Finding One's Tribe: The Immigrant's Challenge

Summer of 1984, I was on a road trip, touring Midwest zoos. At the St. Louis Zoo, I came across a pen demonstrating an experimental procedure to save an endangered species of zebra. Using in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, the vets implanted zebra embryos in horses, who then carried the baby zebras to term. Which meant a zebra could produce more eggs and more than one foal in a year, while not enduring the risk of labor.

There was a newborn, in all its striped glory, leaning against mama palomino’s haunch, while its gaze was fixed on the next pen over—where the zebras were. It knew. It recognized its kin and knew where it belonged.

We Are Herd Animals

Zebras aren’t the only ones. There is something about the human psyche, as well, that we gravitate to our own. Children in a new playground look around for others their own age. When I attended my first group meeting for people with mental illness, Peer to Peer - oh my gosh - for the first time in months of isolation, I could relax. Around the world, tourists get a thrill when they meet somebody from home. Expats huddle in groups.

We can take it too far. We can use our in-group as a shield to avoid the growth and understanding that come from the encounter with what or who is different. But there is a balance to be sought between comfort and growth. The comfort of a familiar base can be just that, a base—from which to launch into the new.

Among the losses that expats and immigrants experience is the loss of community, the herd in which we can relax. Finding that new herd is one of our most important developmental challenges—to give us the sense of safety that allows us to reach out and grow into our new home.

Finding a New Community

So how do we do it? How do we find a new community?

The first step is to leave one’s comfort zone and enter a new place: a coffee shop, a pub, a church, a community event. Look at a library bulletin board and find a meeting to attend. Even the local shop will do, if you start a conversation.

That’s the second step, a conversation. That is when you begin to find something in common with the other. First conversations with a stranger are just that, a search for something in common.

Where are you from? 
I grew up in Colorado, but most recently I lived in Oregon. 
My daughter is going to school in Oregon!
Oh yeah? Where? 
It’s a small school in Portland called Lewis and Clark. 
I went to Reed. It’s just across the river . . .
Small world . . . 

My next book, A Gritty Little Tourist Town: Bar Tales from Costa Rica, is about the community that started in a bar—my sister’s bar, the Pato Loco. The first thing that people had in common—beer. It developed from there, as people told their stories

Next Step: Participation

Communities develop when people do things together. At the Pato Loco, it was story-telling. But then it became a group project, throwing a Christmas party for neighborhood children. Golf buddies, girl’s boat trip, painting classes. Each event building a more solid base from which to move out into a foreign environment.

It could be a choir, a hiking or swimming group, a neighborhood clean-up project, a political demonstration. For the suddenly shy, side by side activity can ease the discomfort. For anyone—the activity provides a conversation beyond the weather.

Next thing you know, one is doing something for the other: a lift home in the rain, sharing an abundance of the crop of apples, recommending a good dentist. More to talk about the next time you see them.

And soon you have a friend.

I have a story about that woman in the photo above with the accordion. She used to intimidate me. Which was a problem, because we had to work together. Now we are friends. Well, she still intimidates me. But we shared a joke, and now we are friends. But the story is long, and maybe the joke isn’t as funny to people who don’t know us as it is to the two of us. So I won’t share it right now.

But that also is how to make a friend, share a joke that others wouldn’t appreciate as much as the two of you do.

What If You Don’t Speak the Language?

Okay, yeah, that’s an issue. That’s worth another post.

Those of you who have moved from your home to another place—how have you formed community?