Homesick

I am surprised that it has taken this long for homesickness to hit me. It's not severe at all, and I am still certainly enjoying myself, but I am also getting wistful for being back in my own home and puttering about in my garden and drinking coffee out of my own coffee mug.

When I first arrived, I was moderately bewildered by all the new stuff I had to navigate not to mention classes to prepare, so I had no time to even think about home. I also wisely got involved in making presentations early on -- I was in front of a high school class my fourth day in Daugavpils -- and being busy helped immensely. If I could give one piece of advice to a new Fulbrighter, it would be to get involved in your new community immediately.

As I settled in, though, I got to the point where Daugavpils started feeling like a place I lived and not just a temporary way station where I existed. It is of course both: I've been here now for four months and am now looking at the final month or so I have left before I leave. I have noticed that when I walk on the pedestrian mall or along the Daugava River, or when I relax in the sauna following a swim at the university pool, that I see people I know, and I greet them and have light conversation. I have a network of acquaintances, a community of sorts.

That said, I'm in the community but not entirely of the community. Not having either language spoken here means that I can't engage much further than light conversation, and that is something that I am missing. Conversations in English here are massively rewarding with Latvians, but they are also a considerable amount of work. They're often stilted and one-sided as my friends struggle to find the way to say what they want to say. Thankfully, they don't worry about grammar much with me, or at least not as much as they used to, so conversations don't devolve into grammar lessons.

I miss the English language -- both hearing it and reading it -- in a lot of ways. In particular, I miss being able to read a newspaper, or at least read one when I'm not sitting at my laptop. I haven't been able to take part in all the political action in the States that is the Resistance because it's harder to do from here. Putting my name on online petitions is easy, but making international phone calls to legislators is not, with the time difference and cost ($5 to $7 a call, generally). Rallies and meetings are mostly impossible. I have been mostly content to watch the endless battles and mess of the Trump administration from afar, but now I am feeling as if I want to put on some battle gear myself and jump into the fray.

On further reflection, it may be that homesickness hits precisely when you feel settled because you know that settled feeling is going to be temporary once you pack up and head home. My fellow Fulbrighter Justine has been here since September, so she has had a full nine months here. She mentioned in one of our conversations that maybe the five-month stint that I have is a better model because it's hard to get that settled and then have to give it all up. She is concerned about re-entering the American mode of life because she is now so used to doing things the Latvian way. I suspect that I will not have this problem -- or at least not acutely -- but I will be interested in seeing how my return to the States plays out in the long run.

What I am sure of, though, is that I will have the same experience that one of my favorite English writers, Rumer Godden, had about her childhood. She and her family moved from London at the outbreak of the First World War to India, where her father had business, and she returned to England when she was a pre-teen to attend boarding school. For the rest of her life, she went back and forth between the two countries, probably staying in England more in the long run, but always feeling homesick for one country or the other. I expect that I will have the same experience. My first week home, I will not be able to get salāti grieku at my local supermarket. I will no longer find harčo among the soups on a restaurant menu. I will no longer see people walking around with flowers in their arms because they someone they know has a birthday or name day. And, invariably, I will say, "I wish I were in Latvia."