life as an immigrant

Life as an Immigrant


Until this last weekend, I hadn’t worked for pay since moving to Canada nearly two years ago. Before coming here I was a high school English teacher. I worked with at-risk and ELL (English language learners) kids primarily. The majority of my students were disengaged from the formal education process. A sizable portion had drug or other criminal issues to deal with and about a quarter of the girls were dealing with pregnancies or abusive home situations and, of course, there were the non-English speaking kids with their immigration ordeals.

I was always struck by the fact that I had colleagues who were all too eager to hand these “defectives” over to my program because they believed there was no hope, or never had been, for these teens who would become my kids. I never once ran across a student who didn’t have potential or couldn’t be at least partially plugged back in. But it was the immigrant students who impressed me the most, coming from distances which would have rendered my finicky co-workers bug-eyed with fear and overcoming language and cultural barriers which would have left those same adults curled up like fetuses.  They had learned so much already and most of it on their own. I admired them. I reminded them often that they were amazing and miles ahead of their American peers, most of whom couldn’t speak English properly, let alone a second language.
I was a typical American who had little sympathy for the plight of immigrants before I met them, but I didn’t gain a true understanding of the “lifestyle” until I became one of them.

The process for entering and gaining residence in a country not of your birth is a bit like navigating the social safety net programs set up in the United States. I have had more than my fair share of experience dealing with Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare, and I know first-hand that the initial barriers in any program run by the government are to discourage people early and often from continuing. It’s a cost-effective measure to keep the number of participants low.

Immigration was not dissimilar. It involved a mountain of paper from application forms to documentation, and followed a rule book that was written with a fuzzy sort of clarity that even those who worked in the immigration system were reluctant to interpret with certainty.

And it is a long process which can take a year or far longer depending on a person’s situation and their value as a contributor economically and socially. It was seven months before I was granted a work permit which I have used only once when I recently gave a workshop on blogging at our public library. It was ten months before I was officially “landed” which means I paid my final entrance fees, was instructed in my obligations as a permanent resident and handed the papers which allow me to live here and travel back and forth to the United States without fear of being denied re-admittance to my home.

Because Canada is my home now. It’s funny. I was reading Neil Gaiman’s blog recently, and he wrote about the slippery term “home”. Home is where one grows up and wherever one is currently living so that we are constantly in a state of returning home whether we are coming or going. That is what it means to be an immigrant too.

 

This is an original 50 Something Moms post by Ann Bibby 

Happy Fourth of July


Rob had to remind me what day it was this morning. I had completely forgotten that today was the fourth. Not that I have become so Canadian in my short tenure here but mainly because I tend to lose track of the days when I am not working. If it weren’t for steady employment over the years, I wouldn’t have been aware of the month, day of the week or even the specific time of day. These are artifices created for the good of businesses  and religions for the most part, I think. 

I haven’t kept up much with the news of late. I know that the ’08 presidential election candidates continue to plague Iowa with their presence and that Hilary now feels secure enough in her manhood to fetch her husband out of the kitchen to join her on the campaign trail. Scooter was predictably pardoned by the President. Enraged liberals bemoaned this latest blow to the constitution at the hands of the current administration, but The Founders wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. They did the best the could at the time but the system they created was, and continues to be, a work in progress. Some generations work harder at improving it than others is all. The boomers are not proving to be hard-workers, at least not for the people, but they have always been a fairly short-sighted and selfish lot. 

People are still dying in Iraq but since it is mainly Iraqis, no one cares much or at least not enough to ask the hard questions and take to the streets when they don’t get answered. Oh, that was a boomer thing, wasn’t it. I guess they can’t take to the streets to protest themselves out of office, can they?

Michael Moore’s latest pseudo-documentary on the secret shame of health care in America is in the theaters. Day late and a dollar short. No one is truly ignorant of the inequities of the system. Those without know the reality too well, and those with enough health care at present are like the people in that story who stand silent as all their neighbors are hauled away because they rationalize that as long as it’s not me, it’s okay. 

Fat people are taking over the country even as  the people who design the clothes they wear try to shame them into slimming down with all sorts of fashions that accentuate their gelatinous bellies and rubbing thighs. The fat know that they are the true inheritors of the earth simply because they are willing to eat more of it and off it, despite the chemicals it contains (and the fact that when they are finally stricken with fat-related diseases their combined weights will crush the health care system for good.)

The U.S. is still not well liked by other countries. They see us as loud, arrogant, hedonistic and stupid. Even Canadians are none too fond of us and given their natural bent towards politeness, this should concern us. If the most easy-going kid on the block thinks you are an asshole, then maybe you really are.

What would the founding fathers think if they could see their country at 230 years of age? Would they be impressed or horrified? I guess that would depend on the individual founder. They were very different men with ideas and ideals that didn’t always match up. They fought, dirty sometimes, and they schemed, dreamed and committed treason against their own government for the independence to build a completely new one. They weren’t saints, so it stands to reason that the country they created would not be a haven for saintly people.  I imagine they would think that there is a lot of room for improvement, but then there always was. 

The fathers created a democracy that flew against the conforming natures of most human beings and for some reason, it worked. Not perfectly then and not perfectly now, but that’s okay. Have yourself a Happy  little Fourth of July.

Finding My Way


Doing the stay at home mom thing was my part-time job over long holidays and during the summer. It was not something I took seriously, and I don’t say this to belittle it as an occupation. Raising a child and taking care of the basic and not so needs of a family is not for the lazy, the weak or the slow of mind. I base this observation on the years I spent, poorly, attempting to manage a household, child and a full-time job. None of which I managed to do well simultaneously and can say with all honesty that when push came to shove it was household that got the boot every time…..because it was hard work. Hard thankless unpaid work.

Yesterday I made my first trip into the Fort without Rob. Katy and I had an appointment for haircuts, and I needed to stop by the florist’s to touch base on arrangements for the wedding. I map-quested the directions and managed with only one misdirection. Today was another story. I need to go the library and the post office which ironically sit next to each other though the are accessible on opposite blocks. Library not a problem, but I had the wrong directions for the post office and being low on frustration tolerance still, I just gave up and went on to the next errand on the list. But, you know how after you have failed at something everything that come next takes on a slightly tinged with impending doom aura? 

Shopping is something that is becoming math-like for me. Despite my best intentions to block out all things American when it comes to money and other units of measurement, I find paying for things flustering. So much of the money here is in coin, and I really haven’t spent enough time looking at it to ascertain the values of the dizzying array of colors, shapes and sizes. So between monetary transactions and having to ask OnStar for directions to the post office, I felt quite like an idiot by the time I left town for home. The drive back is long enough that I was able to put some of the mood behind me and then happy conversation with Jordan over a lunch of leftovers banished the rest of the inadequacy fears, but I still feel a bit silly and think I should be catching on to this whole “being in a new country thing” a bit quicker.

It’s odd to feel as though you are right where you belong and like a fish our of water at the same time. I remind myself that I have accomplished some near Herculean things in the past couple of months, and it is normal to want to catch my breath a bit, but there is a part of me that has always met challenges and new things head on and  wants to charge right in and be perfect now.

As far as I have come, there are still things to do and places yet unknown. Patience not being a virtue of mine (something I actually pride myself on a bit at times), I know that I will have other moments like those today when I admitted defeat and called first Rob and then OnStar. It’s okay, I guess. Columbus probably asked for directions too. Well, maybe he didn’t. He was trying to find India after all. He could have used OnStar. They have turn by turn directions you know, but they can’t help with units of measurement thing.