Home When Away From Home

By Anna Lynn Sibal

There are plenty of times when the kind of travel that a person needs to do will be in no way related to fun and leisure.

In today's worldwide economy, where the focus of a lot of companies is to expand their businesses globally, it is now considered normal to send people from the country where the home base of a particular expanding company away to countries where branch offices are located. The trip and the ensuing stay abroad can take a mere handful of days, but it could also take weeks and months. In some cases, it could take an expatriate some years before he or she could get home.

Being separated from one's loved ones by an ocean and a number of time zones for any extended duration of time is a situation that can get truly gut-wrenching and filled with anxiety. Sometimes, the wave of homesickness can be overwhelming.

Different people have different ways of coping with homesickness. Many of them deal with it by bringing with them items and keepsakes that will remind them of home. These items could be anything. It could be pictures of one's family, a CD containing the voice recordings of one's loved ones, a drawing made by one's child, an article of clothing of one's spouse, or a handkerchief sprayed with the spouse's perfume.

A lot of people handle homesickness by keeping in close touch with family members. Thanks to technology, staying in touch with family members is no longer that hard to do. A person is always just an email or an instant message away from his family. Most instant messaging software now allow people to communicate through voice and video over the Internet no matter where they are, so headphones and webcams are always handy gadgets for expatriates to have.

For people who have the some tech-savvy in their bones, blogging is the way to go. Many people use blogs as a way of communicating to their family and friends how they are doing when they are far away from home. Blogs are very nifty. With blogs, people can use not just words in telling their stories. They could accompany the text of their stories with scans of photographs they have taken, as well as upload audio and video files. Blogging is a neat way to keep connected to home.

For expatriates who are truly in for the long haul, meaning they have to stay where they were sent to for the good part of a year, or even a number of years, the best way to deal with homesickness is to lease a house or an apartment where he could bring his family to for visits whenever possible. Being forced by virtue of employment to a strange country far away from home is not a reason for him not to have his family with him. If he cannot come to his family, then his family can come to him.

Traveling away from home can be a part of the life of some people, and for these people, homesickness is something they have to deal with every time they leave. Fortunately, homesickness is not an illness without remedy, but rather a condition with a cure.