Heads and Tails: A Reverse Culture Shock

I’m working as a bookkeeper in a local business that employs a team of Gen Xs and Ys. I look like most 60+ year olds: greying hair, conservative dress. I’m sure they categorise me as very ordinary – never had a life – in their opinion. They are the generation where the world is their oyster; exciting career opportunities and exhilarating experiences; the era of the Xtreme. The tales this lady could tell of her life adventures would knock their socks off – if they were ever interested enough to ask. Can you identify with this?

I lived in Africa for over ten years; the last three married to a Kenyan national.

Much has been written about culture shock, when first experiencing a foreign environment particularly in the third world. However, returning home, picking up the pieces of a previous (now foreign) lifestyle, can have a much greater impact and affect your life, for better or worse, for years to come. It’s called Reverse Culture Shock.

From my experience returning home, the first thing I noticed was that not only had the environment progressed, but my family and friends had all meandered along the regular path: kids, marriages and photos of grandchildren in brag books. I was not the same woman either. I looked a bit the same, but the me inside was someone now sitting in a box they couldn’t identify with, so they put the lid back on.

My sense of not belonging was overwhelming. Home was still Kenya where multiple families lived in a room or two within whispering distance of the neighbours. Home was still keeping all my belongings in a couple of cardboard cartons. Home was still my adopted African family; subsistence farmers surviving a day-to-day existence without electricity, sanitation and clean drinking water. Security was non-existent. AIDs and death touched every family – even ours. I became very ill. I had no option other than to return home, grief-stricken and suffering a severe dose of survivor guilt.

I had to remember to use a knife and fork and not eat with my fingers: not to carry a wad of loo paper in my handbag and not to mix Swahili words into my conversation. I could understand every word people said and not wonder if they were talking about me. Best of all I was regarded as poor, and not a white person with access to a bottomless well of cash. It took me less than a day to get used to hot showers and toilets that I often forgot to flush.

Meanwhile, my family and two indefatigable friends took me under their collective wing, pushing, prodding, dragging me any which way to get me back into the Australian culture. And along the way, filling me in on all the details of what’s what, what’s been happening and who’s who in the zoo.

My experiences in Africa are as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday. I cannot keep them under wraps any longer; they beg to be let out of the box and shared with any one interested. Some are funny, some sad. Some I think could not possibly be true.

I would like to share my journey with you, reminiscing about my life in Africa. It may awake a long-forgotten happening in your life and I would be privileged if you felt free to share it with me.