Where’s home?

Kids who grow up across cultures and countries often get mildly flummoxed by the innocuous question “Where are you from?” Of course it’s common enough for Nigerians to ‘be from’ a place they’ve never actually visited, but we’re a fairly complicated mixture.

For now, the answer is that we have multiple homes.

Eternally speaking, God’s place is our home.

Frivolously speaking, ‘home’ is wherever we are not currently, as in “when I get home…”

Our colleague Arams has lived for several years in a moderately large town 2 hours away from his ‘home’ of Nkojo, where Elizabeth and I visited last Sunday. Many of the new urbanised generation grow up outside their home language area and their parents may not speak to them in the ‘home’ language, but in a second language.

Anyway, for us, the next few months will change these charts a bit as we inject a little more UK time into the mix. Maybe when we head back to Nigeria we’ll remember to post an update.

Note that India, Tanzania and USA just get some passing mentions, so you can hardly see them on the chart, and several European countries (and Thailand) some of us have visited for a few days here or there, but not quite worth counting. All the rest are countries we’ve actually lived in for a year or more.

Note 2: Why do Nigerian friends often ‘come from’ somewhere they’ve never visited? Because depending on the tribe, you’re ‘from’ where your father or mother is from even if you’ve never been there.