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.