my life in ten objects, #3 visas

When I was a student, an Interrail ticket was the highest form of luxury, flying was way too expensive, hitchhiking was not everywhere a safe option, and while a bicycle could get you almost anywhere, it took time. And boy oh boy, did I ever want to move, I wanted to go everywhere. Everywhere. Just because. My German family failed to understand this. A holiday in Denmark, the Italian Alps, the French Atlantic coast, school exchange to the UK, all well and good, but real travel, with no return ticket, no schedule, no prebooked accomodation? No way. 

Enter the Irish man I met one summer's day in Connemara (I was hitchhiking, he was cycling) who had just returned from working several years on the African continent, and with him my slow understanding of the Irish diaspora, the Irish history of emigration and forced famine and colonialism and so on.

In short, for economic reasons but also because we were young and adventurous and wanted to go and see and hear and and smell and taste, explore!, this planet, we emigrated. It was the second emigration for me, the third one for him, the first of several for our daughter. With little time to prepare, two months between him being interviewed in a Dublin hotel and departure date, we hopped on a plane and 12 hours later stepped into the tropical heat of paradise.

the dates never matched reality

expiry date was 12/1998

 

There is no other way to describe these years. It has been paradise. Other, shorter work and travel stops followed before we eventually returned to Ireland and the - at the time - dismal prospects which resulted in us moving to Germany a short time later. All this happened a long time ago and yet, we still talk about it as if it was yesterday, we know this has shaped us like nothing ever could.

nothing in this visa is correct, nobody noticed

 

The UN calculates that a record 215 million people now live outside their country of origin. An additional 700 million are adrift within the borders of their own nations. This represents a seventh of the global population. It is part of the greatest diaspora in human history, a hegira from country to country, from city to city, from empty belly to mouthful of bread. It is our species’ oldest trajectory. Only the colossal scale is new.

The figures are from 2013, the quote from Paul Salopek, who in 2014 started walking from what he calls Eden, the origin of the human species in East Africa. He is currently somewhere in Japan and this year hopes to cross from Asia to the American continent. 

There's a recent interview with him here, to read or to listen to.

While the figures have probably changed - my guess is increased - they are too colossal to even imagine if you are a person who has never really lived anywhere but home. And even to me who has accumulated several homes over the years. All of them comfortable homes.

We are an African species. That broadly means that Homo sapiens emerged on the land that is now Africa, and most of our evolution occurred there in the past half a million years. The rest of the world was peopled when a few left that pan-African cradle within the past 100,000 years. Until recently, this was largely known from the old bones of the long dead. But recovering DNA from those old bones has become fruitful. (. . . ) a study led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania showed that the small amount of Neanderthal DNA in living Africans today had entered the Homo sapiens lineage as early as 250,000 years ago somewhere in Eurasia, meaning that we had left Africa several times, and way earlier than thought.

Adam Rutherford

A while ago I was watching the TV series Expats with Nicole Kidman who is the wife of a business man living with her family as affluent "expats" in Hong Kong. We were once considered expats, which basically stands for white people who live in relative luxury for a while in a foreign country, mostly in Africa or Asia, often working for multinational corporations or in second or third level education. Expats are neither migrants nor immigrants and certainly not refugees, or at least don't see themselves as such. There is quite a privileged life style attached to being an expat, including servants, receptions, sports, clubs, whatever. It's actually a sickening life style based on colonial attitudes and racism.  I admit to being captured by the shiny allure at times and I have been to a couple of receptions with high commissioners and embassy officials but we were poor expats, sent with the blessings but no financial support of a poor NGO from a poor country, without servants or credentials to join the yacht/tennis/golf clubs, and we refused being housed in a gated neighbourhood and instead lived in a small village with an ancient roaming tortoise and chickens and dogs and a large number of curious children. In short, we were looked down on by the real expats. One year, the people of the village asked us to celebrate Patrick's day, the older ones had been educated by Irish missionaries, and together we organised a big party with charcoal that was prepared from coconut husks for days, firing a large grill where several massive tuna fish that had been marinating in ginger, chili, garlic and oil where prepared and then eaten wrapped in banana leaves. Everybody including the grannies came, The kids were all over the place, the music came from a tape deck, there was plenty of beer and some bacca (a powerful alcoholic drink you don't want to know how it's made). Of course, we also invited our expat colleagues and friends who thought it was great fun compared to the drinks in hand events at the yacht club and some even called it tribal.

As I've mentioned Africa a few times recently, click here for a nice game to play. (I wasn't very good either.)

We travelled and lived simply, wherever we stayed, we left stuff behind and when we arrived back in Dublin one autumn afternoon, all we had was what we carried on our backs. But that was by choice. We had lived a life of luxury. Nowhere were we refused entry, nobody stopped us on our path, when we walked into glamorous hotel lobbies just to use their bathrooms we were greeted with polite smiles. Two white people with a six year old blond child could do anything. Still can. Movement across land, sea, borders, for me, for my family, is a luxury we can afford when and as we see fit. Our passports will get stamped with visas for almost everywhere on this planet. No problem.

But movement is also humankind’s oldest survival strategy.

Migrant is an unforgivable term. Migrants are people who have properly cancelled their electricity and telephone connections, sold their belongings online, thrown a last farewell party, who may even have earned a few moving pennies by selling their trivial emigration story as a TV event.

The others who have no time to mourn their dead, to search for and bury the bodies of their loved ones, but have to run quickly to protect at least the rest of their families, these are refugees. The ones you see in the camps are also very poor. In a war, the wealthy always flee first and the poor last. People who try to escape in plastic sandals while bombs are falling, they are refugees. The media houses of the world  should not be allowed take away the refugee status from these people by using false terminology. It is their only remaining protection.

What these refugees, including an unusually large number of children, experience is the most catastrophic thing that can happen to people in their existence. It makes no sense to list the massive violations of human rights. You have to imagine it like this: The poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak, the most merciless of the most merciless are imprisoned, beaten, tortured, attacked under the direct testimony of Western population who considers themselves to be the most civilized and valuable of their kind. You let them starve, freeze, cry, persevere. You allow this, it is truly not an exaggeration, and always remember this: you let them die.