---
title: Nobody Warns You About Coming Home
description: Sofia spent six months on a project in Zambia. The hardest part came later, back home, when everything familiar started to look different.
---

[Blog Humana web 2026](https://humanavolunteers.org/blog-humana-web-2026)

# [Nobody Warns You About Coming Home](https://humanavolunteers.org/blog-humana-web-2026/nobody-warns-you-about-coming-home)

 Written by [Humana Volunteers](https://humanavolunteers.org/blog-humana-web-2026/author/humana-volunteers) | Oct 21, 2026, 9:19:16 AM

Everyone prepares you for the leaving. The vaccines, the packing lists, the goodbye dinner. **Nobody really prepares you for the day you get back**, unpack, and realize your own life looks slightly unfamiliar.

Sofia came home from Zambia with the October Team 2025. Three months of training at Lindersvold, six months on a project, and then the strangest part of all: her old routine, exactly where she'd left it, suddenly full of things she'd never noticed before.

**"Only now that I'm back am I realizing how many things I used to take for granted,"** she told us.

It's a sentence we hear a lot from returning volunteers. It's also easy to misread. It isn't guilt, and it isn't the kind of gratitude that ends in a list of things to be thankful for. **It's closer to having your eyes recalibrated.**

### **Being open-minded is harder than it sounds**

Before she left, Sofia would have called herself open-minded. Most people would. Zambia made her rethink what the word actually asks of you.

"It's easy to say you're open-minded," she says. **"It's only when you look at what's really around you, without judging it, and ask why things are the way they are, that you understand what it means."**

That shift starts long before the plane. The three months at Lindersvold are built around one idea: **you're going as a volunteer, not as a savior.** You're joining work that local teams were doing before you arrived and will keep doing after you leave. Sofia arrived in Zambia already knowing that. What she hadn't expected was how much the experience would show her about herself: **the privileges she'd been carrying around for years without ever seeing them.**

### **Slower, on purpose**

Six months of working alongside people who knew far more than she did taught her a different pace. **Listen before acting. Understand before giving an opinion.** Be present, and be patient, in a world that usually rewards the opposite.

None of it made life simpler. "Zambia didn't solve my problems," she says. **What it changed was the way she looks at what she already has.**

### **A different chair**

When we asked her how she'd sum it up, Sofia didn't reach for a big statement. She talked about chairs.

> **"Sometimes the best chance you get is to see your own life more clearly by sitting in a different chair. Maybe an uncomfortable one."**

 

We like that image because it's honest about what volunteering abroad can and can't do. **It won't fix you. It won't fix anyone else either.** But if you stay long enough, and listen hard enough, it can move you to a seat with a better view.

**Thank you, Sofia, for being honest about the part of the story most people skip.**

The "volunteer, not savior" part starts long before the plane. [Here's what the three months at Lindersvold look like.](https://humanavolunteers.org/the-training) 

[View full post](https://humanavolunteers.org/blog-humana-web-2026/nobody-warns-you-about-coming-home)

```json
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Humana Volunteers"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-10-21T09:19:16.426Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-10-21T09:19:16Z",
  "headline" : "Nobody Warns You About Coming Home",
  "image" : {
    "@type" : "ImageObject",
    "height" : 812,
    "url" : "https://144171586.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/144171586/Blogs-1.jpg",
    "width" : 1920
  },
  "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://humanavolunteers.org/blog-humana-web-2026/nobody-warns-you-about-coming-home",
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "height" : 60,
      "url" : "/hs/hsstatic/content_shared_assets/static-1.4092/img/default-amp-logo.png",
      "width" : 60
    },
    "name" : "Blog Humana web 2026"
  }
}
```