Stereotyping the stereotypes

Very often our world is divided between the developed countries and the developing countries. Somehow, people from those countries get identified with the same attributes, and the stereotypes are formed. During my modest existence I have seen both sides of this story. First  you will see the developed world citizen’s stereotypes of the developing citizens, and then the other side of the story:

Developed nations think

– People from developing countries are all spitting images of documentary films on poverty.

– Everything they see on TV is true.

– Their way of life is how everybody should live

Developing nations think

– Everybody in the developed countries is rich.

– Everything  on TV about developed countries is true and about their own country isn’t

– Their way of life is ok, but the grass is always greener elsewhere

These are  just a couple of examples of the stereotypes and the core of them all is the way that our own environment and the rest of the world are represented or misrepresented to all of us. Being born in one country or another does not guarantee you a better life, it may, or it may not. The grass is always the same shade of green, everywhere.

Just like a rolling stone

People aren’t stones. We’re more like sponges: we suck in everything from our surroundings until it becomes a fundamental part of what we are. It is not something that we are necessarily aware of. In fact most of us do not even know how conditioned we are by the fact that we live in a certain place, surrounded by certain people.

When you decide to move from the place where you grew up, many things happen. The connections with people in your life become stronger or they break, you become stronger, or you break. If you move to another city, you get to start over. It is difficult but the novelty of it keeps you strong and motivated. What you still have is all the skills you need to survive in that place. You know that, if something happens, your family, friends, neighbors, people who have participated in your life, will reach out for you and help. But when you move away from them to another country, your entire universe instantly shrinks to you and only you.  On top of that, there is all the things about that new place that you need to learn, from the procedure on how to rent an apartment, to simple, every day things like, whether you are expected to say hi to your neighbors or not.

A  rolling stone gathers no moss, they say. But for human existence it is precisely the moss that we gather like sponges that makes an integral part of us and our lives. When you decide to emigrate, you decided to shed that moss, but the full consequence of that will be obvious to you only when you reach your destination.

Why I became an immigrant

I was born in a country that does not exist anymore. It disintegrated right in front of my eyes during my teenage years. I was born a citizen of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 90’s I became the citizen of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; after that, my citizenship changed to Serbia and Montenegro and now I am the citizen of Serbia. All these changes happened because the country changed.

Yugoslavia was a lovely place to grow up in: safe and open. Everybody was some kind of middle class, with access to education, jobs and moderately easy life. There were no homeless people. The country was created in the early 20th century as a federation of several smaller nations, and after the WW II it became a socialist republic. Of all of the Eastern European countries it was the most open, something of which everybody was proud. My memories of that time are lovely and a lot of the values I believe in come from the naivety of the child who grew up in a place where fraternity and unity was cherished.

However, not all stories have a happy ending. Countries are constantly being born or die, they form alliances and break them, there are wars and conflicts. Yugoslavia disintegrated during my teenage years and it took a lot of time to realise that. From a point of view of a teenager, you could get sucked in in the new and trendy nationalism, in nostalgic Yugo-romanticism, or just simply be confused. Since my family was economically ruined, and, like most middle class families, we were simply struggling to make ends meet, I did not have time to mature into a nationalist or a Yugo-romanticist. I was just trying to be good at school and handle the typical adolescent pains with dignity. When the time came to finish high school and think of future, the values I grew up with prevailed – I wanted to go to University and study to become an English teacher or a translator. I wanted to travel and see the world. I wanted to work hard and build my own future. Sadly, I was living in a wrong country to make my wishes come true. It was impossible to travel, because there was no way to earn enough, and even if you did earn enough Serbia was closed off – it was very difficult to get a tourist visa to go anywhere; if you were young and unemployed, even more so – you were the dreaded potential immigrant. The second dream was even harder to achieve. With an impossible unemployment rate and average salaries so low that you cannot become independent from your parents, the future looked bleak.

When I try to remember the dreams and aspirations of a younger me, the one in her early twenties, I still feel the pangs of somebody who, although so young, sees no future. I could not imagine that I would be able to have a job that will give me enough to survive. It was that bad. And the only reason why I was in such a situation (and many young people shared the same destiny) is because I was born in a certain place.

You do not plan to emigrate, nobody wants to move away from their family, friends and their life. You do it because you are just like everybody else: you want a normal life, and you are just not lucky enough to live somewhere where it is possible. This is how the idea of moving somewhere else starts. For me, it was easier, since I wanted to see the world anyway, and I had developed an intense distaste towards nationalism of any kind – it ruined my young years.

The story of a jobstealer

If you live in a developed country, you are probably familiar with the fact that some people from abroad have moved to your neighbourhood. They speak a different language and look different. They have odd habits and the smells from their kitchen are sometimes strange. They tend to have a thick accent, and sometimes can hardly speak the language. What the heck, you think to yourself, why do they even come here if they can’t even speak the language? And in the newspaper there are sometimes articles on how they come to steal the jobs of your compatriots, how some of them steal and do other types of crimes. It feels that every day more and more of them are coming.

I am one of them, one of the foreigners who live in your country. It is awfully annoying that the stereotypes mentioned above exist, but I will not deny them, nor alienate myself from them. On the contrary, I will tell you how I came to your country to steal your job, and other stories.