First, that call will reveal itself as nostalgia, an inexplicable yearning for halcyon days long gone. You’ll develop a deep hunger for the people, places and foods of your past. Next, you’ll spend half of your disposable income on Africa phone cards that never seem to deliver the full number of minutes promised.

Or you’ll find yourself wasting hours poring over old picture albums instead of tending to the more productive tasks that await you in your Western-world life, like raking leaves, shoveling snow, sorting through the mountain of bills on your dining table. Then one day you’ll think, Enough’s enough! I’m going home, and you’ll begin making plans.

I’ve seen it happen over a dozen times. I’ve watched as friends and acquaintances have saved in earnest for years, slowly filling suitcase after suitcase with enough bed linen, kitchenware, towels, toiletries, dry foodstuff and personal care products to carry them through at least two natural disasters, if not two lifetimes.

Half of them never went anywhere: they squandered their savings, or became overwhelmed by the financial, logistical and emotional complexity of returning to a place from which they’d been absent for 10, 20 and in some cases even 30 or more years.

It is because of those particular complexities that a number of repatriates, within a year of relocating, end up leaving and going back to their adopted lands. They realize that the Ghana they remembered, the one that beckoned, was not at all the Ghana that greeted them upon their return.

That new Ghana, the one in which they found themselves, was more expensive, its roadways congested with traffic and hawkers; it was full of red tape, closed doors, incompetence and inefficiency.

“How is it,” asked a friend who’d recently come back to the US after a failed attempt at repatriation, “that you, of all people, managed to live in Ghana and like it enough to go back?” I shrugged then laughed.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” I asked.

The reason my friend said of all people is that unlike him and the various other Ghanaian immigrants we knew in common in the Los Angeles area, I spent all of my adolescent and young adult years in America.

I was born in Ghana, at Korle-bu, and spent the first 6 years of my life in Accra. I moved to the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area to join my parents—my mother had been living there for three years already, and my father had recently immigrated there. So Washington and its suburbs became home. 24 years would pass before I’d set foot in Ghana again. By then, I was a grown woman, had already made a home for myself in Los Angeles—and my own daughter was not much older than I was when I immigrated.

When people learn all this, they tend to write me off as completely American, someone with only a passing ancestral connection to this country. I find that quite humorous because the home I grew up in was so passionately insular it felt as though we were our own little territory, permanently tethered to Ghana. We didn’t speak English at home and we didn’t eat hot dogs or apple pie or pizza or frozen dinners. Much to my chagrin, my mother would even serve fish with the head still attached, thus frightening away my few friends who dared to enter our African home.

So when people, fooled perhaps by the American accent, stare at me as I enjoy my fufu with aponkyenkrakra or abunuabunu and ask, “Eh, Nana-Ama, you know how to eat this?” all I can do is shrug then laugh.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” I ask them.

That first time I came to Ghana after 24 years of having been gone, I fell in love with the country immediately. I felt a sense of comfort, joy, and belonging that I’d never felt anywhere else. It was a brief visit, too brief. My grandmother, with whom I’d been close my entire childhood, the one who’d accompanied me on that initial flight to America and who regularly returned to stay with us for years at a time, was in her final days. I’d wanted to see her one last time and thank her for bringing such grace and light and love to my life.