Mushtaque Habib
Mr. M. Mushtaque Habib is an engineer who has recently been commissioned by North South University to construct their new campus. He is also a return migrant form America.

I left Bangladesh in 1972 when I was a first year student at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. After about 25 years of stay overseas I returned to Bangladesh in 1997. I have worked all over the world on large projects in several countries such as Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, but I have mostly been resident in California. When I returned to Bangladesh I had no plans to go back to the US again, so I think I fit into the category of permanent returnee professional migrant.

When friends in the US got to know that I was considering returning to Bangladesh they thought I was not homesick, but mentally sick. In the first three to four years following my return I myself continuously questioned my sanity, but somewhere within the fifth year I began to settle down.

My reasons to return were entirely personal. As a well qualified professional I was making a decent living in the US. The first and foremost reason for returning was family. My parents were getting old and my wife is an only child. Our children had very little idea of their roots and all these factors prompted us to return home.The second reason was my burning desire to take up the challenge of doing some meaningful projects in Bangladesh.

I feel that additional support systems back home help a great deal in making a decent living. I was one of the lucky ones, my family did have some property and that was a big support in supplementing a decent living upon return. I was also lucky on another count, because my credentials were enough to find a decent job as soon I was ready to enter the job market.

In my experience there are three important battlefronts that one has to engage in upon return. One is children's education, another is everyday life adjustments and the final one is professional and career battles.

To me the key word is adaptation. Communication is different here and in many cases the people that one has to deal with seem to say one thing, mean something else, and do something different altogether. The sooner I learnt this mode of communication, and better still mastered it, the smoother my transition was. There still exists remnants of a master-servant relationship here which is really intolerable for us professionals who have functioned in a more developed environment.

As returnee professionals what do we lose? Foremost is the ability to keep pace with changing technology and know how. The experience of return can be described as getting transferred from a jet plane to a sailboat. For some migrants, of course, such a transition to a slower pace may be a preferred option. Another loss experienced upon return is not being able to use the experience gained abroad to further one’s career, mainly because of the technology gap. Finally, one loses the feeling of being able to operate in an internationally competitive arena.

Those children returning from the US call themselves ABCDs (American Born Confused Bangladeshis). Not all can successfully assimilate into Bangladeshi society and in many cases they decide to return back to their familiar environment in the US.

As the Director of Engineering for a company that was listed in Fortune’s 500 companies in the US I adjusted well to professional life. I had the opportunity to build a 60-storied building in San Francisco and a power plant in Europe. Now I am responsible for building a University Campus here in Dhaka. I cannot wait to celebrate my professional achievement once the project gets completed.

The day I decided to stop comparing my life in Bangladesh with life in California and my professional duties, responsibilities and activities in both these places, everything began to make more sense; life seemed more acceptable and it was a lot easier to adjust. I have my moments of regret, but they are a lot less frequent than my feelings of joy and contentment.