Bolton: Fragments of home from a life of relocation

Traditionally, the word “home” evokes the location in which one lives or has the most connection. However, lately, my life has been fragmented over several locations. My wife, Emily, and I live in London most of the time, but once a month I travel to Haiti, working on Outreach International’s school reconstruction program. On several of these trips, I stop in Independence, where Outreach International is based, where my parents live and I have my permanent address.

I have become increasingly attached to these places as I have spent more time in them. I love London’s cosmopolitan culture, art and architecture. I like the ease and convenience of public transportation and being able to buy almost anything I would need within a 10- to 15-minute walk.

In Independence, I enjoy spending time with the many family and friends I have in the area, the restaurants of Kansas City and engaging with my colleagues at Outreach International’s headquarters. Since it is where my mother grew up, I feel I have roots there.

At the same time, Haiti is growing on me. Port-au-Prince has an immense energy. I admire the fortitude, courage and sheer will to overcome great odds that one finds in that troubled but lively island.

But neither London, Independence, nor Port-au-Prince is where I grew up (Leicester, England) nor where I have spent the most time as an adult (Lamoni, Iowa). And, my career has pushed and pulled me through Bosnia, Zambia, Iraq, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda in the years since I graduated from college in 2001.

So does that mean I don’t have a home? Possibly. Sometimes I find it difficult to answer the question, “Where are you from?” That question implicitly assumes that people are, in essence, spawned from a very particular place on a map, which remains your “home” no matter where you go.

At the same time, the alternative adage, “home is where you lay your head” seems highly detached from the world and the human communities around a person. It suggests that one has no obligation or connection to any place or people.

“Where is my home?” is one of the persistent and enduring questions that bubbles up in my times of reflection and repose. As the world becomes more mobile and as people move to find work in these difficult economic times, we will increasingly have to face this issue, of what it means to have roots, when one is a like a tumbleweed rolling from one place to the next?

Traditionally, the word “home” evokes the location in which one lives or has the most connection. However, lately, my life has been fragmented over several locations. My wife, Emily, and I live in London most of the time, but once a month I travel to Haiti, working on Outreach International’s school reconstruction program. On several of these trips, I stop in Independence, where Outreach International is based, where my parents live and I have my permanent address.

I have become increasingly attached to these places as I have spent more time in them. I love London’s cosmopolitan culture, art and architecture. I like the ease and convenience of public transportation and being able to buy almost anything I would need within a 10- to 15-minute walk.

In Independence, I enjoy spending time with the many family and friends I have in the area, the restaurants of Kansas City and engaging with my colleagues at Outreach International’s headquarters. Since it is where my mother grew up, I feel I have roots there.

At the same time, Haiti is growing on me. Port-au-Prince has an immense energy. I admire the fortitude, courage and sheer will to overcome great odds that one finds in that troubled but lively island.

But neither London, Independence, nor Port-au-Prince is where I grew up (Leicester, England) nor where I have spent the most time as an adult (Lamoni, Iowa). And, my career has pushed and pulled me through Bosnia, Zambia, Iraq, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda in the years since I graduated from college in 2001.

So does that mean I don’t have a home? Possibly. Sometimes I find it difficult to answer the question, “Where are you from?” That question implicitly assumes that people are, in essence, spawned from a very particular place on a map, which remains your “home” no matter where you go.

At the same time, the alternative adage, “home is where you lay your head” seems highly detached from the world and the human communities around a person. It suggests that one has no obligation or connection to any place or people.

Perhaps for me home is more akin to a shifting network of connections, some more dense, some more shallow, that span many different locations. Sometimes the network is centered more in one location, at other times it is more diffuse. Sometimes, it remains fairly predictable, at other times it is in flux. It is a relationship with a variety of places and people that changes and moves, just as time itself never stands still.

For even if one lives in the same town one’s whole life, it is not the same place today that it was two decades ago. People are born, people die. New people move in, others go away. Businesses start up, others fail; some expand, some contract. No matter where we call “home,” it will never remain a fixed, static ideal, it will always require new thinking, new negotiations, new relationships and new ways of doing things.