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! ... more texts