Snapshots

When you remember an event, what does it “look” like, or feel like?  How do we “experience” the past?  A new website I subscribed to recently suddenly had me thinking quite a bit about this.

According to the scientists (and no, I am not even going to try and make this into a scientific paper with references - just go search Scientific American for some good articles), we have long term memories, short term memories and sensory memory.  We have ways to remember things that we use to drive a car for example, which seems to be located in a different part of the brain than the part that remembers your fifth birthday.  The sensory memory fades quickly and is related to what we remember shortly after having seen a flash card with a number of items on it.

I am interested in what I call the snapshots in time that we seem to carry with us.  These are those images that somehow get burned into our minds: a specific scene that we remember fondly, how someone looked on a specific day, a feeling that we resurrect sometimes in moments of solitude.  Do these snapshots fade or change over time, do we re-contextualize them as we move on in life and what is it that makes for a good snapshot for each of us - is it the same for all of us? 

My first overseas trip was when I was already 35 years old.  I remember packing my analogue camera and a video camera to make sure that I capture as much of the event as possible and bring it back to share with my wife and family.  I took hours of video, and quite a few rolls of film.   The film I promptly developed on my return and as soon as I had an opportunity I sat my wife down in front of he TV and started playing back the video.  I had high expectations of how she would react.  Obviously it was not going to be the same as being there, but still, it would be great to share all these events. 

Not so.  And you will probably tell me that you could have told me so!

Some things that I found very special she found utterly boring.  I had long sweeping country side shots, she asked what the people looked like.  I had lots of pictures of old churches and great buildings, she wanted to know how I experienced the interactions with the people I met.  Yes, it was great to see the different places and things, but to her there was a disappointing  lack of “life” in what I brought back.  After that, I noticed that she almost always had people in her photographs, some posed, but mostly just grabbed in a moment!  Somehow our contexts were not overlapping...

Maybe we all have different signals that we use to recover the experience?  And this brings me back to the website that triggered all of this:  Blipfoto.com.  Here you are allowed to post only one image on the day that you took it, building a snapshot collage of the days of your life.  I’ll let you go there from here just now.  But before you go, first imagine something that you would have liked to capture today and that you would have posted there.  I have learned that I need people in my snapshots too, and not posed for the moment so much as just being in the moment of life - frozen in a certain setting that will help me recall a multitude of emotions.   Enough already - link me to Blipfoto!

Migrants

Immigrant - “A person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country”.  That sort of sums it up when natives of a country consider anybody that was not born in their native country.  How can they become truly part of us?  And when the chips are down, these immigrants are easily pointed out as being part of whatever problem the natives may be facing.   I believe that the migrants may hold the keys to more solutions than what they are credited for and I shall return to this later.
When a person emigrates, the loss of sense of place is immediate.  The natives in the country of origin see the emigrant as a “loss” for the country or in many cases as “good riddance”, one less person to worry about, or in the worst case, the emigrant is seen as a traitor to the values and culture of his country of birth.
All immigrants and emigrants are transients or wanderers in the eyes of those that have never ventured to settle outside their known world.  As migrants our accents give us away, the simple things we get wrong in conversations, the subtleties of the culture you are trying to adopt, all these things set you apart.  In many cases being an immigrant puts you at a disadvantage in the work place.  Can this person be trusted, will this immigrant be able to cope with our way of doing things, and should he/she not rather start at the bottom and remain there?
Many immigrants to the developed countries go through stringent selection processes.  You must be of the right age group, you must have a skill that is in short supply, you cannot have a criminal record, you must bring enough currency to fend for yourself for a while, you and every family member that comes with you must be in excellent health, you must conform to very interesting rules and regulations, and once you arrive, none of this is effectively recognized by the people you meet every day at the supermarket, in the job interview, on the bus and in the classroom.
Still, governments have expensive immigration programs.  They see it as a way to bolster the economy, to grow the number of productive citizens, to cover for the skills that leave their country for various reasons, to bring investment into the country and to get a certain diversity that they see may be advantageous in future.  These are all valid reasons.  But do the general population accept these facts?
The world is rapidly changing and the developing countries have aging populations.  For this reason getting skilled young people from other countries into the economic activity makes sense.  As long as the immigrants can integrate with he culture of the new country, this is a good way to renew economies.  The key is integration.  This can only be achieved if there is acceptance that the immigrants are carefully selected for their future contribution and if the community invites them in and values their contributions.
Many older people have a sense of adventure and massive experience that they can bring together to the benefit of a country.  The fact that they are older and wiser must be seen as a positive for those countries looking for exceptional skill sets.  Here you can choose people with proven track records in the country of origin, you can inspect their value systems by interrogating friends and family and co-workers.  The fact that they have the energy and the will to bring incredible change to bear on their settled existences must be an indication of the potential of these people to be active participants and agents for change in their new countries.  For this to happen the communities in the new country must acknowledge this potential and integrate these people rapidly at the levels of planning and strategy to harvest the wealth of experience.  In many cases these people bring established and strong families with them that can be centers of renewed growth in family values in developed countries where this has deteriorated.
As I said earlier, I believe proper immigration policies and programs are key to the constant renewal of cultures and countries.  Immigrants are not the slaves of the new era, they are often the cream of the crop.  They may be the ingredients needed to refresh a stale economy, or to bring the insight for renewal of a stagnant city, or they may bring with them the warnings of paths taken somewhere else that ultimately led to disaster.  It is up to the communities in which the immigrants imbed themselves to utilize this resource.  It also asks of the immigrants to unconditionally adopt their new environment, and to do the rootstock onto which they are grafted proud by bringing forth magnificent fruit.