Category: Home

Where is home?

‘Home is where the heart is’. How often have we heard this expression when being reassured that our physical surroundings are not necessarily vital? Working for many years with TCKs (Third Culture Kids) whose passport identity hardly matched the reality of where they were born or where they had spent much of their life, I recall many a conversation about where home really was. (Tip: never ask a TCK ‘where are you from?’ unless you want to cause significant introspection!) I am a TCK – born in Nigeria, brought up in Ghana and schooled in Scotland – and I know something of what it is to wonder where home is.

Some of you will have seen the Oscar-winning film, ‘Nomadland’, and no doubt others hope to return soon to seeing it on the big screen in a cinema. Spoiler alert… The central character, Fern, wrestles with the idea of home. She has lost husband, job and house but insists she is not homeless, just house less. ‘Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?’ is the refrain in the film.

For all the sense of community, generosity and beauty of nature experienced by the characters in the film (and many are real life modern nomads), there is little sense of the Hope Christians have of life after death – merely a vague sense of afterlife. Christians have confidence in a glorious homecoming to our real ‘passport country’, where a place has been prepared for us. Let’s do what we can to share this Hope with others as we journey through our nomadic life on earth.

(With thanks to an article by Rachel Smith for LICC)

Where are you from?

How often in conversation, especially with those we have recently met, do we hear the question: ‘Where are you from?‘ Whilst travelling in India, especially on the trains, I would often be asked ‘Where is your native place?‘ Then the question might be, ‘What is your good name?‘ and even, ‘What is your salary?’

As a TCK (Third Culture Kid), I find this question difficult to answer. I will often pause momentarily to try and gauge the questioner’s actual interest in my answer – and then respond accordingly. I might mention where I am living currently (Redditch, UK) or simply say that I’m British. If I’m being a little mischievous I may say I am Scottish (and note the reaction). If pressed on the latter statement I will be forced to say that I have a Scottish father (and English mother) but went to school in Scotland and worked there for twelve years – where my three children were born. Usually by this point in an initial conversation the topic will move on – the questioner was probably not that interested in my origins and was simply being polite.

And yet for me, the question of where I’m from resonates deeply. I was born in Nigeria, lived in Ghana for 15 years and (as already indicated) attended boarding school in Scotland. I married at university and then worked in Bedford, England, for three years before moving to near Perth (Scotland – not Australia) for twelve and then crossed the Wall again to live in Cheltenham for five years. Thereafter, we all moved as a family to India for nine years before returning for a further nine years to the south coast of England and, more recently, to the English Midlands. That’s over 15 different houses in my married life of over forty years. So, which one is home?

As with most TCKs, it’s not what it says in my passport that identifies where home is for me. I don’t look typically Nigerian (nor Ghanaian) – nor do I appear to be from Asia – and yet there is something very homelike when I go to West Africa, even to India. It has something to do with the colours, the smells, the childhood memories and, especially, the warmth of the people. Each time I have moved on to a new location, there has been a wrench but the transition has become easier simply because I have done it several times before. It is less to do with place and more to do with people. Less to do with roots and more to do with rhythm in my life.

I have just finished reading Jo Swinney’s book, ‘Home: the quest to belong‘, and this has helped a great deal in making mores sense of the question, ‘Where are you from?’ Jo is also a TCK (she spent much of her early life in Portugal) and, interestingly, attended Dean Close in Cheltenham as a boarder at much the same time I was there in the late 1990s. As a Christian, Jo Swinney weaves her faith into the book but she is also very down to earth, frank and realistic. Like me, she is still on a journey to our eventual home – heaven (listen to Jesus’ words to His disciples about His Father’s house having many rooms) – but in the meantime concludes as follows, and this is good enough for me, too, for the present: ‘Home is the place where we live (now)…is among the people who love us…is our culture, the language we speak, the food we eat, the books we read and the jokes we find funny. Home is our country, the landscapes and weather systems and the architecture. Home is within ourselves. Home is where we belong, the place we come back to. Home is the end of our quest‘.