🐋 One might think that leaving your home country would cause ties to community to be severed, but in fact they are often enhanced when you go abroad. The biggest difference is that your sense of who is in your community expands when living overseas allowing you discover friendships that become timeless. 

🐈‍⬛ For my son’s 20th birthday, we had the great fortune to celebrate with friends that we met when Sean was six years old and while I was teaching in South Africa in 2012. Though our two families only spent the 2012-2013 school year getting to know each other better, our two families have kept in contact all this time. While walking along Lovers Point in Pacific Grove, California, our three children (now in their early 20’s) discussed the advantages and disadvantages of their being “Third Culture Kids.” According to these young people, the connections formed abroad can sometimes seem deeper and more meaningful than most of the ones they have made upon their return to America. There are a few reasons that might be contributing to this. First, they felt that while abroad, they (and everyone else associated with them) were keenly aware that their time at any one location may be limited because most expat families move every few years. When your timeline for meeting people and building a community is sped up, how you approach social settings is as well. Thus, most people they encountered abroad refrained from indulging in a lot of small-talk and instead chose to jump right into deeper conversations meant to form stronger bonds quicker.

🛥️ The consequences of making faster and deeper bonds also led to greater social risks being taken without many people overthinking their decisions. Therefore, it wasn’t unusual for people overseas to decide to go on vacation for a week with people after just meeting them. Whereas here in America, most families and friends will hardly go out of town for a weekend with one another, let alone make many plans to meet up for dinner midweek even if they live nearby. Proof of this was how our two families decided to spend our fall break together after knowing each other for only a month. Our fast friendship led us to take an action-packed vacation that started with us literally running to catch our plane to Cape Town, hot tubbing on a rooftop while watching whales migrating in Hermanus, and swimming with penguins in Simon’s Town rocky pools. Together we discovered just how much we had missed Mexican food when we chose to eat at the same Mexican restaurant off of Long Street in Cape Town for dinner, left-overs for breakfast, and then dinner again.

🇺🇲 Another fascinating realization the young people shared was that their time abroad gave them a broader sense of what it means to be a citizen of the world and what it means to have nationalistic pride. They discussed how sometimes they felt greater pride in their national heritage while abroad, especially when celebrating International Week, than they felt when they actually were living back in the states. Perhaps this was due to them seeing and feeling what it can be like to live in other countries whose citizens do not have the same freedom of religion, speech, and gender equality that we as Americans usually enjoy while back home. However, when they were back in the states, they discovered that it was often harder to relate to people from America because they may not have grown up watching the same television shows or attending the same types of school events like Friday Night Football and Proms while they were living overseas. Yet, that ability to think more critically about what it actually means to have national pride and to recognize which values you have chosen to accept into your own life rather than just naively accepting things as they are because of some blind allegiance has connected them better to the world and their chosen communities because they have a better understanding of who they are in those spaces.

🪨 Over the past thirteen years, our two families have acted like touchstones to one another. Anytime I was feeling discombobulated or misunderstood by family, friends, or society in general, I knew that I could call or hang out with anyone from their family and instantly I would feel grounded again. Because of our shared experiences traveling together and our common experiences living in a variety of places around the globe we have the ability to speak freely with one another without judgement about our future plans and thoughts about current events. Additionally, we have chosen to celebrate some of our families’ biggest milestones (usually reserved for close family) such as birthdays and graduations, along with holidays like Thanksgiving together. The strong connections our two families have made over time demonstrates how easily you can forge your own supportive community in the most distant of places and in the most unexpected ways.