Home Assignment
People have different experiences in reentry depending on how long they will be in their passport country. The chapters of this book are about what the majority of people do, and that is return to their home country to stay for long periods of time. However, some people reenter every few years to remain there a limited amount of time. Their experience may be quite different.
This appendix is about those who return to stay for about a year, a common time to be assigned at home. Of course, they are not likely ever to fully reenter, to be fully involved in their passport culture. Since it often takes about a year to reenter, they enter the leaving stage to return to their host country before they are through the entering stage into their passport country.
These people quite literally are entering and leaving simultaneously. At times they don’t know if they are coming or going—because they are doing both. People who return to their passport culture for a year every three or four years literally spend from half to three-fourths of their lives in reentry—to their passport culture, back to their host culture repeatedly.
They never fully become a part of their passport culture because they are going as they are coming. In addition, people in their passport culture know that they are soon going to leave, so they do not attempt to build lasting relationships—why should they since the other person is planning to leave soon anyway?
Often people on home assignment are expected to report back to people who have donated money to help your organization and those people want to hear success stories. They want to know that their donation, no matter how small, relieved the suffering of many people or resulted in a large number of converts. Those who have been working among the poor often have wonderful stories and pictures of smiling children, but those teaching in a university or translating the Word have little to show that will result in further help.
Of course, donors expect you to travel all over the country to represent the needs of the people you serve in other countries so this travel is sometimes called “deputation.” This travel to raise funds often results in families being apart as one parent is gone much of the time you are on home assignment. Some people home school and just take the whole family along.
In addition, the same people who expect you to travel widely to raise funds may conclude that you are not really serving nationals overseas. As a result, they may stop donating to pay your salary and travel expenses while in your passport country!
Ironically, home assignment is sometimes called “furlough” implying that it is a temporary absence for rest and relaxation from the work you have been doing. Most people find it much more stressful than serving in their host countries and long to be back in their host countries. Since they live in their host countries the majority of the time and put down deep roots there, it often is much more home to them than their passport country, the reason “home” is in quotation marks in the title of this book. Of course, it is difficult for people in your passport country to understand how home could be somewhere else. As a result, they may not offer much support for your longing for another place. They may feel rejected, and you may feel alienated from friends and family who simply cannot understand why you would want to leave them again.
Since you have a broader worldview and see yourself as nonjudgmental, tolerant, and caring, it is difficult to reconcile this with your feelings of judging their provincialism and rejecting their intolerance of your feelings.