Being foreigner is encountering with alterity all the time, whether in habits, in the way of expressing yourself, in food or in the way that people socialize. It is a process of feeling a complete strange, by being a new world, to an adaptation that makes the world not so strange, that is when everything becomes familiar.
I was a foreigner, living in other countries, twice. The first time, during my adolescence, in New Zealand, and the second, recently, in Uganda. Even though the experiences were completely different, the process that I’ve described at the beginning was exactly the same, a strange feeling that became familiar.
In addition, there is also the fact of being away from all of those that would comfort me and from not having people to share with.
I could share my experiences in three phases: the first one, that began in estrangement and discovery; the second, that covers adaptation (the best one in my opinion); and the third one; homesickness. Living each one of them, however, changed something inside me, whether by getting out of my comfort zone, whether by encountering with some challenges that weren’t necessary before, whether by trying a new food, whether by talking to strangers or sleeping at places that I didn’t even know that existed before.
That being said, I believe that living abroad is such an extreme while internal process, by the fact that the context is guided all the time by a discovery to a new world, since at the same time that the physical environment is new, there is news about ourselves, about self knowledge, by discovering things that were untouchable before.
Thus, I encountered myself all the time questioning what was already given, accepting that the different wasn’t necessarily better or worse,but simply different, and it was up to me, at the end of the day, to adapt myself. And this is what makes this experience so addictive, since each lived experience, I had to lose ground to sum up and transform myself.