Home is where the heart is… or something like that

For national and international migrants, there is almost no harder question to answer than “Where is home?” or “Where are you from?” Generally, some people consider home to be a place or building while others think of home as certain people. Some might even consider home to be a feeling.  For expatriates and national migrants, in particular, the concept of home is most often fluid and not tied to a singular place or person.

22-year-old international student Rena Ketelsen is one of those who have uprooted their lives to try their luck in another country. The urge to leave her home country had been living in her heart for as long as she could remember. While most of her high school classmates decided to remain in Germany after graduation, she didn’t feel the need to stay. So, she decided to enroll in Morningside University in the United States and start a new adventure as an international student.

“The reason why I came to the US is just because I wanted to try something completely different” Rena recalled and added that another big part of her decision had to do with getting away from home. Further reminiscing about her decision, she said, “I think everybody at some point wants to get away from their family. I just went as far away as I could.”

Rena’s move to the US was not the first time she had changed her address. Originally, she was born in Birmingham, England but at the age of three, her family moved to Germany. In Germany, the Ketelsens then changed cities another two times and finally ended up in Wrestedt a year before Rena came to the US. This has made 15 years the longest period that Rena has ever lived in the same place.

So, what does home mean to a person like Rena Ketelsen whose location of home has changed more than just once?

Rena generally thinks that “Whenever you go somewhere, you lose a piece of yourself there – even if it’s just a week.” The result, she said, is that “I don’t really have one home. My home is here at Morningside University. I’ve lived here for over three years. But at the same time obviously, my parents, my parents’ house, my siblings, just Germany, in general, is also home because I’ve lived there all my life.” Home to her, in the end “is mostly the people” rather than a specific place.

Answering the question of home becomes an even more complicated task when one considers factors like the feeling of national belonging or geographical technicalities such as borders. One to know that struggle is international student Annemiek Goedhart who is from a German town called Emmerich right on the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

Despite having lived at her parent’s house in Germany almost her entire life, she said “I usually say I’m from the Netherlands because it’s easier.” Thinking about it more deeply she added that she considers herself Dutch mainly because of her family’s origins but also because she spent the majority of her time in a Dutch city near the border. Both her school and her soccer club were in the Netherlands which resulted in most of her social contacts being Dutch as well.

No matter her national identity, however, until she moved to the US for college, she had always considered her home the place where she lived with her family. “The first semester, the US definitely felt just as kind of a second home,” Annemiek said about how her concept of home changed with her move. “But then after that, I realized that I was like, “Oh, can we go home?” and it’d be Dimmitt.” She added, “I feel like this [Morningside University] is my home right now. But then whenever I go home, it never really feels like I left.”

Because of that, similar to Rena, Annemiek also thinks of home as more than just one place or person. “I think it’s more the people I’m surrounded with,” she said and explained that while being in the US she misses her family but when going home for break, she finds herself missing her friends from college.

In the end, Annemiek, Rena, and the rest of the 272 million expatriates worldwide have one tool that enables them to stay in touch with whatever their definition of home is – video chatting. That may not provide an easier answer to the question of where their home is. However, it certainly gives them the possibility to connect and combine their several concepts of home into their unique version of it.