Peter's SA Homecoming

2009 is the year that I will return to my home country after three-and-a-half years in London.  It was meant to be six months initially, but then life happened.  I’m going to write down my experiences here, post resources and links, guidance and so on for others who are moving back to Sunny SA.

Let me just give you a bit of a background to my stint overseas, so that you can see the rest of my posts in context.  Firstly, I came to London at the age of 24 after my first job at Dimension Data in PE.  My DiData contract had expired and I needed to look for something new. I thought I’d need to go to either Cape Town or Joburg to find a job, but thought that I might as well go overseas and do some travel while I’m young and independent.

So I wasn’t running away from the problems in South Africa and was attracted to London rather for a temporary period rather than repelled from South Africa. I should also say that I had lived abroad before — 2 years in Germany with my family when I was about 16, so this was not an entirely new experience. What was new was the fact that I would also be leaving home for the first time. Coming from an extremely close family, this was something I had always thought would be the most difficult thing.

I ended up moving to London on 1 March 2006. Found a software development job in a month at the bottom of my acceptable salary band (£30k). I was made redundant after 6 months when the company started running into difficulties. Although it screwed up my plans, it did prove to be great career-wise, as after 3 weeks I had 3 job offers to choose from and moved to a big-four accounting firm with a salary of £35k in the position of senior technical analyst.

Ranked as one of the top companies to work for in the UK, I have worked there to this day, with a promotion and two fairly measly salary increases. But nonetheless, it’s been the best place I’ve worked so far.

The biggest spanner that’s been thrown in the works is the fact that I met an Australian girl at work, whose father is a South African expat, and had brainwashed them with negative South African news their whole lives about everything that’s wrong, or could potentially be wrong with SA.  To the extent that Elizabeth’s sister was too scared to even visit South Africa on holiday. I did state upfront in the relationship that it was very important for me to return to SA, and we kind of left it at that until it became crunch time.

Elizabeth visited South Africa over the past Christmas holidays. I have been to SA at least once a year since being in London. She enjoyed the holiday, but was understandably shocked at the presence of electric fences around private residences. But she still appeared to have an open mind and be willing to try it.

But it was after a holiday to Cyprus that Elizabeth said she could not fathom living in SA. This hit me right between the eyes. I was totally shocked, as I saw Elizabeth as the person I would marry. To cut a long story short, she didn’t want to go to SA and I didn’t want to go to Australia. My reason being that my heart would always be in SA, and there’s no point living, albeit generally happy, but constantly wishing you were somewhere else. So after much discussion, arguments and tears, we decided to go our own ways, and just under a week ago, Elizabeth flew back to Melbourne, to see what kind of a life she can make there for herself.

I’ve never been very happy here in the UK. My stay was meant to be six months and by stepping from one comfort zone to another has left me where I am today. For 3,5 years, I’ve postponed buying the bigger things that would be too difficult to move back. I have not settled, it’s been 3,5 years of being in a lull.  A transient state.

So that’s basically where we are at the start of this blog. My decision to move back was made a long time ago, it was really just the timing that kept getting pushed back due to one thing or another. I have now managed to save a fair amount and have sent money back regularly (I do own a house back home which is being rented out).