It’s the little things that you miss the most.
The freedom of leaving your bike unattended. Not having to ration your internet download. The assumption that every hot-dog will be paired with mustard.
Those were the things I longed for the most when I left the United States to live overseas for half my life. Naturally, I also missed my friends and extended family, the safety of our suburban lives, and the predictable changes of seasons. But those little things were a constant reminder of being a foreigner in strange lands. Make no mistake, as a Brazilian-American, I was already accustomed with the duality of my existence. Two languages, two passports, two cultures. Yet the move to Africa felt like being uprooted from the snugness of my comfortable dichotomous world. And I didn’t like it… in the beginning.
Mozambique was my home for four years.
At first, I resented the nine-hour time difference, which kept me from calling my friends in the States regularly. My accent was often ridiculed by the Portuguese-speaking locals. I feared the reckless drivers, who would eventually claim the lives of some of my schoolmates. I looked with suspicion at the heavily armed guards in gated communities. I strongly resisted having to eat a hot dog with ketchup instead of mustard. But...
...mostly, I just missed home.
Then I started looking at those same small things from a Mozambican perspective.
I learned to laugh off jokes about Americans from my new international group of friends. I found out that learning a few sentences in Xangana, the local language, would score me major points with the locals. I started an inventory of all the exotic meats and foods I would eat and saved my YouTube-binge-watching for the free promotions during the weekends. Then something unexpected happened:
I started feeling comfortable.
If not, at least molded by my new environment. I agreed to spend time with a Peace Corp volunteer in a remote village a few hours from the capital. I dared a group of friends to help me clean up a local mangrove. I was more at ease in Mozambique, but I also had my breaking points. Feeding comatose HIV-positive babies in an underfunded orphanages drove me to tears and made me miss the comforts and safety of home terribly.
Adapting became a way of life.
In Nicaragua, I was the new kid in school (again!) in a tightly-knit group of students who had known each other since kindergarten. Some things were still similar: armed guards in every corner or the appalling lack of mustard.
But once again I had to re-learn how to listen and find areas of common interest. I knew when to let the die-hard Nicaraguan soccer fans win in soccer or how to convince friends to create an aerospace club during an earthquake-induced school closure that lasted a few months. But...
...by then, I just knew better.
I would eventually return to the New York City; my home, to which these lessons proved useful.
While I found solace in being able to enjoy the small treasures of the daily life I held dear, I knew I had changed myself. I didn’t take things at face value anymore, even things I considered natural or normal. I began to ask questions and look for answers. Friends always talk to me as if I were doing the world a favor by living abroad. But I never saw it that way. I was just trying to live a new life and make the best of it – not with any grand gestures of saving the world but with small acts of empathy that proved self-serving and altruistic at the same time.
But in each chapter of my life, I was just looking for a home - like a choose-your-own adventure book.
And I think; overall, the best adventure is still yet to come.