Participation – Intercultural Experience 137friends at home. Homesickness can be just that—a sickness^126 that in
one form or another can be present and sometimes debilitating over the
course of years. Staying faithful to their roots and culture while attempt-
ing to fit into and make roots in another requires a determined and posi-
tive effort.
I say ‘they’ in reference to international migrants but I am in fact one
of them. Like many of my generation, like my husband, many of my co-
workers and a large number of friends here in Geneva and in neighbour-
ing France, I left my hometown, in my case in North Wales in the Unit-
ed Kingdom, at the age of 18 and haven’t been back except for visits in
30 years. I’ve lived firstly within the UK then spread my wings to Boliv-
ia, Peru, Switzerland and France with family and work related trips af-
fording short but vivid glimpses and tastes of other cultures further
afield. I feel myself to be extremely privileged and yet at the same time
in some important ways somehow less than my elderly French neigh-
bours whose home has always been here.
9.3 Intercultural Imperative
Experience of other cultures is not confined of course to those who
travel beyond national boundaries and tour or settle in other places;
within districts let alone countries there are a multitude of cultures and
sub-cultures, determined by age, gender, education, neighbourhood,
social class, ethnic markers, economic factors, language, workplace,
leisure, sport and artistic activities, sites of learning, and so on that co-
exist on the most part with varying degrees of success in relative harmo-
ny. As soon as we are old enough to emerge from the family circle we
quickly become aware that things are done differently elsewhere, of the
richness and variety of human life in all our forms, of the importance of
126
Tom Heyden, The adults who suffer extreme homesickness, BBC News, 5
June 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22764986