AW JOURNEYS: Addressing Home

Addressing Home

By Hadassah Winters Lampron

Please list all addresses where you’ve resided for at least eight weeks. I groaned. Immigrating to Canada via spousal sponsorship was mostly a long process of filling out tedious forms like this one. When I saw it only required a record of residences after my eighteenth birthday, I sighed in relief. At age twenty-one, I was looking at a threeyear period. I listed eight addresses. None of them felt like home.

My passport is American, but I grew up in Senegal and called it home for sixteen years. Even after we left Dakar, Senegal’s capital, in 2014, it remained the place I most strongly identified with the word “home.” When I received a scholarship to study in Dakar for a semester in 2018, I felt a sense of comfort. I thought going back would feel like going home.

It only took a few days in Dakar to realize that while it was familiar, it wasn’t home. I was there temporarily as a student. There was no sense of permanence. My international friends were no longer there. Some of my Senegalese friends had moved to other cities. New highways, new buildings, new businesses that bought out the old…the city had grown without me, and I had grown without it. Like two friends who drifted apart, crossing paths again but with only enough time for small talk. A grocery store run-in where you exchange a quick “Hey, how’s it going? It’s been so long,” and an empty “We should get together again soon,” knowing you won’t.

I didn’t want a “ships passing in the night” situation. I wanted hours of earnest conversation over endless cups of tea. I wanted to memorize the labyrinths of alleys, to know the bus routes by heart. I wanted to learn the city’s gratitudes and grievances, what had changed, what was better, what was worse, and why. I wanted to perfect my Saturday market bargaining, to routinely soak up sunsets from the top of the lighthouse, to leave long trails of fading footprints on the coastline. I longed to say to this city once more, “I know you, and you know me, and I belong here.” But four months is hardly long enough for that.

Going back was like losing it all over again. I lost the physical place when I left in 2014, but now I was losing the feelings I had attached to it for so long. It was hard to accept I had associated home with memories, with times—not place. You can only go back to places.

Why is finding “home” such a constant struggle? Why is it so important? It’s wrapped up with our sense of security, belonging, cultural identity—tied to our very sense of self. We don’t know who we are without it.

Going back was like losing it all over again.

After moving to the United States, my sense of home became more strongly tied to my family. I journaled in 2015 that home was “when my family is laughing around the dinner table and our plates are clear, and our bellies are full.” Home was “the game of cards in the living room, trying to figure out why my little sister always wins.” When I moved onto my university campus in 2016, I lost those aspects of home as well. Then my family moved to a different state, and when I visited them on school breaks, I stayed in a new bedroom in a new town where I didn’t know anyone. I felt maybe nowhere was home anymore, and maybe I should just accept that. As the school year continued, I developed deeper friendships and over the summer found myself missing my college friends and professors. University is meant to be impermanent, not designed for putting down roots, and yet it became home.

I then decided home is wherever people know you and love you, wherever you are welcomed in and made to feel you belong. For a while, this was enough for me.

In 2018 I spent my spring semester interning in Cameroon, summer semester studying in Florida, and fall semester in Senegal. When I stayed with friends back at my university the week before my December graduation, I was with people who knew me and loved me and welcomed me. But it wasn’t home anymore. I realized there were still people who knew me and loved me in Senegal. I was still known and loved in Washington State where we moved in 2014, in South Carolina where my parents now live, in Cameroon where I spent five months during my internship, and there at my university in North Carolina. I knew and loved people in each of these places, too. And yet, in December 2018, caught between all these worlds that used to be mine, I knew I no longer belonged to any of them. I decided home is wherever I am, something I carry with me. But this interpretation fell short as well.

Last year was full of transience, especially with my immigration process. Five weeks in South Carolina, separated from my husband. Three weeks in Quebec. A week on the road. If I was truly carrying “home” with me, it didn’t feel that way.

Now, in 2020, I live in Alberta with my Canadian husband (that’s another whole story). We haven’t been here long. I’m far from my parents and siblings, far from our loud dinners and living-room card games. Since COVID-19 hit the province relatively soon after we arrived, we haven’t gotten out to meet many people yet. It’s too soon to have a large community here where I am known and loved.

But strangely, within just a few weeks of our arrival, Alberta became home. Not because I adapted quickly (can anyone truly adapt to temperatures of -40?), and not just because I’m with my husband (though it helps), but because I realized Alberta is where I’m supposed to be right now. I belong here, whether I feel it or not, because I know it’s where God has me for this part of my story. Maybe home is wherever I’m supposed to be, regardless of how comfortable I feel, which gives me permission to calm the restlessness, to be fully present, to have peace in the stillness.

I listed eight addresses. None of them felt like home.

I’m not sure what home is, but I know how it feels. I’ve tried to pin down the elusive concept so many times but it seems to change definitions faster than I change residences. Maybe pieces of home are found in all of this. The whole adventure. The trans-Atlantic journeys, packing and unpacking and repacking, the celebration of hello and grieving of goodbye. Sugar peanuts and mango tree shade. Lemon rain jackets and evergreens. Fried plantains in Cameroon, South Carolina sweet tea, lavender mountains at sunrise, snow-covered prairies and icicles under window sills. Hospitality, sincerity, compassion. The hearts that say, “I love you. Let me share your burdens, too.” The God who says “I am with you. I will be your refuge and shelter.” And last of all, the many addresses on my long immigration form, and all the streets and zip codes from the eighteen years not listed. They are there in the background throughout the whole story, a quiet presence in every chapter...and maybe home is too.

Hadassah Winters Lampron has an American passport, grew up in Senegal, met her Québécois husband in Cameroon, and now lives in Alberta, Canada. She’s currently a grad student studying public policy analysis, and she hopes to make her way back to West Africa in the not-too-distant future. She’s also a singer/songwriter who has written about TCK themes.

Check out her music here: https://www.youtube.com/ channel/UCjhqNAbclu__eJ8zF0QdsMg

Instagram: haddie.grace