LostInTheWoods

At school we have a 30 minute break, when it is time to get the obligatory mug of strong black coffee, eat a snack and chat with current and previous classmates. Occasionally, like the other today, I found myself excluded, and I sought refuge in the computer room to start writing this. There are so many cliques, and not the usual 'High School' cliques you may be thinking of.

First their are the native Swedes, mainly women, who don't seem to speak to any of us immigrants. They seem keen to keep their distance, I am not sure why.

Then there are the far eastern, women from the Phillapines and Thailand. They are diminutive and very chatty. I do speak to a few of these women who are in my class (in Swedish), and I find them to be very pleasant.

OK, where in the world shall I go next.... OK, the Middle East. These definitely fall into two camps, the Muslim and the non-Muslim. They Muslim women (who are from Iraq) are quite reserved, but once I had to work with one of them in class, the floodgates opened and we discussed the usual immigrant topics. The women who I work with has fled Basra, and is one of the 9000 refugees Sweden has taken in since the beginning of the Iraq war. We are yet to talk politics or the current situation in Iraq, but in the mean time we are able to make each other laugh.

The folks from places like Morocco and Lebanon are all very friendly, they speak English as a second language, and are obviously quite westernised.

Another clique is the Polish. It seems Poland is emptying itself of it's populace and they are heading to other parts of Europe. Good for them I say. They are quite fun to have around and no matter how hard they try to teach me, I am unable to pronounce a single Polish word.

Another clique are the Russians. Nearly all of them blonde(?). I know one of them quite well, so I do have a kind of a way into this group.

The are also many young adults from the former Yugoslavia here too... another war torn country to add to the list.

So outside of these groups there are not many people who don't fit into one of these groups. It is in this exclusive club that I find myself, and some days it just works out that nobody wants to go to the trouble of speaking to me in a second language on their break. I understand this totally, but it is very strange being an English speaker and being a lingual minority amongst so many different nationalities.

Going to school with people, a lot of whom have fled war, or poverty, or come to Sweden with a partner (and the culture shock than entails) has been a very humbling experience for me. It is their blogs you should be reading, not mine. My leap from the island to here has been a comparatively small one compared to a lot of these people's. I guess I can articulate what I experience for English speaking people, and they cannot.

So I wish to “big up” all my classmates, and thank them for changing my opinion of people from foreign lands.

That is all.

LostInTheWoods