
BY OLIVIA LITTLE
âIt quickly starts to feel like youâre a foreigner in your own home,â Suzyo Suman Bavi says reflecting on his visit home to Zambia, Africa after living in Oakville.
After being away for a long time, returning home can be difficult. Just like moving to a new country, returning home takes readjustment and can result in reverse culture shock.
âReverse culture shock happens when you go back to your home country or original environment, resulting in an emotional reaction of anxiety or depression,â says Bavi, a counsellor at Sheridan. âYou feel low, isolated, lonely, confused, a full mix of emotions.â
Bavi has experienced this first hand.
âAlways the first thing that hits you is the jet lag and trying to adjust to the time difference,â says Bavi. âYou wake up at odd times and you canât sleep. It causes you to feel very disoriented, physically, emotionally and psychologically.â
Bavi says that the excitement of being home will often keep the emotions at bay at first and calls this the âhoneymoonâ phase.
âOnce you start getting out, it can start to get hard to make sense of things. Maybe the driving culture is different; possibly the side of the road that people are driving on is different, mannerisms, honking, the amount of people around, it can all hit you,â says Bavi. âIt can be a lot to take in in a short period of time.â
First-year Animation student Uriya Jan, 18, says that arriving home to Kazakhstan after living abroad for the year, she noticed cultural differences instantly.
âI got used to English speech everywhere and then when I arrived to the airport, everyone was speaking in their Russian or Kazak language. It felt so different. It even took me some time to recognize my national language,â Jan says. â[I also noticed] everyone was a little ruder than people in Canada, the people in my hometown are loud and they shout.â
Jan says she didnât consider reverse culture shock when leaving to return home.
âMy parents wanted to see me and so I had a reason to go back home. I didnât think anything about getting used to the culture, it was just about going back to see my family,â she says. âBut you have to get used to the different time [zone], the weather, different food.â
Bavi believes reverse culture shock sneaks up on people.
âI think a lot of [students] donât really put much thought into it. They just pack their bags and theyâre just excited to see their families. I think thatâs why a lot of them get really hit when they go back because theyâre still thinking of their home country the way they left it. What they donât realize is that things couldâve changed there. They also may not realize that while being [in Canada], they have also changed and have learned a new way of doing things.â
Second-year Animation student Linh Do, 21, has also experienced reverse culture shock when returning to her home in Prague.
She says that when she was on the airplane returning to her home country she felt more like she was leaving her home than going to it.
âWhen youâre [living abroad] your life is kind of split between two countries,â says Do. âThere was a lot of sadness, and alienation and not being able to explain it fully. Youâve made that choice to study abroad and so itâs also a choice as to whether you are going to see those feelings as something that can damage you or to just accept them as a part of you.â
Do says that returning home made her realize how much living abroad had made her grow up and change over the year.

âSo many things had happened to me, so many changes, but then I came home and nothing really changed, everything was the same and everyone was doing the same thing,â she says. âAll the familiar places that youâve gone to a thousand times when you were a teenager, theyâre still all the same but itâs you who has changed, your perspective on everything is completely different.â
Bavi says that itâs not only international students who experience reverse culture shock.
âIt can apply to locals too, those students who are coming in from remote areas of rural Canada,â he says. âThat same phenomenon of reverse culture shock can occur as long as youâre moving from one culture to another.â
In particular, Bavi helped one student through reverse culture shock when they returned to their home, a small homogeneous community in a remote part of Northern Ontario.
âThe weatherâs different, itâs much warmer here and colder there, the days are shorter, the food is different and so he became very agitated and got into a lot of arguments with his family,â he says. âAt one point he even wanted to cut his vacation short and to come back early.â
Bavi says the student found it difficult to share his experiences from Oakville because he felt that his friends and family no longer understood him.
âHe ended up staying longer and as time went on he was able to readjust. He went through the same [process] of the honeymoon period, the depressive period, recovery and then he started to normalize.â
Bavi says that students can help to normalize their surroundings by participating in an activity or eating a food that they enjoyed in the previous country or location. Also he suggests reeducating and preparing yourself before travelling home.
âI usually get in touch with people back home before I go, asking them how the weather is, whatâs new and so on. If they tell me, âYou donât want to come with anything warm,â Iâll know to bring a lot of summer clothing. Then when you get there, itâll be much easier of a transition.â
Bavi says that although the emotions can feel purely negative, there is a positive aspect to the experience.
âFor me, I found that in experiencing [reverse culture shock], it makes you appreciate the differences in culture. Thereâs something wonderful about the differences that we have, theyâre all wonderful in their own way.â
Do agrees.
âThe journey of studying abroad definitely makes you feel like the entire earth is your home. So even if you feel like an alien [in your home country], remember youâre still walking on the same soil.â
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