How I changed my family tree into a family map!

Hi steemians, today I’m writing my second post. In the first one I mentioned I am going through some internal process right now. I believe I won’t be able to cover it in just one post, but I’ll try to explain the key elements : living abroad and missing my family. As I said, by writing this down I’m trying to figure out some structure of this chaos in my mind, and I hope it could be helpful to someone in a similar situation.

For us immigrants, it’s a very complex time. When you move to a free country, from Venezuela, you instantly feel the change, you would think that you feel better, you are actually better, but sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself about it. I am a citizen in this country, so I'm here legally. My first job here wasn’t bad at all, I can go to the supermarket anytime and buy all my shopping list in the same place, without spending more than 40 minutes or 10 minimum wages. (believe it or not, that’s a huge improvement to begin with). This new country wasn’t that new for me. My mom was born here, so I visited before, and there is no army here, so I guess it was a good call to come here after the violent times we had back home. So, everything's good! right?

But still I felt sad. And then I felt like I had no right to feel bad, because it was all getting better, and also because a lot of fellow migrants would kill to have half the chances I was having. So I felt guilty about feeling that way. I felt like I was being somehow ungrateful. And that feeling wouldn’t go away.

So I tried to untangle it. It is not that I wanted to go back home… I just wish I had never had the need to flee. The things I now long for, are not there anymore. People I miss aren’t there anymore, they migrated too.

I come from a big family in Venezuela. My dad has 9 siblings, and all of them had at least 2 or 3 kids each…. And well, most of us have kids too.. so… big family. But most importantly, we are very close. We were always there to sing happy birthday with a cake (which was extremely hard to bake, since all of the ingredients were painful to get, even 4 years ago). We used to gather on Holidays and sometimes made a big family tree. It helped us stay together, and caring for each other.

For the past two years it has been just the four of us here in Costa Rica. After we left, a lot of cousins and even aunts and uncles left too, mostly heading South. Last year we made Hallacas and Ponche Crema and made a video of a traditional Christmas song to share it online. We had Skype meetings with grandparents, and sent pictures through Whatsapp and Facebook. Stll I noticed my kids were starting to forget the names and faces of some relatives so I came up with the idea of making a different family tree.
This one was actually a map. I gathered pictures of pretty much everyone, even my cousin’s newborn baby, and placed them on the mapa mundi according to their current location. I made it on Prezi (the map is one of Prezi's cool templates), and then shared the link with all my cousins, aunts and uncles. It took me about 3 days to put it together, and I got absolutely obsessed about it… It was important. Family is the most important thing. So this is how it looked like when zooming in the Venezuelan area:

They were all moved by it. It was my Christmas gift, a way to let them know that I love them, and want my kids to love them the way I do. Somehow I feel now we are even closer than when we used to live in the same country.

Here are a few lessons I’m learning form this experience:

1. Family is the most important thing

2. Your country can be brought to ashes and still be almost impossible to leave without looking back. This is an empathy tip. Keep it in mind when you see a Venezuelan friend “doing better” but feeling blue. We all are kind of bipolar in that sense.

3. Geographical closeness is overrated

4. Some relatives’ pictures are harder to find.

5. My family is a blessing, being away from them makes me sad but trying to stay in touch keeps me grounded.