Contact with home

Yeah there are some I have contact with, usually be email or skype. I often talk for long periods on skype and sometimes we'll have dinner together, is quite fun having a few beers and chatting with each other over video skype. Fortunately for me the time difference is only 3 hours.

I use skype to keep in touch with family back home/in the old country?????

Many people don;t know but you can get an online skype number, local to many cities. Mine is a Sheffield, UK number so people back there can get hold of me easily.

Time goes by very quick, after living for sometimes somewhere you realize that weeks, months and years passed by; this creates a gab in our lives and makes us lose a lot of our connections back home.

To bridge the gab, you need to be in touch with your family and friends back home continually; find something to share with them; involve them in your daily routine activities; listen and listen to them and be part of their problems as well as their happy moments.

I totally agree with you that they may have their priorities; but this does not mean that you have got to forget about them. Make them your priorities and keep asking about them and see how it goes.

Regardless of who talks to the other, we have got to talk and share and as the song say "Sharing means caring"

@ VidoDido (byt he way isn't that cartoonboy from Pepsi in the late '80?)

You are wright about not to forget them but I don't like the one way conversation that goes like this: Hi, how are you? Fine, thanks. How is the life? Well, same as usual.
End of discussion.
What I try to say is: they want to know everything from me because I live in a strange country and than you hear absolutly nothing news from them.
Or you send emails with pics and they never answered it.
After a few times you don't want to do it anymore and stay in touch with the others who do care about you and your life abroad.

@Primadonna; yes ... that's correct

I totally understand your concerns; my only worry is that; if you continue this way, you may isolate yourself from everybody and in this case you enlarge the gab to the limit that you wouldn't be able to bridge it later.

Don't worry about that: some contacts you lost, some contacts you get new and some contacts will always stay no matter what.
Like I said before: it is not my intention to make the gab bigger but it takes two to tango.

I also use Skype, but even that doesn't do away with the problem of loss of contact and shrinking social circle. The fact is that both get progressively less the longer your absence from your home country lasts. This is inevitabale.

I've been living in Brazil for over ten years now. The ONLY person that I have regular (not frequent) contact with now is my older brother. The last time I heard from my youngest son was a couple of years ago despite the fact that I've sent numerous e-mails to both him and his wife. I hear from her from time to time via Facebook, but she never even talks about him. I am beginning to think he feels that I abandoned him and he's PO'd at me.

On the other hand the new technologies in communication (internet and social networks) can have some very surprising and incredible effects. About three years ago I was contacted by two women asking about my older brother, if I knew anyone with his name, etc. The story developed that the two were half sisters, different mother/same father, and they were 40 years old, both trying to find out about their biological father. I never knew they even existed, however I knew both their mothers. I ended up with two nieces, was instrumental at reuniting one of them with her father and have regular contact with her. The other drifted away from me, never contacted her father, but at least thanks to the information that I was able to give her she at least knows where she came from and her medical history. I can't imagine how one would reunite with family after 40 years before the internet.

Thanks to the internet I now have a niece who loves me as much as she loves her dad, who could ever ask for more from this dumb black box and keyboard???

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog