An Intense Homecoming

I have been planning for some time to post a story on our web site that chronicles the return journey of a young Danish woman who had a most difficult re-entry experience after her AFS year as a high school student in Kenya. Julie Gehl originally wrote this story in 1984, a few years after she had been on the AFS program. Read Julie's story on the AFS web site.

Julie's experience of Kenya left her confused about her identity as Danish. She had so fully taken on a Kenyan identity and set of values that she had a hard time finding her way back to Denmark. She returned to Kenya for a long visit to her host family and friends in Kenya, and somewhere along the line in this journey, she understands that her future is in Denmark and she finds the strength to meet the challenge of readapting to her own country again. Julie is now an oncologist in Denmark and fully participating in her own culture these days, but as she says in her story, "there will always be a little bit of Kenya in me somewhere."

Julie's experience is uniquely her own, but many exchange students will relate to the intensity of her experience, and the importance it had for her life. AFS wants every student to have a life-changing experience, and this means that going home at the end of the year can frequently be difficult. How can you return home after such an experience, and act you did before, as if you never left? Even when the home and host cultures are more similar, the changes brought on by the experience can be monumental. It is important to hold on to what has been learned and to find a carefully balanced integration with the way of life back home. Coming home is part of the journey abroad.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Back Home and Homesick

It is perhaps expected when you go abroad for a long stretch of time that you may from time to time experience homesickness -- a yearning for something familiar and comfortable, for people you know and love. Less expected, but also quite common, is the homesickness that many exchange students feel once they return home. In the course of a few months or a year, the host country, family and friends, had become so familiar and comfortable that this is the longing.

"It is my goal to go back to Ecuador as soon as possible. If I can manage to get the money together, I’ll be back there this summer."

The urgency of the homesickness for the host country can disrupt the person's ability to become re-involved with his life back home. Such feelings are much more intense than, for example, the fond memories I carry of that lovely little house we rented in Montréal once. Sometimes I imagine living again in that house, chatting with the neighbor behind us, shopping for groceries around the corner, commuting on the Metro to some job, watching the children at the playground across the street. It wouldn't be a bad life, but I'm not so dissatisfied with the life I have now to contemplate making any plans to rush back. I also have fond memories of the mountains rising around Quito in a view that can take your breath away. I hope to return to both these places sometime, but my life right now is here in New York.

Now what?

"I’m going through a period of great disillusionment with my life and my plans. Maybe because last year, I understood what it meant to invest a year of your life in something wonderful, and am now struggling to find just as valid a plan into which to plunge myself."

Of course, it's not just the fantasy of what life might be like back in the host country that can create a disruption for the returning student. It's often equally a question of how to incorporate the benefits of the intercultural experience into the life you have at home. The exchange students coming home have a new perspective on themselves, a new outlook on the world. The more profound the experience, the more time and reflection is needed to rearrange the way one gives meaning to life to include these new perspectives and multiple layers of meaning. Going through the re-entry process thoughtfully leads to a richer life.

What can parents do to help?

Most of the AFS students are in their last two years of secondary school and still depend to a great extent on the support and concern of their parents. Recently we published an article on the AFS web site that humorously and indulgently talks about the re-entry experience, addressed (in this case) to Brazilian parents and their returning teenagers. Funny, emotional, and very much to the point, THE LONG AWAITED RETURN HOME, by AFS Educational Advisory Council member Andréa Sebben and Raquel Fernandes, is written with a very Latin flavor for parents who miss their son or their daughter but may be quite surprised to meet the young man or woman who comes home. (Also available in Spanish as EL ANSIADO REGRESO A CASA).

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Coming Home

In researching the impact of the secondary school international exchange program that AFS offers, I have become increasingly aware that much of the learning that takes place as a result of an international experience happens well after the student returns home. Immigrants who do not return home – the most common type of experience for the immigrants to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – undoubtedly have a different learning path and may miss some of the kinds of learning available to the exchange student.

Many years ago we met an Italian AFS student from Rome who had recently come into contact with a branch of his family who had moved a generation or two earlier to New York. To him, these family members hardly seemed Italian, although they spoke Italian with him.

In 1991- 92, when I was interviewing Indians who had returned to India after their studies in the USA, several of those I interviewed recalled the same kind of story, and this seemed to be part of what impelled them to return home to India. To my interviewees, these American branches of their Indian families were not very modern. In fact, they seemed to be clinging ever more tightly to the Indian lifestyle as it existed in the epoch when they made their migration to the USA. Because they were living abroad, they were virtually unaware of the ongoing evolution of Indian society and mores. One of my interviewees called them “fossilized” Indians.

This may be unfair if not unkind. Immigrants living in the USA are also creating and maintaining the culture they share that includes the fact of living in the USA as well as the community of their fellow immigrants. But it is true that their ability to touch and taste the life of their homeland is limited, and that their memories of home have in some ways replaced the direct experience of home.

The AFS student who returns home may also feel a little fossilized after a year of living abroad. He or she has missed a number of critical events in the lives of those living at home, but also the physical sensation of living in the home country and community may have become unfamiliar and the memory of how live at home feels is probably never quite accurate until you are there again.

Trusting this faulty memory now, I recall an aspect of a familiar playground activity when I was growing up: jumping rope. Occasionally a boy would get involved briefly, but largely this was an activity for the girls. While two would hold the ends of a rope and swing it, the others took turns running in, jumping, and running out while not stopping the rope. Each girl had the habit of standing outside the rope for a while, watching, nodding, and often using her hands and her whole body to mark the rhythm of the rope until she could internalize it. With different girls twirling the rope or with arms getting tired, the rhythm changed constantly, so as girls left the rope and came back, they again had to watch carefully and mark the rhythm.

I think of the thousands of AFS students who will be returning home in the coming weeks. They also need to stand outside a bit and watch the rhythm of life at home. It will be so familiar and yet not so. Many will even stumble over a few words in their own language, or start speaking to their parents in the now familiar Norwegian or Thai or Italian instead of their native language. It may take a while to understand what has happened, since they had not before tried to leave and return to this rhythm that was so natural to them before they went abroad.

And so the journey for the AFS returnee begins here, again, where it started, and where there is still so much to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

For AFS Volunteers a new section on the AFS International web site (www.afs.org) offers a special focus on intercultural resources and ideas to support your work. Currently the focus is on "coming home" and re-entry orientation.

"My Different View" is the name we've given to the AFS Essay Contest for returnees, and we are delighted that 35 AFS Partner organizations are participating. The web site for the contest (http://mydifferentview.org) is open as of April 1.

AFS is organizing this contest because we feel strongly that it will be useful and educational for our program alumni to reflect on their experience and what they have learned. The contest is a way to encourage them to tell their stories and to increase their understanding of this incredible experience that they have had. 

Recently, Dr. Bruce LaBrack and Dr. Nan Sussman visited AFS International to help us re-focus our attention on the re-entry phase of the experience. They reminded us that for many participants, the message they hear when they come home is that they now need to return to "normal," to "fit in" and to "return to their old patterns of behavior." What they don't hear is their peers, parents, and others asking them "How are you different now?"  The essay contests asks this now, and we look forward to reading the essays our returnees submit. Thank you to the many staff who are making this possible.

Connecting with our Alumni
One of the most surprising and concerning findings in the 2002 Educational Results Study by Mitch Hammer (see http://www.afs.org/research for more information) was the fact that while almost all students attend orientation sessions prior to departure and in the hosting country, less than 13% of the AFS students who responded to the post-test survey in September of 2003 had attended a post-return orientation event in these first two months after their return home. We know from discussions with volunteers in various countries that it is often difficult to attract participants to the re-entry sessions when they are planned. Post-return sessions that are planned usually do cover issues of re-entry adjustment and frequently attempt to encourage returnees to become involved in the volunteer chapter. Some also offer opportunities for the returnee to reflect on what he or she has learned.

The difficulty we have in gathering our alumni requires us to re-examine the way we provide orientation for this group. If we believe that AFS is a life-long learning experience, it's important to find a way to involve the returnees and to provide them with both support and the opportunity to rediscover their own culture through their re-entry experience.

R2 A4 and the World Wide Web
Having seen the benefits of the alumni web site developed for the "Yes" program participants (the YES program is a US government-funded program which hosts Year Program participants in the US from countries with significant Muslim populations), we are looking with AFS-USA at how this could be developed to include not just the returnee blogs, photos, and discussion forum but also a fun and informative educational element that focuses on the re-entry learning needs of all AFS alumni. We are currently reviewing the orientation goals for re-entry, and all phases of the program, to ensure that we are better addressing the needs of our participants and returnees, and are planning to create modules for use on the web. The first phase of this project involves working with AFS-USA's revision of their "Culture Trek" but we are looking to set up a model for use and adaptation worldwide.

A useful model for developing a re-entry orientation component for an alumni website, or for developing a workshop of any type with recently returned participants was developed by Bruce LaBrack (see attached Word Document). He's named this model the R2 A4 model (each step begins with an R or an A in English) for re-entry programs of any type.

From his many years of experience, Bruce has found that addressing topics in this order creates the most fruitful experience for the returnees. Watch for more information on this project in the coming months.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Research, AFS International