The Life of an Immigrant - Where is Home?

Two years on now, I am an immigrant living in Ireland. Taking stock again.

Helen and I have had friends visiting from the States for Holy Week. Lots of church, lots of interactions with our communities, in church, coffee shops, out walking. People tell them how well we have fit into this community. Two years on and we are a part of it, part of them.

It is not always so. Some immigrants tell us, and some complain on social media that it is hard to make friends, that the Irish are friendly on the surface, but don’t let new people “in.” It’s understandable, especially in the west, in villages where friendship groups were formed fifty years ago in one room schoolhouses. They knew each other before they had electricity. People here a mere twenty years are still newcomers.

My wife and I will never not be newcomers. But we do have a place here. I think we came with experience and a set of skills about how to join a different culture, starting with a keen awareness that it is a different culture.

Is this home?

A friend who emigrated from Germany after World War II and has lived in the US for seventy years now told me “You will never have a home again.” Seventy years, and the US never became who she is. Meanwhile, post-war Germany is not the Germany in which she grew up. It’s a foreign country to her now. She has no home.

I do understand what she means. Always a newcomer in Ireland, while the US becomes a different country before our eyes.

A Irish friend told me that whenever they wanted to express how wonderful something was, they used to say, “How American!” They don’t say that anymore.

As much as it pains me, I can’t not follow the news from the US:

• Even if I ignored the news, the Irish don’t. That’s their culture. They understand that what happens far away from them has the power to change their lives. They love to talk politics. They have to talk politics. The fever dream of somebody across the ocean is wrecking the income of our Dublin cab driver.

• People I love in the US are being hurt, threatened, lives disrupted, losing jobs, forced to move for safety. I care, personally, intimately, about what is happening there.

• And strange as it may seem to people in the US, even if it weren’t personal, I care—because I am a human being. The suffering of one is the suffering of all.

Every morning I say my prayers: Lord, keep this nation under your care; and guide us in the way of justice and peace.

I wonder which nation I mean. Which nation in my prayers is this nation? Both, I suppose. Though my understanding has not yet expanded to the whole of Ireland. County Kerry—that is my home. Or the Dingle peninsula. Or my own little village.

Home begins not in a fragile nuclear family, but in a village. I think I am home after all.

I am curious how others experience this. Do expats have a different take than those of us who call ourselves immigrants?