United States Colleges and Universities
Help for Student Victims of Hurricanes

1. Introduction
2. Now that you are home

2. Now that you are home

(The following information has been adapted from the University of the Pacific’s “What’s up with Culture” Module 2, 2.3 Exercise D, developed by Professor Bruce LaBrack)

Please write your own personal responses to the questions below. Be as honest as you can be. Your responses should reflect how you feel right now as you are going through the readjustment process. Please write your answers in your journal or some other place where you can refer to your answers later on.

After you complete the questions, you will be given the opportunity to think about and compare your answers with what you anticipated and expected about being home. Taking this exercise seriously will eventually assist you to better gauge how the process of adaptation to another place has played out for you personally.


1. The five things that have bothered me most about being home are

____________________________________________________________________


2. The five things I have enjoyed most about being home are

____________________________________________________________________


3. The five things I miss the least since I returned home are

____________________________________________________________________


4. The five things I miss the most since I returned home are

____________________________________________________________________


You may have made a list as part of the Preparing for Home exercise in the previous section. That list was made on the basis of what you anticipated things would be like when you returned home. You can now directly compare what you thought it would be like to your new list of what it has actually been like. There are a number of things that such a comparison might suggest:

1. Sometimes there are substantial differences between what one expected after being displaced and how it actually turned out. For example, things you worried about and thought were going to cause problems or be difficult to deal with, turn out not to have been as big a challenge as you anticipated. Having absolutely no concern about coming back home can lead to more problems upon return than were experienced elsewhere. Your concerns about going home are normal-and now you can see how you feel about the issues you listed previously.

2. Sometimes the things we are looking forward to elsewhere the most can fail to transpire or are less enjoyable or interesting than we had originally believed they would be. In returning home post-Katrina, people may be unrealistic about how they and others will react to the changes at home.

3. Just like being elsewhere, where daily life can be exciting one day and really trying the next, so can reentry seem once back home. Our flawed projections about what life elsewhere was going to be like before we went there were often paralleled to some extent in our preconceptions of reentry. Just as confronting reality once elsewhere often leads to personal growth and a far deeper understanding and appreciation of things, so can the struggle to readjust and readapt to home life after Katrina.

4. Looking back upon our aspirations and preconceptions of going elsewhere can be a bit embarrassing because we can see rather clearly how little experiential knowledge we had and how much some of our goals and expectations were naïve projections rather than realistic aspirations.

5. Comparing pre-and post-sojourn (being away a short time) perceptions is a good way to become more sensitive to the role preconceptions play, not only in your time elsewhere but in any of life’s many transitions. Knowing why and how such preconceptions can influence our satisfaction with our experiences will enable us to make more judicious judgments and lower any tendency to indulge in premature and unrealistic expectations in the future.

6. If there is any one lesson to be gained, it might be that to the extent to which one can resist the tendency to make too many preliminary judgments about “how things will be” in transition situations like study elsewhere, the more satisfied one might be about the outcome. Someone once said: Unrealistic Expectations = Premature Disappointments! As always, students are advised to allow experiences to unfold and be open and flexible, including applying what you have learned about adjustment when contemplating issues involved in returning home.

7. Think about the points above as you compare your own lists and then consider:

How might any of this apply to my future expectations about my life after graduation and the significant changes I can probably expect as part of my personal and professional life? How can I apply the skills and knowledge I gained as part of being displaced in all the important areas of my life and future transitions?

Now that you have reflected on how your expectations of home and what you are experiencing now compare, please proceed to the next exercise, which brings more focus onto yourself as you experience home and change.