Keeping in contact with friends in your home country

Leaving your home country often involves a flurry of quick goodbyes to friends and family, and promises of “I’ll write!”, but many people’s experiences show that it is not easy to keep in contact with those back home.

One of the main reasons for this is that it does take much more effort to write to someone than to communicate with them in our normal day to day, face to face interactions. Many feel they are too busy, or the person slips from their mind because they don’t see them regularly. Realise that not all your friends who promised they would write will do so, and rather focus on those who are committed to maintaining contact. The quality of communication will be better when you have five friends to write to than trying to keep fifteen up to date with your new life.

Before you leave, try to gauge how interested various friends are in keeping contact, and discuss with them how you will do so. Try to set up a reliable way to get in touch with them as soon as possible after your arrival.

Nowadays there are many tools that are available to keep in touch. Consider investing in a notebook with a built-in camera – seeing the other person you are talking to can really make conversations come alive – and they are much less hassle than a separate webcam. You can take your laptop with you on business trips as well. Find out about the cost of phoning between countries (international call cards are often quite cheap) or use a programme such as Skype to make calls over the internet. Sign up for an online photo album, such as flickr, and upload photos regularly. Your annotations and the pictures of your environment are much more successful than letters in giving your loved ones a clear idea of what it is like to be you in your new home. Putting your profile onto a social networking site such as facebook will allow friends and family to view your site, and see what is happening in your life without having an email from you – this is especially helpful for those who are poor at keeping in touch. Social networking sites are a useful tool as each time you add or update your site, all your friends are automatically notified thereof when they log onto the site. Consider starting up a blog as on online diary.

Another topic to address is the content of what you write. Communication between friends often deteriorates when you can no longer relate to each other’s lives and experiences. What often happens is the person in the host country writes of their exciting new experiences, all the places they have visited, etc, and the person in the home country feels they have nothing to say because their life has stayed the same. When communicating with those in your home country, highlight day to day life – something funny one of your children said, an experience while grocery shopping, a good book you read – your friends need to know that you’re still the same person and they will feel more at ease with topics they can relate to. In talking about your new experiences, be careful not to boast about new luxuries you may have, your excellent financial situation, all the travel and holidays you are going on, etc. Friends may experience jealousy, and you also need to let them know about frustrations and problems you have to deal with. Also, communicating about your thoughts, emotions, etc will keep them more connected to you than long stories of where you went and what you saw. When things are not going well, and in the process of adjusting to culture shock you are feeling negative about the country and culture in which you find yourself, be careful not to use them to just ‘offload’ on and rant about all the things that frustrate and annoy you.

Friends and family at home can be a great support to you and provide an important link to your culture. They are usually your main social network in your first few weeks of being in a new country. Remember to thank them for keeping in touch with you and for being willing to put in the additional time and effort.