Then there is the reception from the Kenyans at home. Family and friends welcome them with open arms, celebrating their return. The rest of us may not be as welcoming. They feel we still treat them at times like foreigners in their own home-land. We keep them at arm’s length, never really taking the time to acclimate them to the developments, politics, or sheng/slang or the day. They feel like outsiders looking in, not able to fully participate in the conversations and debates in bars or at home, because after all what do they know? Their ideas and contributions are dismissed as ramblings of people who are out of touch, and can’t relate with modern day Kenya. They are not even able to vote in elections, and therefore they are seen to have no voice in the way things are run in Kenya.

The culture clash is also a big issue. Straight from first world countries, they expect things to operate like clock-work. They have got accustomed to efficiency, excellent customer service, schedules, systems and procedures that work. In Kenya things tend to be handled differently. We do not always keep time, we do not always honor appointments, we use short cut where need be, and things don’t always work the way they are supposed to. What we consider as the norm is highly perplexing and frustrating in their eyes.

Their deep accents don’t help. They can‘t even bargain at Maasai market anymore. Now they have to deal with tourist prices wherever they go. Locals struggle to understand what they are saying, reminiscent of the same challenges they faced when they first left our shores.

These are some of the challenges Kenyans from the diaspora experience when they come back home. Some brave ones are able to return home and adapt to the Kenyan setting and even do very well for themselves, while most still fear struggling to fit in and reclaim their homeland, and would rather continue to struggle with life abroad. Out there the systems are clear cut-if your work hard you can live a fairly comfortable life-while in Kenya there are too many unknowns and uncertainty.

I believe Kenyans living in Kenya should try our best to be more welcoming, more patient, and more understanding of our diaspora brethren when they come around. We should not be too quick to judge them because of their accents, their dress code or different way of seeing and doing things. Diasporans should also humble themselves a bit more when they come home, and not expect everything to be like they are in the first world countries they now reside in. Let’s respect and embrace our differences, because at the end of the day Kenya is where we belong.