Coming Home

“It is guaranteed that you will return changed to some extent by your experiences.

Even if you were overseas for only a week, you may have witnessed a way of life and a level of poverty that you would never have seen before.”

What happens after your placement, when you come back home? For many people, this can be a time of confusion and of differing emotions. You might have been gone for anything from a few weeks to over a year. You’ll probably have mixed emotions about returning– you’ll be looking forward to seeing family and friends, you might even be relieved at leaving your host country, but you may also be sad at leaving new friends, not to mention the experiences, sights and sounds of what had become your temporary home. It may be necessary to consider issues relating to both your physical and mental health.

You might ask yourself: is that it? Do you just get on with your life and leave your overseas experiences behind you – a distant memory which occasionally emerges on hearing a certain sound or smelling a distinct, hopefully pleasant, odour? How will your friends and family react to your experiences? How indeed will you react to those experiences? Rather than filing them off in your mind, you might want to actively recall them. You might wish to capitalise on and delve deeper into the new knowledge that you’ve gained through your experiences volunteering overseas. Perhaps you might be spurred on to further action, so impressed (or depressed) you were with what you saw, experienced and learnt. Whatever you decide to do, there are a wide variety of ways in which you can use your experiences to your own benefit, hopefully to the benefit of those you left behind, and maybe even to the benefit of the world itself.