Finland has cast its lot and decided to go populist, which is its right, as long as that decision was made out of free will and is not due to some manipulation of a more or less invisible puppet player pulling strings in sheer desperation with his ailing hands because he needs one last plot twist in the narrative he has created in the net he has woven. #(British with French-origin name, settled in Germany after fulfilling his mission to “mess things up with Brexit”).

Do I think Finland is shooting itself in the foot? Absolutely. Mixing and matching is always a good thing, otherwise look at what we’d be missing out on. Think of your breakfast, think where the products are from that you have on your breakfast table. Yes, things are better if they come from your garden, but you cannot provide for all your needs and added extras give your products spice. Living in a society is a constant dance of give and take, and the more we engage in this, the better we become. We need variety, we need a different perspective, and most importantly of all, we need each other because we are humans and we live on the same planet, and while we are very much familiar with our corner of the world and everything we consider our corner of the world, we need to share this knowledge and listen to the knowledge of others, because stagnating means we are not ready for change, and change is the one thing we can’t stop no matter how hard we try. We change, we become older, our children change from creatures that think we are the incarnation of the sun to going against everything we stand for because they are developing their own minds. This is how it should be. 

Coming back to the breakfast table, look at the items around you. Maybe your furniture is local, maybe it comes from Ikea. Look at your electronics, your clothes and your smartphone and all your favorite gadgets. Look at your preferred mode of transportation. From the things you eat to the machinery you use at work, if it wasn’t for foreign elements, your day would be significantly harder. And society is the same. Look at all the sushi, Tex Mex and burger places that are filled to the brim with Finns enjoying some food with their beer. Even though they have been adapted to the Finnish palate to the point where no one from the original countries would recognize their “national food,” people are eating and enjoying something foreign. Even the music, the movies and shows we watch for our entertainment are often foreign. We engage with them because they bring us joy. 

There are so many foreign elements in our lives that if we were to take them away, our quality of life would drop so significantly as to set us back an entire century. And yet, people want to survive on their own. They want to do away with what they don’t know rather than get to know the element they fear. Admittedly, this is a global phenomenon, but Finland especially has mastered hiding its racism and xenophobia while still living it every day. Foreigners do not get charged more for services on the surface as they do in other countries (barring not knowing where to go for bargains), they are merely excluded from the same benefits allocated to the nation’s own. The call back service at health centers is available in Finnish, Swedish and English, but the English option does not provide you with the possibility to have your number registered in the system for call back. Which is the only way to get an emergency appointment. Students whose native language has been registered as not being Finnish (or Swedish) have significantly less opportunities in schools than their Finnish-registered peers not because teachers actively put them down but because these teachers simply do not see the potential, or even hear these students, quite literally. It’s as though a part of their brains gets turned off. I once witnessed a Finnish friend literally not hear a word of what I was saying when I switched to Finnish even though I was standing right next to her. Her brain simply didn’t allow for the fact that I was addressing her in Finnish, when we had spoken English all this time and sometimes French when she wanted to practice. It was an interesting experience, and definitely opened my eyes to similar reactions around me.

So learn Finnish, is the advice given by foreigners and Finns alike. Which is all fine and well, people should learn the language of the country they are in. But here’s the catch, if you want people to learn Finnish, you need to provide adequate opportunities and possibilities. Treating foreign adult learners as though they are toddlers, and slow ones at that, is not the way to go about having others learn your language. Yes, it is a difficult language to learn, but not nearly as hard and as complicated as you make it. If – as Finnish teachers who have taught in Hungary have confirmed – Hungarian is much harder and can be mastered by people of various nationalities, then why can’t Finnish achieve the same? I give Hungary a lot of flack, and deservedly so, but at least their language teaching methods had a very good standard. The country that prides itself on its world-leading education forgot to mention one key factor: it is world-leading and top notch only so far as Finns are involved. Because what I have witnessed in terms of teaching at Finnish schools does not match in any way, shape or form what goes on in Finnish language classes for the most part. But it does match the way foreign students are treated on tracks specifically designed for them within Finnish schools when they are classes as Finnish-as-a-second language students. There are good courses for foreigners, but they are few and far between. 

Divorcing Finland is not a slam piece. I do try and find the good. But it is an honest installment of posts that showcase what it’s truly like to try and live in Finland, amidst a society that shows one face to the public while displaying a whole other treatment towards those it aims to attack. The objective is to give a clear image to those wanting to make Finland their home, so that they can see the reality behind the PR. As always, there is one side, there is the other side and the truth lies somewhere in between. So do not take this as a definitive statement speaking for a monolithic experience true to all foreigners. But instead take this alongside other accounts and juxtapose them with the happy clappy image state-funded sites project, as is of course their job. Whether the process will end in divorce or will be settled to mutual satisfaction remains to be seen.

The project that got me out of Budapest involved one phone call, which literally changed my life as it gave me the motivation to move to Cardiff and see it through. It also involved being able to work with someone who had helped me keep my sanity when we moved to a very antisemitic town in Germany when I was nine going on ten. It taught me two things, that antisemitism still exists and that people will not only deny it when it’s pointed out but will actively (seek to) punish you. Spoiler, the project ended up not working out, but it resulted in a move to Norwich, and from there Berlin and from there Helsinki, which when I look back on it is all very logical and part of an easily traceable chain reaction. Albeit one no one could have predicted back then. which is of course precisely how these things go.

NSync has nothing to do with this , other than I wouldn’t turn off the radio if their songs came on (providing I even recognized it was them singing), but this song jumped in my head right after I hung up after that phone call. It was actually two phone calls, because this one merely provided me with the number. But it had been provided with full consent of the person I wanted to contact and between hanging up and dialing the number I’d been given there was that moment of spine tingling excitement and hope and the world truly being my oyster (and One Night in Bangkok was very much my theme song for this venture, partly for its lyrics but also because I discovered it around the same time as I discovered the song that saved me).