What does home mean when you are always moving on? What does belonging mean when your address changes every few years? And how do we reconcile our evolving identities with the places we’ve left behind? Catriona Turner talks about her travels from Scotland to France, to Congo and Uganda, and back home again over 14 years, and how she has redefined what she calls home.
For more episodes on home, check out my solo episode on Sanctuary, Retreat, Belonging: The Importance of Home in Difficult Times; and for more on Third Culture Kids, check out the interview on Djibouti with Rachel Pieh Jones. You can also find more about my thoughts on home in my memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Catriona Turner is the Scottish author of Nest, A Memoir of Home on the Move.

Life in Kampala, Uganda – discovering an unexpectedly cosmopolitan city with thriving coffee and food scenes
Experiencing the Republic of Congo – navigating life in Pointe-Noire, a Francophone oil city with strong French influences
The challenges of living in transition – the struggle between temporary mindset and embracing the present moment
Unpacking the loaded terms ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’ — privilege, cultural integration, and identity
The evolution of “home” – from a fixed geographical location to a multidimensional concept that travels with you
How children experience third culture living
Repatriation challenges – seeing your own culture through new eyes after years abroad
Unexpected appreciations – discovering the beauty of Scotland through foreigners’ perspectives
Book recommendations for understanding global living, going home, and repatriation

You can find Catriona at CatrionaTurner.com and her book, Nest, on Amazon.

Transcript of the interview:
Jo: Hello Travelers. I am Jo Frances (J.F.) Penn, and today I’m here with Catriona Turner. Hi Katrina.Catriona: Hi. So happy to be here.Jo: It’s great to have you on the show. Catriona is the Scottish author of Nest, A Memoir of Home on the Move, which we are talking about today.
Tell us a bit about why you left Scotland 14 plus years ago and some of the places that you’ve lived.
Catriona: Yeah. Coming up for 16 years ago that we left in 2009 and that was because of my husband’s job. So we had met a couple years before and it was always kinda on the cards that his company might ask him to be globally mobile.
So when the opportunity came up, we did, I had been teaching for 10 years and I was happy to kind of take a career break to move to Southern France for three years, because who wouldn’t?
Jo: Yeah, for sure.
Catriona: — on the company Dollar and off we went. We got married about the same time and 14 years later, we came back having, by then moved to Uganda and back to France and the Republic of Congo and Denmark, and then back to France.
One more time in Paris before we came back, yeah. Coming up for two years ago now we’re back in Aberdeen, in the northeast of Scotland, which was where we left from.
Jo: And with two kids.
Catriona: Two kids that joined us along the way.
Jo: Well, it’s interesting and I wanted to talk to you ’cause although we lived in different places, I left England in 2000 and returned in 2011.
So I was away 11 years and no children so I understand the sort...