Coming Home/Moving Away

I've been asked to blog about "coming home," which is ironic because I moved away from my real home two days ago and I'm currently crashing at a friend's house while I'm waiting to move into my apartment, which means I'm technically "homeless." But that's life.




I've been waiting to move to D.C. for 8 months. Eight months ago I moved home from Colombia, where I had been teaching fifth graders at a bilingual school in Periera. This is what I left:

Really.

This is what I came home to:












Although adjusting to the icy Midwest winter was difficult after leaving tropical Colombia, it was just as trying to adjust to living at home again. Coming home from an experience abroad shocks the senses the same way the winter cold shocks your body when you come home from the tropics. It was jarring to leave a place that had been my home for a year. To walk away from all of my furniture, my apartment, my dishes, my friends, my job, my view of the mountains, even my favorite bus driver, to come home, where no one understood what I had left, what I had built in that foreign country, or what I had experienced, was in every way more challenging than moving abroad had been. When you move to a new place, everything is exciting; everything is new. It's fun to take the metro in the morning and walk the streets to work right now. It's mind-boggling that I could walk out of the office and in just a few minutes I could stand in front of the White House. That's not how it feels to go home. Going home is comfortable, not interesting. Going home is sameness, repetition, and familiarity after days, weeks, months, or years of the exotic, the surprising, and the uncertainty of a new day.

It's called "reverse culture shock" for a reason, and it is what I believe is the hardest part of living abroad. Moving abroad can be scary, but coming home means leaving a life that you have worked hard to build that you might never be able to return to. At home, no one says "con mucho gusto mi amore" after you thank them, even if you thank them in Spanish. No one says "listo?" and no one, not even the Spanish speakers, pronounce "llama" or "yo" with that lovely "j" sound at the beginning like my Colombian students did. No one makes jugo de lulo or limonada, and no one here appreciates what it means when it doesn't rain for an entire day. They just don't get it. They also don't understand how difficult it actually was to teach and live abroad in a foreign country for a year. They don't understand how hard it was to wake up at 5:00 a.m., catch the bus, teach fifth graders who barely spoke English about prisms, talk to Spanish speaking taxi drivers or doctors or bakers or even my non-English speaking boss, walk past the homeless kids begging for money, buy weird foreign foods and learn how to cook them, plan lessons that will probably fail, fall asleep listening to the sounds of traffic and police outside, and then to wake up and do it all again. My family still thinks that I lived a fabulous life surrounded by palm trees and beautiful people in a great apartment. To a great extent, they are absolutely right.

Maybe that's the problem. No one knows how awful it was, and no one understands how amazing it was either. It seems impossible that everything could be so bad and so good at the same time, but it was. It seems impossible that I could be in a parent-teacher conference speaking Spanish and a week later I could be home baking pie with my family. It's shocking to realize that my family looks nothing like the Colombians I was around for months. It's shocking to see people throw away uneaten food, and it's shocking to realize how much money we have in the USA.

When I worked in a study abroad office, I always warned students who were about to leave for their own grand adventures about reverse culture shock. I told them to be prepared to feel totally out-of-place in their own homes. I also told them to remember the best parts of living abroad and to incorporate as much as they could into their normal, at home, lives. That's why I sometimes fry plantains and why I like to speak Spanish  to my dog. It's why the scent of Colombian laundry detergent on my unpacked "work" clothes means I might never again wash (or wear) the polo I wore to work. And it's why, after what seemed to be eight endless months, I was glad to leave home again. It's good to be back in the unfamiliar.