Working with mostly non-English colleagues for the last 3 months has given me lots of opportunities to look at things from other points of view. The chat in the junior doctors' room ranges from ways to control the world population, to where is best to go on holiday, to council tax and religion. What has struck me most I think is getting a glimpse of what it's like to live in England as a foreigner. This came across particularly forcefully a couple of weeks ago when I went to a barbeque at a colleague's house, and was the only British person there. I had a fun time and people were friendly and chatted to me, but what came across from almost everyone I spoke to was how difficult they found it to live in England. Almost all made some reference, either implicitly or explicitly, to the discrimination they face in getting a job. This is particularly an issue for doctors at the moment. People see this country as a difficult place to survive and a very hard place to get ahead. People have said in my prescence recently, all of these things... "you have to be disciplined to work here", "you have to pay for everything here, everything is taxed", "some are more equal than others", "I have to prove my worth twice as much as an English graduate" etc. A lot of internationals also seem to find it difficult to see the classes of society who see benefits as a way of life. I suppose if you come from a country where the poor starve on the streets to a country where you have to prove your worth at every turn, and then see people living for free, it is difficult.
Certainly all this has made me think a lot more about the country that we live in. Why do our media cover human interest stories obsessively for days? Why do we have to pay a licence fee and a fee on almost everything else that happens on a piece of paper? Why do we pride ourselves on being an inclusive society, when the BNP got 11% of the vote in my local council elections? Why do we enable people who have no desire to work to live in a comfortable house with enough money to run a car as long as they have enough children? Some of these thoughts are not comfortable to me. I admit to normally being a woolly liberal when it comes to benefits, and a little islander when it comes to thinking the British way of doing things must be the best. Of course there are great things about our country and things we should be very proud of. Corruption is minimal compared to a lot of countries, we have freedom of speech and religion and a lot of history behind us. I just hope we don't lose the freedoms and traditions that we have. The thing that struck me most at the barbeque was when a young Nigerian man said to me "The reason that this country is losing its power and greatness is that it has turned its back on faith, which was the source of its strength."
2 comments:
What a depressing little piece. They say that when young if you don't believe in socialism you have no heart, and when older if you do, you have no head. You seem to be at a crossroads.
Good luck, you have an important role in what are the remnants of a civilised country.
As I mix with people from all over the world I often have the same thought. But I also had a conversation with an American friend who had lived over here for a year. He was finding it very hard to go back to American society with its even more massive focus on consumption - so maybe were not quite the best of a bad bunch....
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