A stranger in a strange land.

My previous blog posts have been about our day to day lives, like finding a house, unpacking our boxes and some of the traveling that we have done. Other than a few small mentions here and there, we've almost completely avoided the subject of what it feels like to live, like ordinary people, here. The after effects of a intercontinental migration like this are long lasting and too numerous to mention flippantly, they come in waves of happiness, sadness and frustration. And show themselves at the oddest times. This blog has been hugely responsible for dealing with these emotions as it helps connect us with all of our family and friends; it’s a tenuous and abstract way of connecting but it a connection nonetheless.

What a move like this does is not only force you to look at your partner in a different way, it forces you to look inwardly at your own self. This can be frightening at the best of times, because unlike taking a picture with your smartphone you are unable to put a filter over it. You can’t smooth over the bits you don’t like, what you see is unashamedly you. Immigration forces you to look at yourself with all your bits laid bare, its exceedingly difficult to evaluate ones inner self and to be critical of your shortcomings, its counter intuitive   but that's exactly what I've had to do, it’s been life changing in many ways. You almost instantly learn where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and learn to adjust your way of thinking and your actions to suit. 

Many people have said to us over the last year that those that leave to make a new life for themselves, are taking the easy way out, this is an inaccuracy of epic proportions, in fact I will put fire to the next person who has the audacity to say that to me. This is the hard way out and you only find that out once you've made the move, never before. It takes an inordinate amount of inner strength and pure iron will to leave everything you know for what you think is a better life halfway across the world, almost from the first moment, you begin second guessing yourself, simply because there is no clearly defined path to getting settled.

 Physically settling in is the easiest part,humans are very good at adjusting in the physical sense, especially the younger ones, but some of the people I've chatted to have in fifteen and twenty years not emotionally settled, this is where it gets tricky.  You are born into a circle of family and friends and you grow with them., you go to school and mature with them, so once you remove yourself from it and move you need to create a new circle in a new place. Almost always you have a culture that is vastly different to the one you are used to hence the term culture shock, the easiest way to remedy this is to look for the familiar, we have done that in spades, and the reason is that the familiarity is comforting.

 Modern technology allows us to find the comforts we need anywhere in the world, things like Facebook, where we belong to a group called South Africans In Dublin, has allowed us to meet people either in the same transition phase as ourselves or people who have done it and can offer sound advice. Even the way we live stream our old radio station through a media center brings certain amount of comfort, and Whackhead and sometimes Greg and Lucky into our everyday lives. However the feeling that there is something missing is always there in the background, you know deep down that you are a stranger, and at the same time you know that the longer you are away from your birthplace the stranger it will become.  It may sound odd but the idea of not belonging anywhere is very real. 

It’s important to remember that all this thinking and evaluating is in effect your psyches way of letting you know its adjusting to the new environment, of changing you ever so slightly so that you might fit into this new life, surrounded by new people, more easily. I’ve found myself using words that I’ve never used before so that I'm better understood, I see this in my kids too, all three of them have begun adjusting in their own ways and words slightly and their interests bending to suit their friends. We all crave acceptance and it’s to that end that we make those slight changes.

 I suppose it’s of great importance here that we as their parents don’t let them forget where it is that they come from, it’s in us, but that's because we left at an age where its ingrained in everything that we do. We identify as Africans, and specifically as South Africans. For the kids, they do not, they are too young to understand the significance of their heritage and their place in this world. Unless we show them they will never identify as Africans. Tayla especially, will never remember the time she spent there, and by the time she is old enough to know any better her passport will be a red European Union passport and not the dodgy Green Mamba we all have now.

In the end all this was explicitly introduced into our lives by our own doing, and I know for a certainty that given the opportunity to do it all again I would change not a single thing. We are all incredibly happy, it’s an awesome adventure, and I know that in the years to come when our children are settled in a stable country where there are jobs and there is a future we will have accomplished what we had set out to do in the first place. My hope for them is that when they have children they never need to consider taking the same steps we did, to guarantee them a future.

Garreth