On Home

My dear friend,

People ask me where I am from. It is a simple question with a complicated answer, and I have tried many different versions of it over the years. Sometimes I say Syria, which is true. Sometimes I say wherever I am working, which is also true in its way. Sometimes I say everywhere and nowhere, which makes people smile politely and move on. But lately, sitting with this candle in a city that is not the place of my birth, I have been trying to find the honest answer.

Where is home when you have lived in twenty-three countries?

I was born in Bosra, a small village in Daraa, in the south of Syria. I carry that country the way you carry a first language—in the structure of my thoughts, in the things that make me laugh without explanation, in the foods that mean safety, in the sound of the call to prayer that still reaches something in me even when I hear it in a country that is not mine. Syria is in me. But Syria was also taken from me, in stages, the way a building comes apart—first a window, then a wall, then the ceiling—until one day you walk past the street where you grew up and the street does not recognize you back.

I remember the last day in my apartment in Damascus. I did not know it was the last day. That is the cruelty of that kind of leaving: you do not get to say goodbye to the specific corners, the light in the kitchen in the morning, the sound of traffic outside the window that you stopped noticing because it was always there. I was in a hurry when I left. I would have paid more attention if I had known.

When I arrived in Turkey with almost nothing, I tried to make the new place into home as quickly as possible. I arranged the few things I had brought. I put something on the wall. I bought a plant. I learned which café had the best coffee and which corner of the park had the best light in the afternoon. Building the small architecture of belonging, piece by piece, in a place that had not asked for you.

Then I moved again. And again. Lebanon. Jordan. Iraq. Turkey. South Sudan. Afghanistan. Nigeria. Bangladesh. The United Arab Emirates. Denmark. Country after country, each time building the small architecture again. Learning the streets, the rhythms, the informal rules of how people move and speak and leave space for each other. Making the new place into something that almost felt like home. And then leaving.

After enough of those arrivals and departures, something in you shifts. The initial grief of leaving gets shorter. The work of arriving gets faster. You learn to make a room yours in a few days. You learn which things to carry that will make any space feel familiar. A book you have read before. A photograph. A particular coffee ritual. A playlist that belongs to no country but belongs entirely to you.

But something else happens too. The idea of home stops being a fixed place. It becomes a feeling you carry.

I have felt at home in a tent in South Sudan. Not comfortable, not safe in the external sense, but at home—because I was doing work that mattered and I was surrounded by people I trusted and the days had a shape I understood. I have felt profoundly homeless in beautiful hotel rooms in Geneva. Everything comfortable and nothing familiar. Everything provided and nothing mine.

Home, I have come to understand, is not coordinates. It is a quality of presence. It is the particular ease that comes when you are known — when you do not have to explain yourself from the beginning every time, when the people around you have some memory of who you were before you became who you are now.

This is why the international life, as rich as it is, carries its own particular form of poverty. You are always the newest person in the room. Always explaining. Always beginning. The continuity that makes home possible—the long slow knowledge of a person, the accumulated inside jokes, the shared history that does not need to be spoken—is the thing you give up when you move constantly. You trade depth for breadth. You gain the world and sometimes lose the sense of being rooted anywhere in it.

And yet.

I have found pieces of home scattered across every country I have lived in. A street in Gaziantep where the baker knew my order. A café in Juba where they brought the coffee without me asking. A colleague in Abuja who could tell from my voice in a meeting whether I had slept. A friend in Copenhagen who knew to leave space in the conversation when I went quiet. These small knowings, these fragments of being recognized, are what I collected over the years instead of a fixed home. They are less portable, harder to explain, but real.

I have also found home in language. Not in Arabic or English specifically, but in the deeper language of shared experience. When I meet someone who has worked in crisis contexts, who has sat with displacement, who has led teams through emergencies, there is a recognition that crosses every other boundary. We speak the same language of long days and difficult decisions, of love for communities that will never know our names, of the particular fatigue of caring deeply for many years. In that recognition, there is something that feels like home.

I have found home in work. When a problem absorbs me completely, when a document starts becoming what it needs to be, when a team finds its rhythm, I am at home. Not in a place. In a mode. In the particular quality of being fully used.

I have found home in music. In certain songs that carry specific rooms, specific people, specific moments of my life across the years. Music is portable in a way that furniture is not. You can carry an entire country inside a song.

And I have found home in myself. This one took the longest. For many years, I was always slightly elsewhere. Thinking about the next country, the next mission, the next version of the work. The present place was always temporary, always a corridor to somewhere else. I lived in a perpetual transit that had nothing to do with airports. It was only much later—through loss and failure and the slow work of becoming more honest with myself—that I began to feel at home inside my own life. Not settled. Not static. But present. Rooted in my own values, my own story, my own way of being in the world.

That, I think, is the deepest home. Not the place that holds you. The self that knows where it stands.

My friend, if you are someone who has moved often, who crosses borders, who belongs to more than one country and fully to none, I want you to know that this is not loss. Or not only loss. It is also a different kind of wealth. The kind that does not appear on a balance sheet. The capacity to find meaning in transit. The ability to make any room feel like home quickly. The practice of carrying your roots in your chest rather than in the soil.

And if you feel homeless sometimes—if you stand in a city that does not know you and feel the weight of not being rooted—that is real too. Do not rush past it. That feeling is telling you something important. It is telling you how much you care about belonging, which is the beginning of building it.

Start where you are. Say your name clearly. Tell your story when someone asks. Plant something, even if it is small, even if you are not sure how long you will stay. Because home is not found. Home is built. Quietly, daily, in the small acts of caring about the place and the people around you.

The candle in front of me is from a shop in this city. The music I am listening to is from another country entirely. The coffee is from a continent I have lived on and left. This room holds pieces of many places. And tonight, in this assembled life, I feel something that is very close to home.

Until tomorrow, my friend. Wherever you are reading this, may it feel a little more like where you belong.

With warmth and rootedness,

Ali Al Mokdad