Being immigrant, being different

When you come from a different world you cannot help feeling differently. You are used to dress a certain way, to talk and behave differently and on top of everything your mother tongue is... yeah, you guessed right it is different.

You suddenly realize, that you came to the world that is not like your own. You feel as if somebody stripped you naked up to your soul and left you exposed in the crowd and you have nothing to cover your body and your soul with. You feel shame and humiliation and urge to shout: people, please, wait a minute, I am not that different from you, just help me a little, push me into right direction, I’ll learn I am not stupid, I have some merits, I just need some time, be patient with me.

I am convinced that everybody lives in an emotional and social bubble/box and breaking out of this box can be very painful. You are surrounded by people you know and who know you and you expect them to behave a certain way and you behave a certain way towards them too.

You can love them or hate but their behavior to the most extent predictable and that predictability gives comfort and you do not have to feel depressed and stressful.

If you an immigrant (alien) your surroundings lack that familiarity, it takes time.

You gradually learn language and habits, you find new friends who morally support you. You can vent and cry on their shoulder. They understand.

You learn how to make a living in a new country.

Sometimes it's hard when you do not have new skills, or your skills are not enough, you need some extra learning, or you need something completely different.

When I came to Canada I had a University degree but with 3 small kids and my diploma meant next to nothing in Canada. I found a job as a translator but lost it right away for some stupid reason just because I did not know some trifle things.

With time comes the experience and gradually you forget what was so bad in your country, you remember good days only, you feel nostalgia and regret.

Finally you come back as a tourist and everybody treats you as a guest and you do not see any place there for yourself, you indeed is a tourist.

You come back into your new country more relaxed and glad you returned. You see the differences and understand them. You want other people to see everything with your eyes and share your experience with others.

And you join something like http://www.hubpages.com/ and you write about your experience and wisdom, your ups and downs.

And you do not feel like you are in a box anymore because your box suddenly expanded and it includes now a lot of people who are ready to listen and willing to understand, criticize you or applaud to you and with you.

You do not feel like a stupid immigrant in a box, but as a normal human being with lots of ideas you cannot wait to convey to others.

And it feels great.

Too tired to write...

This week I am completely flat and cannot write anything, my mind is blank and refuses to cooperate, so I fill like a total dummy. May be I should write some manual. Something for Dummies, or what should you do when you cannot do anything anymore? I cannot even reprint my material I’ve been writing before and was going to post. I’ll try to do it tomorrow, if I can. But as I have to work tomorrow I have no idea if I’ll be able to accomplish that. So if somebody expected something new, wait till next time, please. I am done for today. I need rest. I still managed to post something into Hubpages, I am absolutely in love with them. Here is my link if you are curious.
http://hubpages.com/_HG5/hub/yourmoneyanddignity_
I hope it will work as I am not familiar with all that link producing technique.
I'll just leave you a picture I made recently and that's it.

New pill, doctor? Will I have fun with it?

I am a Canadian citizen since 1997, but I still do not feel like I belong here. I always feel like a visitor, who for some unknown reason has been hold in here for too long. I live in Canada but part of me still lives in a different place, probably the place that does not exist any more. But that’s I think the cost of immigration, you have to accept it and play by new rules but you cannot help it you want to criticize those rules if you do not understand them.

I have a big issue with medical service in Canada. In a big city like Toronto god forbid, if you need some emergency or just after hours help, you can hardly get any of it on time, when you need it. Of course the ambulance will come pretty quick but then they will take you in emergency room and if you are not having heart attack or bleeding severely, you’ll be waiting for some doctor to attend to you for hours. May be they hope you somehow get better and just go home, without bothering the doctor, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s exactly how it feels.

I remember once my son who was 15 at that time developed a stomach pain so we called ambulance and we were sitting in the hall there for 3 hours in the middle of a night. Finally my son felt better and I told him: are you better? Let’s go home, I have to go to work in the morning. So we just left and I still do not know what was the problem with his stomach. Every time you go to a family doctor, you have to sit in a row for an hour or more before you can get to the doctor, and all he has just 10 minutes before he shovels you out with some pills. How wonderful! And if the pills do not help you can always go back, sit more and get another pill plus some pills for side effects if you have any. Most doctors are completely ignorant about the miracles of healthy nutrition and almost never give you a sound advice regarding it. Eat everything and in moderation is not working in certain occasions when you are having sugar or some other food addiction or just used to eat wrong type of food, or have a crazy life style etc.

Most babies come into this world amazingly healthy and what happens next? What do we do to our kids, why don’t we teach they healthy habits? They grow up looking for fun. I hate this word fun. I think we use it too much in this country. Not everything is a fun and kids should realize that early. May be then we’ll have less depressed teenagers in this country. They go to the doctors and trust them and then they get hooked on some vicious antidepressants and become dependant, they need more and more and cannot stop. Depression real or imaginary gets worse.

It’s a shame dear doctors, because we have by Nature, God, or whatever you believe into, build in amazing ability to get better no matter what with doctors or no doctors, pills or no pills, sometimes by determination and mere willpower. It’s in our power to make us healthy. Just do not mess with you health, please. And do not let doctors do that just because they need more patients and more money.
I sincerely wish doctors to be paid when a patient have recovered after the treatment AND ONLY THEN. Then they would work efficiently I think. May be in future it will happen. Right now by nature of their profession doctors have tremendous power to save us and to harm us at the same time and it is not a good thing.

That’s my reluctant immigrant’s opinion. I do not trust doctors especially here in Canada, where medicine is severely commercialized. I never go to any annual or whatever check up. I try to live healthy; it is not always possible, as I cannot protect myself from stress. But before I am really sick I am not going to go to any doctor, just forget about it. I’ll take my chances. At least he is not going to harm me. And I will try to help myself as long as I can. Stupid? May be. Sorry, but I have my reasons.

Immigration of an educated person

In a way I was a lucky immigrant. I came to Canada with landed immigrant papers (my husband did everything, I just signed the papers). I did not have to fight and suffer and pay lawyers thousands of dollars of last money and prove anything. I came to Canada, signed something and was free to go. Welcome to Canada! It was easy.

But there is another not less important side to immigration – psychological. Adaptation to life in a society completely different, when you have to move from one way of life to another, from one social structure to completely different is not easy. Shock is imminent. Step from broken socialism to unknown capitalism with 3 small kids in tow. No money, limited language.

I could not speak English when I came. I was English-Russian technical translator; I could decently translate from one language to another on paper, but no spoken language. It took me about 5 years before I stopped being afraid to open my mouth and say something. That ingrained fear to say something wrong haunted me. It’s difficult, when you cannot say something what you want to say, cannot express yourself properly as educated person should. It gives you deep sense of inferiority. You look like a fool and feel the same.

If you do a lot of mistakes in your speech, people do not trust you. You do not sound like an educated person and people tend to look down on you. Not only that, when you are immigrant you do not know how to behave socially, you do not know simple things, like what to eat, cook, how to wash your clothes and with what, products are different and oh, boy, these products are plenty!

I remember my first visit to a big supermarket. There was one, called Knob Hill Farms, if I am not mistaken. It’s gone now. It was really a monster supermarket; I was completely lost there. In socialist country in a northern area we lived we used just cabbage for fresh vegetables and dry apples for fresh fruits in winter. We were ecstatic when we managed to buy some lemons in December and I still remember that smell of a first spring cucumber; when you slice it thinly and do not want to eat it, just smell that fresh aroma promising summer.

As kids we used to get a present on New Year’s Eve. A bag full of candies in colorful wrappings, couple of walnuts and an orange or mandarin. Many years passed by I still have to smell the orange before I eat it. It took me I think about 10 years living in Canada to get used to the fact that food is always around and it is not going to disappear tomorrow. It’s still hard to throw food away. It is sacred. It’s ingrained in my system.

One immigrant girl I know told me once, that for many years she would come to fast food restaurant and steal some packages of salt and pepper and ketchup, because she could not understand that they are “free” and that tomorrow they still be there.

Now she is a businesswoman and do not steal any packages of anything but that’s how mentality works. In a "pure" socialist country everything belongs to the government. That means nobody directly personally controls you. Centralized distribution means not enough of anything when you need it. At the same time this very thing you need might be rotting somewhere, but you are not getting it, it’s not there for you where you need it. There is shortage of everything.

People would say: collective means mine. It’s just socialist mentality. Taking something that belongs to the government is not stealing. Of course if you steal big time, you could go to prison. But attitude is the same. If it belongs to government, it’s mine and I can take it if I need.

Though political indiscretions have been punished more severely. Capitalism was enemy #1, business in any form was illegal. Illegal businesses existed all the time, but you had to hide it pretty good...

Of course Gorbachev changed all that but he already could not help it. Socialistic mechanism started loosing its wheels. Artificial “society for people” collapsed, painful and hateful capitalism was reborn again. Big monster USSR ceased to exist. Enemy #1 became way of life. People started to emigrate in droves, running out, from poverty, political games, discrimination, wars, confusion, what not, you name it.

It’s hard to leave everything and start all over again. It’s not easy for those who left and not easy for people who stayed. System collapsed but mentality still there and nostalgia, for the better that existed in reality or in make believe and for the broken dreams.

Many people believed into socialism and still do, especially in the countries that never experienced the reality of it. But I hope for the better future. We will change mentality, we’ll learn how to cherish what we have and create better life here, over there, anywhere. Our future right here, right now and we’ll learn from our mistakes and will be better. Here , there, anywhere.