About Turn
On Relocation: Learning, Unlearning and Relearning
I was sitting in Church one Sunday morning in July when the idea for this article first came to mind. An elderly woman was talking about the people who had helped with the Church cafe and didn’t take any of the money, and that somehow made her rather emotional. She then went on to talk about how to donate to little girls outside the country who wanted to go to school. When she finished, someone gave her a hug and a bouquet of flowers and as you may have guessed, there were some tears.
Every time I go to a Church here, it’s impossible to miss the difference between their conduct and how it is back home. They even seem to be practicing a different version of the faith altogether, but I digress not.
When you visit a place, you barely have any time to notice certain nuances, but you see everything when you live there. You also quickly discover that not everything is as it seemed from afar and that there is no utopia anywhere. As long as people are involved, there is some dysfunction.
When I first relocated, the concept of going about your daily activities unafraid of being shamed or ridiculed was foreign to me. I had always felt there was always someone somewhere watching. Imagine my surprise seeing people brazen enough to hold a cigarette in one hand and an inhaler in…
