A year ago today...

Today it is a year since I set off to Brazil, a year since I started this blog and a year in which I’ve met incredible people, seen some amazing places and learnt lots about God’s faithfulness wherever I am. It’s also been a year of hard things; feeling speechless with shyness in a new country, watching children I’ve come to love robbed of the kind of childhood I had and crying for hours on the plane home after saying goodbye to my Brazilian family and friends.

Over the past few weeks a few people have asked me to keep writing my blog. I still haven’t decided properly whether I’m going to but it seemed right to write some general thoughts today.

This weekend I met up with some other friends who’ve just come home from a year abroad as well and although we all have had completely different experiences there are some things that coming home has meant for all of us.

1. Suddenly you’re that slightly irritating ‘post gap-yah/yah abroad’ person with all those stories about “this one time on an obscure Nicaraguan island” or the time “you delivered puppies in the back of a Brazilian car”. I find myself daily apologising for how annoying I must be with yet another Brazil story or for laughing at some Portuguese joke on my phone that just can’t really be translated.

 2. Every so often slightly foreign grammar or vocab slips into English conversation. I found myself telling my dad that the time was “eight and fifteen” and I told a friend last week that someone “totally had the face of studying English”. The worst thing about this is you either look like you are incapable of speaking your mother tongue or like you are just doing it on purpose to remind everyone that you went on a year abroad. You also get frustrated that there’s not so good a way to express something as in your other language.

3. You have lots of people that you love in another country. I thought coming home would mean not missing out on big events in people’s lives as much or having to constantly calculate time difference but I was wrong! You also have a renewed love for the benefits of facebook and whatsapp and love (and yet also get a little bit sad) knowing what is going on since you left.

4. You look around at things back home in a different way. I often find myself looking at the English greenness or the Cambridge buildings or me and my family a bit like a tourist, like a Brazilian would. Gravy and fresh milk and custard are no longer taken for granted and yet you miss foods from where you were. Also you now know where you can buy obscure foreign items in England, or about that side-street Brazilian café that makes cochinhas, or where they make real paella.

5. You think you’re totally used to being back home and that you don’t miss it so much and then suddenly a song comes on shuffle or you look at a photo or it’s someone’s birthday and the nostalgia or ‘saudade’ (classic case of not a good enough word in English!) hits you. You realise that a little bit of ‘home’ and who you are is now somewhere else too. Life goes on and yet you desperately don’t want to leave behind everything that you’ve learnt and all that you experienced while away.

As a Christian this whole process of living abroad and moving back again and feeling like ‘home’ no longer just means one place has reinforced to me that home is not actually any of these places. The Bible says “We are foreigners and strangers in your sight, as were all our ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope” (1 Chronicles 29:15) because “our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20).

 I love Gloucestershire, I love Cambridge and I love Recife and yet all of them are places with lots of brokenness, whether that’s in the form of my own failure to behave and treat people as I should or in the form of homelessness, poverty, injustice or greed.  Real home with God is something so much better and lasting, where homesickness simply won’t exist and where all nations and classes and languages will be together. Being away and missing people only makes me more conscious of how amazing that will be and how much I want to make sure that one day I and the people I love are there.

I'm going to leave you with the exciting news that my Brazilian parents will soon be visiting. Prepare yourself UK (or potentially non-United K after tomorrow). In a very typical turn of events I skyped them to make plans, found myself talking to my Brazilian Mum at the dentist, the dentist soon came to join in on skype, and the waiting room joined in too. I miss Brazil!