Finding Your Soul in a Place far from Home

I’ll be honest – I’ve never been much of a “process” person. I like people, I like problems worth solving and I’m deeply suspicious of anything that gets reduced to a checklist when it clearly deserves more thought than that. So, when I sit down to write about employing people who’ve immigrated to Australia, I can’t write it as an HR topic. It isn’t one. It’s something far messier, far more human, and if I’m honest, far more interesting than a policy document could ever capture. 

At Chris Barnard Health, we employ people from all over the world – carers, nurses and support workers who’ve packed up a life somewhere else and planted a new one here. It’s one of the things I’m proudest of about this business. But somewhere along the way, I realised something most employers don’t say out loud: hiring someone who has immigrated isn’t a straightforward employment transaction. It’s a journey. And whether you meant to or not, as their employer, you’re on that journey too. 

The Excitement Before Reality Sets in 

There’s a particular kind of excitement that comes with starting a new job in a new country. It’s almost intoxicating – a fresh start, a new opportunity, the sense that this is the chapter where things finally click into place. For a lot of people, it represents years of planning, sacrifice and hope, often carried on behalf of people who aren’t even in the room: a partner, children, parents back home. 

I love that energy. But I’ve also learned, watching it play out again and again, that it tends to sit alongside something quieter that only shows up later – the reality of what it means to live somewhere that isn’t your birth home. 

A Place that Doesn’t Look, Smell or Sound Like Home 

Here’s a strange thing I’ve noticed, and it’s not something you’ll find in an onboarding manual: home isn’t just an address. It’s a smell. It’s the particular way light falls through a window at 5pm. It’s food that tastes right without having to think about why. Take all of that away, and replace it with something perfectly pleasant but entirely unfamiliar, and something in a person quietly recalibrates – even if their new life looks great on paper. 

The people around you don’t carry the same rhythms you grew up with. The jokes land differently. The silences mean something else. And that connection to a place doesn’t arrive with a work visa, a signing bonus or paid accommodation. It’s built slowly, almost embarrassingly slowly, through the smallest of things: a familiar face, a corner shop that reminds you just slightly of somewhere you used to know, a Tuesday that finally starts to feel ordinary instead of foreign.  

Until that connection forms, plenty of people are quietly carrying a kind of dislocation to work each day – usually behind a perfectly normal, professional smile.  

The Weight of Loneliness 

Loneliness is the part I think gets underestimated the most, possibly because it doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside. You can be fully rostered, fully social, fully “fine” and still feel like nobody around you actually knows you. Not your history, not your humour, not the version of you that existed before you got on a plane. 

For a lot in this position, that loneliness comes bundled with an enormous sense of duty. Many made this move for the people they love – some brought with them, some very much left behind. That’s a heavy thing to carry quietly, and it doesn’t leave much room to admit “this is harder than I thought,” when there’s a whole family back home hoping this works out. 

When it’s Harder than Anyone Expected 

If you ask me, this is the part that ambushes people the most – including, often, the person going through it. From a distance, the hard part looks like getting the visa, landing the job, making the move. Nobody warns you that the harder part often starts after all that – in the small, unglamorous moments: the early mornings where the unfamiliarity feels heavier than usual, the flicker of “did I make the right call here,” the quiet exhaustion of adapting to a new culture, a new workplace, and a new rhythm of life, all at once, indefinitely. 

None of that means the decision was wrong. It just means the emotional journey is real and it tends to run a lot longer than anyone budgets for – one year, five years… it’s a unique journey that doesn’t look the same for anyone.  

What this Means for us as Employers 

This is precisely why I refuse to let this be treated as a box-ticking exercise. Call it quirky, call it stubborn, but I think if a business brings someone onto the team who’s left everything familiar behind, that business has signed up for more than a position description. We’ve become part of that person’s support system during one of the most disorienting stretches of their life, whether we like it or not. 

And I mean that literally –  not as a HR line item, not as a wellbeing webinar we tick off once a year. I don’t believe in the bandaid approach. A bandaid is quick, it’s the same for everyone, and it’s designed to make a wound look covered rather than really understood. People aren’t wounds, and they certainly aren’t one-size-fits-all. Someone who’s left Colombo is not having the same experience as someone who’s left Manila, or Nairobi, or Kyiv. Someone who came here alone is carrying something entirely different to someone who came here with three kids and a mortgage back home they’re still paying off. Treat all of that the same, and you haven’t actually helped anyone – you’ve just been efficient about looking like you did. 

So practically, that means checking in on more than rosters and performance reviews – and checking in differently, person by person, the way you’d check in on a friend rather than a file. It means building a culture where someone can say “I’m finding this tough” without it being read as a lack of commitment or lack of appreciation or as laziness. It means understanding that homesickness and loneliness aren’t red flags – they’re a completely normal, deeply human response to an enormous life change, and they deserve patience, curiosity and fairness, not a pamphlet, not a culture day, not a voucher or even a day off.  

Because here’s what I’ve learnt, underneath all of it: every single one of us, wherever we’ve landed, is quietly trying to find our footing – a connection, and if I can be a little unashamedly sentimental about it, something closer to our soul – in a place that isn’t the one we were born into. That’s not unique to immigrants. It’s just more visible, more raw, and more urgent for them. Our job as employers, as I see it, isn’t to smooth that over. It’s to make sure nobody has to go looking for that connection entirely on their own – that we leave space for them to what they need to do while feeling that their job isn’t in jeopardy when they are at their most vulnerable. 

We ask a great deal of the people who choose to work with us, and even more from those who’ve made the additional leap of building an entirely new life here to do it. The least we owe them in return is the understanding that this is a journey, not a transaction, and the willingness to walk alongside them with kindness that’s specific to them, not generic to a policy, rather than simply employ them and hope for the best. 

A Final Thought 

To everyone on our team and those in this position who’s made this journey – we acknowledge the courage it took to start again somewhere unfamiliar, and for the quiet resilience you show every single day, usually without asking anyone to notice. We notice. We don’t take it for granted, and we try, imperfectly but genuinely, to meet each of you where you are, not where a policy assumes you should be. 

As a business, and frankly as an industry, I think we owe it to people to get better at recognising this – not as a footnote to employment, but as a genuine, central part of how we support the people who choose to build their careers, and their lives, with us. Everyone deserves the chance to find their footing, their connection, and yes – their soul – in this new place, in their own time, and in their own way. 

By Supun Wali, Founder & CEO, Chris Barnard Health