Why Pablo and Aanu Left America to Build a Different Life in Nigeria

The common narrative today often centres around Nigerians relocating abroad in search of better lives. It’s rare to hear stories about Nigerians moving back to Nigeria, let alone non-Nigerians choosing to return. However, when Pablo and Aanu married in 2017, they envisioned a peaceful, family-oriented life that they felt the United States could not provide. Their ultimate dream was to lead a self-sustaining lifestyle, grow their own tropical food, and raise their children without being trapped in a gruelling work-until-you-die corporate culture. This felt impossible for them in America.

In 2023, they decided to move to Uganda. While Uganda initially offered them the peace they needed to heal, it soon became evident that it wasn’t their forever home. They faced challenges with their investments, their land was not ready, and they realised that as a Nigerian-American family, they would always be seen as outsiders, navigating complicated visa processes just to remain in the country.

In 2025, they moved to Nigeria. In this conversation, they talked to us about their previous life, what it looked like, their experience in Uganda and what living in Nigeria has been for them as a family of seven.

Before Nigeria became home again, what did life look like for you and your family?

We were living in the American Midwest, where Pablo worked as a university professor, and we had purchased a cosy home in the countryside. Around that time, Anu made the decision to leave her career in healthcare to become a full-time stay-at-home mother. By the time we decided to leave the United States, our family had grown to include four beautiful children—two girls and two boys.

Even though we were physically in America, our home was a vibrant microcosm of our cultures. We would drive for hours just to source authentic Nigerian food, and our days were soundtracked by Nigerian music and Nollywood movies. From birth, we practised a strict “One-Parent-One-Language” approach: Anu spoke to the children exclusively in Yorùbá, Pablo spoke to them in Spanish, and they absorbed English from the world around them.

Yet, beneath the surface, it became increasingly clear that we needed a radical shift. Opportunities for Anu were stagnant, and the financial returns of academia weren’t keeping pace with the needs of our rapidly growing family. We wanted more out of life than just surviving the daily grind.

So what did you do?

We turned our gaze toward Africa. Pablo had always championed moving to West Africa—specifically Nigeria, Togo, or Benin—so the family could fully immerse themselves in Yorùbá culture. However, having moved to the US as a child, Anu had initially ruled out ever returning to West Africa. Like many in the diaspora, she had been conditioned by the pervasive narrative that nothing good could come out of Nigeria due to insecurity and economic challenges. Her family in the US was equally adamant against the move.

Consequently, we pivoted our search to East Africa and settled on Uganda. It felt like the perfect, quiet sanctuary with a beautiful climate, fertile soil, and a calm, inviting culture.

How was your time in Uganda?

Our time in Uganda was a profound season of healing and detoxing from the high-stress Western lifestyle. During our two years there, we looked for farmland, built up our social media presence, and even wrote, produced, and starred in our first feature film, My Love from Another Land. It was also where we launched our popular “How We Met” YouTube series and where we gave birth to our beautiful baby daughter at home on our living room floor.

Uganda seemed like a joyful place for you. Why did you leave?

It happened during a short, open-minded visit to Nigeria while we were still living in Uganda. We quickly realised that the negative hype and fear-mongering spread in the diaspora did not match the vibrant, full-of-potential reality on the ground. When we returned to Uganda from that trip, our eldest daughter looked at us and said she wanted to go back to Nigeria, where there was food, family, fun and sun. That conversation sparked everything.

Another massive catalyst was education. After briefly enrolling our eldest children in school in Uganda, we observed that much of the formal education system on the continent remains deeply colonised. It often stifles creativity, discourages native languages, divides students by encouraging snitching, and uses outdated disciplinary methods like corporal punishment to create compliant followers rather than independent thinkers.

After this experience, we knew we wanted to take 100% control of our children’s education. However, we discovered that Uganda heavily restricted foreigners to specific international schools and prohibited homeschooling. Nigeria, on the other hand, offered us the legal freedom, cultural comfort, proximity of supportive family, and boundless economic potential to build the exact life we envisioned. Our children were so thrilled by the decision that they started packing their bags immediately!

There is often an assumption that moving abroad automatically means a better life. Having lived in Uganda and now Nigeria, what has your experience taught you about what “a better life” actually means?

Our journey completely redefined our definition of success. Having lived in America—Pablo for his entire life and Anu for half of hers—we can confidently say that the Western system isn’t designed for family thriving. It is a cycle built to funnel children into the workforce, teaching them just enough to be compliant cogs in a machine of debt and labour. Because Americans are taught to believe they live in the greatest nation on earth, it creates a unique psychological trap; people feel deeply unfulfilled but assume everywhere else must be worse, so they never try to escape the vortex of 24-hour news cycles and perpetual anxiety.

Uganda showed us a completely different rhythm of existence. Many people there genuinely enjoy where they are. Even when Ugandans move abroad for opportunities, their ultimate goal is usually to bring their earnings back home to build their dreams.

Through these experiences, we realised that “a better life” isn’t about the infrastructure of a Western country. A better life means having the time, peace, and autonomy to design your own day, feed your family clean food, and raise your children in alignment with your values, free from institutional exploitation.

How did your families react when you told them you were moving to these places? Did they immediately understand the decision, or did you have to convince some people that it was the right move for your family?

It was a tale of two very different reactions. On Pablo’s side in the US, our family was sad to see us move further away, but they were incredibly supportive. They gently asked if we had exhausted all options within the States first, but once they saw our clarity, they championed our choice.

Anu’s family, however, required a lot of convincing. Because of the common diaspora mindset regarding West Africa, they were initially 100% against the move.

The breakthrough happened when Anu’s mother came to visit us while we were still in Uganda. The trip triggered a beautiful sense of nostalgia for her, and she got to see firsthand the peace and healing the African continent offers. By the end of her visit, she had a complete change of heart, concluding that if we wanted to build a legacy, we could do it bigger and better in Nigeria. Winning her blessing was a beautiful milestone that made our final journey home feel complete.

Pablo, coming to Nigeria as a foreigner, what were some of your earliest cultural shocks or unexpected experiences? Were there things you had to learn or unlearn about living here?

The first major hurdle was the language. Having listened to Anu speak to our children for years, I knew a decent amount of Yorùbá—but it was mostly “child Yorùbá.” To make things more challenging, the dialect spoken in our new environment was Ondo, which sounded completely different from what I was used to. For the first few months, I felt entirely lost in translation.

There were also stark culinary and cultural differences that caught me off guard. Coming from the West, seeing dogs—ranging from cages of puppies to a fully grown Boerboel—being prepared as “bush meat” on the side of the road was deeply jarring and something that took a lot of mental processing to witness.

The most profound shock was confronting the local dynamics of colourism and the òyìnbó stereotype. Having lived my entire life in the United States, I understood racism all too well and knew how to combat it. But I was entirely unprepared for the complex system of colourism, colonial baggage, and deep-seated historical scars that exist here.

Because of my skin tone, people automatically assumed I was incredibly wealthy. This made me a constant target for scammers and endless requests for money. The constant cat-calling from all sides multiplied my anxiety, especially because my primary focus was keeping our five children safe in a brand-new environment. Because Anu was quietly battling her own severe reverse culture shock, she didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to guide me through it. I had to quickly learn how to protect my peace, unlearn my Western expectations of privacy, and find my own rhythm in a very loud, vibrant, and intense new world. But, despite all this, I can honestly say I have never felt more grounded and more at home than here in Naija. This is truly where we belong.

Aanu, what was it like watching Pablo experience Nigeria, the parts of the culture, family life, and everyday living that may have been unfamiliar to him?

The truth is, I wish I could have shielded Pablo from his culture shock, but I was quietly drowning in my own reverse culture shock. I left Nigeria when I was only 15 years old, meaning I had never actually navigated adulthood here. Returning two decades later as a spouse and a mother of five—while mentally still processing Nigeria through the lens of my 15-year-old self—was a psychological rollercoaster no one warned me about.

Because I am Nigerian, my family and community naturally expected me to step up as the guide. But the reality was that I felt like a foreigner too. Things had changed, people had moved on, and after living in two different countries back-to-back, I didn’t even fully grasp how the local currency and economy worked anymore. I found myself in the middle of a deep identity crisis. Despite speaking Yorùbá fluently, I was constantly labelled as an òyìnbó (foreigner). I felt out of place in my own homeland—strangely “not Nigerian enough” for the world around me.

On top of that, I had to confront the ugly reality of colourism, and I was not mentally prepared for it. Due to the lingering remnants of colonialism, there is a pervasive bias where lighter skin tones are unconsciously associated with higher class, wealth, and privilege. I faced hurtful ridicule and idiotic comments about my own skin tone, especially in comparison to my children. It stung deeply because I grew up in a society where people are terrified of getting darker.

Because I was processing all of this heavy emotional baggage, I didn’t have the capacity to help Pablo navigate his own culture shock. He was dealing with massive amounts of unwanted attention and being given unearned preferences that he didn’t even want. We were both just trying to find our footing in a country that was simultaneously home and completely brand new.

You both work and have built a life while raising children. What does an ordinary day look like for your family?

An ordinary day in our home is centred around intentional living, sustainability, and togetherness. Because we guide our children’s learning at home and are building a self-sustaining lifestyle, our days are beautifully blended rather than strictly compartmentalised. We spend a significant amount of time cooking wholesome meals from scratch, working the soil on our farm, and reading and learning alongside our children.

How important is it for you to raise children who are fluent in multiple languages?

When it comes to linguistics, raising our children to be multilingual is non-negotiable. To us, languages are intangible, priceless assets that no economy can devalue and no one can ever take away from them. Fluency in Yorùbá, Spanish, and English gives our children a golden key to connect on a deeply human level with over half the population of the globe.

These languages are not just words; they are windows into entirely different worlds, each holding its own unique repository of ancestral wisdom, cultural perspectives, and history. It is our blended heritage, and it is the very first inheritance we are proudly passing down to our children.

What would make you both look back years from now and feel that you built the life you hoped for?

Our ultimate dream is to be completely self-sustaining. We envision owning our own land and living closer to the earth—building a home, cultivating the soil, and fully providing for our needs and those of our children. We want to prepare our kids for a truly global life, but one that is firmly anchored in both traditional heritage and modern living. By giving them a healthy appreciation for all walks of life, we want to open doors of opportunity, empowering them to freely choose how they live on their own terms.

For us, food security and self-reliance are the foundation. From this baseline, we can actively reach into society to help build a stronger, more independent, and united community—and ultimately, a better state and nation.

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