Thoughts and reasoning about christian faith today.
Date: 2010_09_07.
C-Text - Christian Blog: Migration 2 - How can I know? ...
Tuesday, September 7, 2010. We are talking about migration currently. Do you have
experiences with migration? Have you ever lived in another country? We have twice
moved from Germany to the UK and back as a family. I have lived in the
US for a year and have worked in France as visiting professor.
And today I am working actively in both Germany and the UK. I would like to
reflect the experience in the light of the current debates.
Many things you do not know! ...
First of all: probably my experience is special. When I came to the UK first,
I spoke the language already. I came to work and had been offered an academic
job. So to some extent I was integrated into some social processes from the very
beginning.
But even the things we experienced with our particular background
made us think differently about migration.
When you come into a country, there are many things you do not know - even
if you learned the language at school. Often these are little things, but they
can slow you down extremely. How to buy some medicine? In the pharmacies
in the UK that works differently from the pharmacies in Germany. There are many
administrative things which are completely different in the two countries.
Getting a social security number or a bank account can be a real adventure.
You go from here to there and try to find out what you need to do. For this
you need the language, and even then special vocabulary is often used in
special situations - you are not prepared for this!
Every country has special ways do to things. In the UK you queue up, in
Germany you do this much less, usually. However, this is considered to be very
important, even a key social competence! Another thing:
Whom do you approach how? That is
another important topic. In the UK, the way to talk to others is sometimes
different from the way you would do that in Germany. France and Germany
have the forms "Vous" or "Sie" when you address another person. It is extremely
impolite to use a personal form which is common in the UK. When you move
into France or Germany, you need to know this!
We found Christian brothers and sisters ... it's the Lord's world!
We have been active Christians in a Christian environment. In Germany, we have
attended a free evangelical church - and in the UK we looked around to find a
church right away. This was very successful and we found brothers and sisters
in the Lord very soon. I would say that moving country as Christians is very
different from moving without such background. You get contacts very quickly,
and these contacts are often sustainable, characterized by sincere friendship
and start with a reasonable depth.
It is fantastic that the Lord is everywhere. It is his world. The world does
not belong to you or to me. It does not belong to a particular group. It belongs
to the Lord. He has created it and given it to us to live in it and to use
it. We all are visitors in our world.
I am extremely grateful for the experiences I made as foreigner in the USA,
in the UK, in Japan and in France. We have learned so much, and today I feel
quite at home in different environments. That does not mean that I know
everything all the time! We need to learn to live with imperfections everywhere.
We need to learn how to learn from each other, locals and strangers,
how to communicate the key
expectations and processes which our society uses to the foreigners, and we need
to be open to errors and difficulties and help each other. We need to be
open to learn, eager to learn, all of us!
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