BEYOND BURMA

Last week I finally talked to the Burmese man whom I had met at the Italian-for-Foreigners class. He convinced me, among other things, that he is one of only about 30 people from Burma in Italy. He’s been in Italy for about 12 years, working at a hotel/restaurant in Calitri (he’s the only immigrant who works there). His wife and daughter came to Italy four years ago. They live near Torino—his daughter attends the university there and her mother cleans houses.

He feels at once that Italy is his home (“I plan to get my citizenship papers as soon as I can”), but that he can never be part of the culture (“my spirit is not Italian”).

He’s an attorney and practiced law in Burma for about four years before deciding he could make more money working in a small, rural village in Southern Italy. When I asked him what the difference was between small-town and big-city Italian life, his first response was purely in economic terms. It’s less expensive in small towns, he said: “I work like an animal, but I can save almost all the money I make and send it to my family.”

The downside of small-town life is living alone, “isolated,” as he put it. And a practical consequence of this isolation is that he has yet to learn much Italian. In fact, I conducted the interview entirely in English, and he seemed quite relieved when he realized he could speak English to me instead of Italian.

And the factory strike (see my last post)? It seems that another company has stepped in, and production at the factory will continue, though under a different name and with different equipment. It’s not clear to me (or others) if this is a short-term or long-term fix. On the other hand, the May Day picnic was fun, at least until it started to rain.

And what about the Moroccans I mentioned earlier? I have yet to make much progress with any Moroccan man or woman I’ve met. While I interact with at least one Moroccan family almost daily (D’s closest friend at preschool is Z, a young girl from Morocco, and they play after school all the time), it’s a somewhat strained relationship. The family lives right around the corner from us, the father is rarely around, and the mother speaks no Italian. D’s five-year-old playmate is allowed to wander around the town by herself and she tends to come to our house hungry and, until spring hit, cold. I should explain that now that it’s warmer; most people in town, ourselves included, leave their doors open with those now-trendy beads hanging in the doorway, so Z can literally just walk into our house unannounced. Maybe I’ll try and explain at some point why, in fact, I call the relationship “strained”.