Returning Home

Written by

Helen Watts is a re-entry expert.

She lived in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia for over seven years where she was involved in development work.

In this article Helen kindly shares a little of her own experiences and some insights into practical things we can all do to help us re-enter what should be familiar but isn’t.

 

Going home

It should be so easy. All it involves is going back to a country you know, whose culture you understand, whose language you are fluent in and where familiar people live. Right? Wrong. It’s a common misconception that it is just about returning to your roots, to a known and understood place but it’s not as simple as that.

Wherever you live (as a child or an adult), you create a sense of home. You settle, you become familiar with the surroundings,  you learn how to get around, get involved, become known, and gain some sort of status (whatever that might be).

You do that when you live abroad too, which also involves getting to know the language and culture as well as all the other things. You become comfortable to a greater or lesser extent with being where you are, even if it’s totally different to your home country.

In order to settle, you change; mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, in your worldview… you adapt yourself to your new living situation. It takes time. It doesn’t happen immediately, but over weeks, months and years, you change.

So now uproot yourself back to your “home” country. Not only have your country, friends, and families changed (sometimes in subtle ways, other times unrecognisably), but you have changed immeasurably. Put these two basic facts together and you have a clash. A clash of values, cultures, expectations, and of new home vs old home.

 

“In order to settle, you change”

 

The first time I went through re-entry was after studying in Germany as a student. I had thoroughly immersed myself in the language and the culture. I found I could be blunt in conversation or black and white and nobody thought I was picking a fight! Coming back to the UK after so successfully delving into another culture, I no longer felt I could be myself.

It took me the best part of the year to find my voice again and to start to feel I was fitting in, despite only having been away for a year. I was helped in part by spending much of that year mixing with international students, who were foreigners in my country; amongst whom ironically, I didn’t feel quite so foreign.

Re-entry for the second time was after 18 months in rural Kyrgyzstan as part of a development team with my husband. We’d had a team conflict which ended up getting quite messy, not all our own making. We were forced to leave at short notice to find a different charity to work with.

Again, I had fully immersed myself and learnt as much about the language and culture as possible. This time the predominant struggle was with expectations, ours and those of others.

 

“We didn’t know who we were or who we wanted to be.

We’d lost our identity.”

 

We wanted to go back overseas again and saw the time in the UK as temporary. Family wanted us to stay. Our church was keen for us to remain for longer and prove ourselves. After 2-3 months back most people assumed, we were over it and part of the furniture again. We were still hurting, exhausted with trying to work out who we were and how to fit in, and how to get back out there again.

We did finally make it out to Kyrgyzstan again after a couple of years, this time with our daughter in tow, and soon our son was born too. This time we stayed five years and made our own decision to come back when it felt right.

Despite that re-entry was still difficult. All our married life we had been expats, development workers, slightly mad people who thought it was normal to live and work in a foreign environment in the middle of nowhere; suddenly we were none of those things anymore. We didn’t know who we were or who we wanted to be. We’d lost our identity.

We were (at least to look at) just Brits, although we saw the UK through alien eyes and didn’t know how to do some of the most basic things;

  • how to use chip and PIN;
  • to use a pay-at-the-pump petrol station or
  • how to greet men or women (making eye contact and worse, having to hug or kiss a man who I didn’t really know. I was used to not even greeting men).

There are so many different facets to reverse culture shock it would be impossible to mention them all. You may have struggles which are not necessarily the same as your partner’s, your children’s or your friends’ reactions. Click the link for a few hints and tips from Helen to give you a head start.

 

About Helen

Helen returned to the UK in 2010 and retrained as a coach and de-briefer – specifically to help others through the re-entry process. Research she conducted in 2017 showed how little support repatriates get from their organisations after their relocation, and how challenging people can find going “home.”

Helen has been coaching individuals through their repatriations for the last seven years and has been through re-entry herself as a single student, a married couple, and with a family.

She launched her first online course, “From apprehensive to quietly confident” and co-authored her first book “Arriving Well: Stories of Identity, Belonging and rediscovering home after living abroad” in 2018.

 

Successful Repatriation – practical advice

Written by

Helen Watts shares practical advice that helped her and her clients cope with the challenges of repatriation.

 

Allow yourself time to adjust. Just as you don’t adapt to living overseas within a couple of months, getting used to being in your home country will take time and adjustment too.  Many people say 18 months is a good estimation of when you will feel normal again. Take it a day at a time.

 

 

Approach your relocation with expat eyes. There will be things you don’t know about your home country anymore and which may make you feel foolish. Investigate and explore as if encountering the culture for the first time. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Be willing to ask questions.

 

 

Think about how you have changed. Awareness of this change can help know where potential clashes may occur with others. Work out which of those changes can serve you in your home culture and which you may need to let go of. Be gentle with yourself when you don’t know who you are anymore.

 

 

Look after yourself to look after your children. Children and re-entry is a massive topic. The most important thing you can do for your children during re-entry is make sure you look after yourself. Be honest and open with them about your reactions and emotions so that they feel safe to express theirs too.

 

 

Find other repatriates or foreigners to spend time with, as they will understand your journey better than those who have never lived overseas. A few people who understand your transition is helpful in being able to talk about your experience. If there is no one nearby, join a Facebook group, such as Re-entry Stories, to find like-minded people.

 

 

Be intentional about finding routine, meeting people and building your new community. It takes time and effort, just as it does overseas – and possibly more so, as everyone in the West tends to be so busy. Set yourself small goals each week and keep to them as much as you can.

 

 

Find help when you need it. There are plenty of coaches and counsellors out there now who work with repatriates. If you are struggling, or just want someone to walk through the process with you, find some help. It could turn out to be a game-changer for you and help you to thrive rather than just to survive.

 

 

Re-entry is rarely smooth but can be navigated well. It is important to take your time and be kind to yourself as you would in any other major life transition. Treating the transition as a challenge to overcome or a new adventure can help you to see it in a different and positive light. Find whatever mindset works well for you! Good luck!

 

For more information regarding children please see some of the work by Ruth E van Reken

21st Century Third Culture Kids

Written by

Ruth E. van Reken is an international speaker on issues related to global family living. She is co-founder of Families in Global Transition. In addition to other writing, Ruth is co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds.

 

People often ask me, “Why do you still speak about your third culture kid (TCK) story? Isn’t it irrelevant for today’s TCKs? Surely the internet and social media make their experience completely different from yours.”

These are important questions. Without doubt, new developments in technology, communication, and transportation have revolutionized our world. When I returned to the USA as a 13-year-old from Nigeria sixty years ago, I innocently asked my new classmates “Who’s Elvis?” when I heard them talk about Elvis Presley on a first name basis. Today’s repatriating children would know the answer because of YouTube™!

 

Transportation Kano 1946

Numerous communication tools have greatly enhanced everyone’s capacity to stay connected to their many worlds. Children never go four years without seeing or talking to their parents as I did when I stayed in the USA for high school while my parents worked in Nigeria.

Friends don’t drop into a sink hole when children or teens fly away and leave them behind. Cell phones, Skype™, Zoom™, FaceTime™, Messenger™, What’s App™ and Instagram™ have changed all of that.

Today’s ease of travel means the worlds TCKs leave are not gone forever. Flying between home and host countries several times a year to visit relatives or friends or to attend a class reunion on a different continent are part of the new normal.

Without doubt, Bob Dylan’s song, “The times, they are a’changin’” is equally, or more, applicable now than when he wrote it in 1964.

 

Ironically, while the advances in technology and transportation have introduced new benefits to the TCK experience, they have also added new challenges. As snail mail or airmail took forever, TCKs of previous generations were forced to try and assimilate into the new place to have any social life at all.

While it’s great that today’s TCKs can keep up with their friends in other places, it seems some children and teens want to spend all their time texting and Facetiming with those friends rather than moving towards new relationships in the current place.

Other TCKs say it is hard to see friends together on the screen and know they can’t join them in person. How do they learn to balance the paradox of holding on to the old while establishing themselves in the present?

Sometimes today’s TCKs (and their families?) assume because of technology and the internet, they won’t experience any culture shock during ‘re-entry’ because they are up-to-date on the latest news, fads, and music.

Rubbing against the nuances of how life is lived in another country with its unseen values and expectations is quite different from reading about it on the internet. Being unprepared for this can make it harder to navigate that transition well.

These are obvious changes but there are some hidden changes as well. One is the growing cultural complexity today’s TCKs often experience compared to those of former generations. During those early post WWII years, most TCKs lived a relatively ‘simple’ life if judged by how many different cultural worlds they interacted with.

For example, while growing up, I lived between two cultural worlds and cities: Kano, Nigeria or Chicago, Illinois. My parents both carried USA passports marked ‘Caucasian’ for race and shared English as their first language. In Nigeria, I was a clear foreigner and people expected me to be different. However, in the USA I became a ‘hidden immigrant,’ as I looked like most of my peers and spoke their language, no one saw how different I was inside.

 

Cultural Identity in Relationship to Surrounding Culture

© 1996 David C. Pollock/Ruth E. Van Reken

 

Now, many TCKs are from bi-cultural/ bi-national families or mixed racial heritage. They may go to school where the language and culture are different from what they experience at home. Some TCKs are also international adoptees or started life as refugees or immigrants before parents began working internationally. Others carry several passports. Depending on which host country they live in, they may be hidden immigrants in the host country as well as at ‘home.’ Some TCKs have only lived in the hidden immigrant and adopted categories and never had a visibly clear identity.

Recognising that TCKs are part of a larger cohort called cross-cultural kids (CCKs)—children who grow up meaningfully interacting with multiple cultural worlds for any reason—helps us see this evolving story. Here are some types of CCKs.

The Cross Cultural Kid (CCK) Model

©2002 Ruth E. VanReken, updated 2017

Here we not only see many ways children grow up cross-culturally, but also recognize that many current TCKs are in multiple CCK categories.

This adds extra dynamics to consider in their particular story. For example, one TCK of Nigerian/Irish parentage is in the traditional TCK, bi-cultural, mixed racial heritage groups, and educational CCK groups as her international schools’ cultures weren’t primarily rooted in either Irish or Nigerian ways. She told me that in Ireland she is defined as ‘black,’ but in Nigeria she is seen as ‘white.’

How do all of these additional CCK experiences potentially amplify the struggle to find a clear identity that many TCKs already feel? How many circles are you or your children in?

New mobility patterns also add to the degree of cultural complexity for today’s TCKs. Instead of spending longer periods of time in two or three countries as my generation did, many globally mobile families now live for a year or two in multiple countries. Some TCKs go to ten different schools between the ages of six and eighteen with country or school having its own distinct culture.

With all these differences of experiences between past and present TCKs, it’s understandable that people wonder how there can be any commonality between current TCKs and those from my generation.

One basic reality, however, hasn’t changed. TCKs of every generation grew or grow up in a lifestyle where repeated patterns of cross-cultural mobility are the norm, not the exception. This factor alone continues to shape the story of every TCK—past, present, and presumably future both in terms of the great benefits offered as well as common challenges.

Many current TCKs still love to travel the world, but find it difficult to answer the questions, “Where are you from?” or “Where is home?” as my generation did. The salient theme for TCK blogs or TEDx talks remains, “Where do I belong?”

These mobility patterns also create repetitive cycles of separation and loss, no matter how good the future promises to be. With loss, comes grief which needs to be processed. Living well in the paradox of affirming the gifts and dealing with the challenges remains a key for past and present TCKs.

 

How can we help today’s TCKs to live well in their reality?

To begin with, remember that TCKs are children who need what all children do: love, acceptance, affirmation, a sense of safety, and healthy boundaries.

In addition, here are a few tips for dealing with the extra challenges of cross-cultural mobility.

 

 

1. Portable family traditions help offer a sense of stability and roots in a frequently changing world. It may be a red plate for the birthday person, or family rituals like reading bedtime stories.

2. Don’t be threatened if children are conflicted about their sense of cultural or national identity. Allow them to be ‘all of the above’ as they consider how to put the various pieces of their puzzle together into a unified sense of identity and belonging.

3. Remember change and transition are different. Change is the external event while transition is the internal process of detaching from one place and attaching to the next successfully. It is important for all members of the family to do this well. Outpost member and Shell spouse, Jo Parfitt, has been a pioneer in publishing books for globally mobile families. Visit her ‘expat bookshelf’ at https://www.expatbookshop.com/summertime-shop/ for many excellent resources. Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, 3rd ed., also has a section on tips for transition.

4. Help children remain fluent in the languages they learn. This not only helps them communicate in the present but is a great skill to list on résumés later!

5. Comfort before encouraging. That means to hear the sadness (and give a hug) without trying to immediately point out the positives that are also there. This allows children to process their losses as they happen.

6. Enjoy the journey. There is so much to see and experience as your family traverses the world. Such first-hand learning is a great privilege and opportunity. Don’t waste it!

Titles by Ruth