zambia. My parents had retired to a ‘Heart of England’ town. There was nothing familiar about that place.
We spent some time with my husband’s family. That was in another part of the country that I didn’t really know. More unfamiliar.
I stayed with a friend for a while. She had also moved while we had been away. I was happy to see her. But it was another new place.
Bits of that Dr. Seuss story came flooding back. It mentions “bang ups and hang ups” and that was true enough. It hadn’t all been a fantastic adventure. There were some very real difficulties. Challenges were many. But we overcame them all. And that gave you great confidence. Before, we had felt “ready for anything, under the sky”. Being back, we suddenly felt unsure of everything.
We longed for the “weirdish wild space” in Zambia, weird and wonderful bush. Big trees, big ants, big heat. It was all big. Mighty rivers. Unimaginable beauty.
Back in the grey and the concrete of UK, we missed it all. Who do you explain that to? All we knew was, we were supposed to be happy to be home but we missed being in Southern Africa.
The Dr. Seuss story talks of waiting. We had weathered a lot of waiting; waiting for buses to leave, waiting for our phone to be connected after a storm (5 months), waiting for a bridge to be rebuilt, that had got washed away in the rain (the army built a temporary one in front of us in a few hours), waiting for the rains to come. Back in U.K the waiting was over. Everything was in order; planned, prescribed and predictable.
A few weeks later it was Christmas. That was the usual cornucopia of excess; various meats and festive treats at the table followed by abundant desserts. There was a sea of plentiful presents under the Christmas tree, wading out all over the lounge carpet. We couldn’t help but glance at each other and think that all of this was crazy. In rural Zambia, most people that we had met were so lacking materially but so rich in many ways compared to life in the west. In post Thatcherite Britain, it had all become about the money and all about the stuff! We wanted none of it.
We met up with an assortment of mates in the months that we were back. Well meaning friends would ask questions like “was it hot?”, “isn’t it great to be back?” and even “did you see like, you know, mud huts?”
We missed debating about development, discussing contentious elections, recalling epic adventures across numerous borders. The circle of friends who would get it, our group who had been through so much together and supported each other through so many tests and tribulations, was now separated.
I’m noticing more and more about ‘Reverse Culture Shock’ now. We didn’t understand it at the time. When we went back to our home country we didn’t ‘fit’. Things didn’t fall into place easily. We didn’t slot straight back in.
We had walked away from jobs, a close circle of friends who lived nearby, a house, a cat and a place that we had come to love.
We went back to nothing.
In Zambia we were the ones who hosted, in a large detached home on the college campus. When other NGO workers passed through town, they would come to stay with us. We hosted everyone.
Now everyone was hosting us. Spare beds. Sofa beds. Air beds. We bounced about, off the walls and off each other.
We tried to make sense of it all.
I read an article on Reverse Culture Shock recently. It stated “In any transition, it is unfair to compare the end of the last thing to the beginning of the new thing”.
That’s probably great advice. Great hindsight! How helpful to be able to understand it all, after it had happened.
Could we really have changed so much that we had out-grown the country that we called home?
We didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
What’s your experience of Reverse Culture Shock?
© Maggie M / Mother City Time
Hmm, very interesting story of reverse culture shock you had in from your Zambia experience. Relocating to Kenya from a 5 year stint in Dubai was also quite a story for us. We did not want to leave Dubai, perhaps because we had gotten so used to the pace of life there, yet we had to return home somehow. Like you, our parents were no longer living in the places we once called home so it was new settings altogether whenever we went to see them. We had to adjust to the way of doing things which had changed. At my mum’s, I sometimes felt like visitor because it was just different. Most of our connections had moved on too.I found that it was not easy picking up banter with old friends because there was a lot to catch up on and while we were away, a lot had taken place and they had learnt to live without us being around them.
We had never worked in Nairobi before therefore we felt like visitors coming to a new city. It was familiar, yet not familiar. There were lots of many small changes that just made the city a lot different from what it used to be. In as much as I grew up in Nairobi and partly schooled there, I never had worked there before and so did Catherine. I felt a lot of apprehension many times I walked or even drove into or through the Nairobi CBD, a feeling I never had when growing up. To this day, I wondered why I felt that way.
Settling in was fairly easy, perhaps because we were returning residents, and procedures were pretty familiar. We had a good start at our new location but soon reality struck. The Dubai razzle dazzle feeling was very much present in our minds and sometimes we felt like recreating those feelings. We were back to a slower pace of things, broken systems, scanty resources and this definitely made us feel agigated and frustrated. On one occassion we may have felt like breaking our contracts and taking off again because we felt constrained and limited in terms of resources. It was very clear too that there were very few of our friends or the acquintances at work who understood the conflicts that we were processing. I did find it was easier to connect with foreigners perhaps because at this point we shared similar challenges of coping, as compared to the locals who simply would give you the “get on with it and fit in” look or talk.
We didn’t quite settle in as it should and in our second year of contract, it was clear that we can’t stay on. We probably need to step out again. I think it is never quite the same again once you have left your home country, gone elsewhere and lived there for some time and then returned home. Chances of leaving again are very high..and we did! We may have come back again but I see us going out again!
I guess the lesson I am learning now about re-entry is to keep abreast with key issues happening at home while you are away so that whenever you return, you are able to plug in connect and plug out again to the next destination.
Sam, this is pole pole taken to new heights! So sorry…your comment disappeared then reappeared. You have had a unique experience and now another chapter in China too. Going ‘home’ can have its challenges. And yet we know others who ‘slotted back in’ so easily..same jobs, same town, same friends. It happens. I wonder how you are feeling about being back,’second time round’? I hope that the positive experiences of life in UAE and China stay with you. Certainly the friendships made during these years away remain. And most importantly, hope that you are happy with your decision to be back and feel less frustrated with things. Or maybe you will never truly ‘settle’ again and your travelling spirit will need to seek out new adventures. Keep enjoying Mother City Time.