Where is home?

Where is home?

This seems like such a simple question. Yet, for many within the world today, the answer is much different than each one of them probably ever expected it would be.
With a growing number of refugees internationally, globalization and changes in borders and boundaries drawn by men, the answers to this question are both metaphysical and tied to people and place.

If you're wondering how could this be, I'll ask you to contemplate a situation. Imagine that you could not return to the place you loved most, the place where you knew the traditions, how to act, the language, the foods, a place where you were loved and somehow just fit right in. Indeed, you would carry it in your heart like a precious jewel.

So, too, in the age of globalization, a growing number of citizens seek the place that beckons them, the place where they can live to the fullest, offer the most to the world for whatever reason. Some admittedly have lived within their native lands as foreigners, strangers and/or slaves with no ties to the land or its customs, merely experiences to build upon.

For humanitarians, the answer is so very often both metaphysical and tied to people and place. After all, we are all ONE. In that oneness, everywhere is one place and each place is a reflection of every other place. Lands are all at once distant and right here right now within one's minds eye. Yet, the place humanitarians and world citizens often call home is either within the land where they become a more engaged citizen or within the land or place that empowered them to do so.

Interesting, isn't it?

During my time in Huai hua, Hunan Province China, I met persons from more than 60 countries. Some had travelled to many lands seeking health and restoration. Others had travelled and lived abroad for business, educational reasons or for personal reasons, including fleeing persecution due to governmental changes. Yet, the place that each of them called home was as individual as each of them.

One man I met was Saudi Arabian by birth but raised in Italy. He fought the Italian government as a young man for many years, when the government seized his family's lands and cheated them. For years, he lived in Ethiopia and rather paradoxically found himself applying for a visa to live with his family in Saudi Arabia. Because his parents were born there and his brother, as well, they could claim the Saudi nationality. My friend could NOT! Yet, Saudi Arabia was the place he called home.

He was an incredibly gracious and appreciative man who shared his adventures in Italy and his love of the culture, and his love of Ethiopian music. He could talk about the vast and varied changes in many lands and articulate the facts with personal stories. Yet, no matter, where his business led him, he always returned to Saudi Arabia before his visa expired. Despite or inspite of every circumstance, it was home.