When going back home feels more than foreign

Immigrants find they’ve changed, and so has their homeland

Home sweet home is something to which we can all attest. Whether it is going back to the small town we grew up in and reminiscing about the way we were, or returning to the familiar surroundings of family and friends after a long trip, going back home is something we yearn for.

This yearning is part of what drives many immigrants who have lived abroad to go back to their native countries. According to a 2006 Statistics Canada study, a third of male immigrants (25 to 45 years old) go back home within 20 years of arrival.

But as I am discovering on extended visits to Ghana, the surprises, frustrations and disappointments that await immigrants who return home after years away can be unnerving. Going back doesn’t mean you’ll fit in. If you’ve lived, say, in Canada or the United States for 20 or 30 years, you don’t realize how much you and everything about you have changed until you go back. It can be quite a struggle to really fit in, and more often than not, you feel like a square peg in a round hole. You think “I was born here, I grew up in this culture and I’ll fit in perfectly.” It’s not that simple. Yes, reconnecting with friends and family is exhilarating, but what many returnees don’t realize is how much the culture and way of life of their adopted countries changes them. Not only do immigrants change, the country and people they left behind change dramatically. The change is not just in the physical surroundings, which are predictable enough. The biggest difference is attitudinal, and you don’t really realize how much you’ve changed until you begin to interact with people.

Everything is new to you and the learning curve can be steep. Often, you hardly know what to do in many circumstances, and you can react in ways that are off-putting. For instance, you find yourself making excuses when friends take you to some of the public eateries you used to frequent, and that can come off as snobbery.

One difficult challenge is what returnees in Ghana jokingly call the water test. Because of the ill-effects of untreated water, many returnees go everywhere armed with bottled water, and the test comes when you go to a friend or family member’s home and are offered water. What to do? A returnee-friend came to visit me at my brother’s home last week and wouldn’t drink the water until I vouched for it. At an aunt’s home a few years ago, I declined water from a pot I drank from regularly as a child, and created a major incident. She took my refusal as looking down on her and no explanation would get me off.

In Ghana, as in most African countries, one of the first things you realize is that things move at an agonizingly slow pace, and that can be very frustrating, especially if you require public services. The most vexing problem when dealing with officials is not knowing whether to grease a palm to get things done — and how much is too much or too little.

The worst sin is the tendency of returning immigrants to look at things through the lenses of where they’ve been, and then judge things by those standards. The residents resent nothing more than some know-all returnee with a sense of superiority telling them what to do. Often the refrain is, “this is how we do things here, who are you to try and change us?”

This is why many wellmeaning people go back home to contribute get frustrated and leave. Scores of physicians, engineers, pharmacists, economists and administrators have left in frustration because no one would listen to their advice, or they just can’t take the way things are. The most important thing is managing expectations. Returning immigrants can come back home and succeed, as many have. But they have to find a happy medium between their way and entrenched local practices.