On migration and maintaining friendships

I went to boarding school and left pretty early, so I had some experience with losing friends to relocation long before the current heavy outflow of people from my home country, Nigeria.

When I was in boarding school, many of my friends in the first year of Junior Secondary School didn’t return in the second year. Some with no notice. Many of these friends lived in different cities, and I had no way of contacting them. Therefore, a friend leaving then was a strong signifier of the end of the friendship. I learned then to compartmentalize — to keep the hurt I felt from losing my friends in the farthest part of my consciousness.

After the first term of Senior Secondary School, my parents decided it was my turn to pull a sudden exit. Leaving my friends behind was gut-wrenching. I tried staying in touch with the friends I’d left behind — I’d call the house mistress’ phone every few weeks to say hello to my friends and sometimes sob over the phone. My friends cried too for a while. But after a few weeks, it became obvious to me that new people had come to fill whatever void my absence had created. I had lost all my friends.

I thought I had gone through the worst of it. So when I started losing friends to opportunities to move abroad about 5 years ago, I was shocked and appalled by how much it got to me. Reader, I was nowhere near prepared for how exhaustingly sad their exits were for me.

Now, whenever a friend tells me they’re moving, I feel a lump in my throat. I’m not sure why exactly it hurts so much, and I have done my best to shove those feelings as far behind my mind as they’d go. But I have a feeling that more people will move, and there is only so much I can suppress.

I decided that for the first few episodes of Work in Progress, this thing I have been avoiding is exactly what I want to explore. I know I’m not alone, and I hope that this episode will help anyone else struggling with losing friends to opportunities abroad deal with our feelings.

How do you feel when your friends move away?

“It’s frustrating”, says Hassan Yahaya, a writer currently living in Lagos, Nigeria. “It feels like you’re being left behind”.

Hassan pushed our call for this episode back by a few minutes. He told me later that he had just returned from seeing a friend of Seven years, Tola*, off at the airport. His friend is moving to Canada.

Tola, he said, was one of the majority of his friends who have moved in the last five years. To put it into context, he is in “three group chats with at least 13 people”, he said. When they formed the groups, everyone in them lived in Nigeria. Hassan is now the only one left in the country.