(This week's CHAFF meeting: Those who wish to be at the Pailin Restaurant (Kenttätie 9, Kasarmi Area) this Easter Sunday are welcome, but there will be no buffet. Also, the meeting time will be at 14:00 hours as the restaurant is rather full between 12:00 and 14:00 hours. So join us an hour later than usual. Soon, if the warm spring air persists, we can revert to our older times as we meet sitting out in the sunshine!)
And now to last week's programme as a CHAFF Participant.
I was persuaded by Emilia Frantsi to come out of hibernation and give a talk to the Social Anthropology students at the University of Oulu on the subject of my impressions of the problems faced by migrants and ethnic minorities in Oulu and Finland. having held many official positions over the years and having been an activist on the subject for almost all the time Annikki and I have lived in Finland, cooking up a lecture was not difficult, except I did not know from when it should start and to which time it should cover. So I covered the entire life span of Annikki and myself (some 120+ man/woman years)! :-)
My lecture was preceeded by one by Päivi Pelkonen, whom I have known for several years, but not met for a long time. I was quite surprised that she remembered me after all these years.
She is a product of the Education Department of the University, probably a little junior to our daughter, Joanna.
After graduation from the M.Ed. programme in 1999, Päivi continued working in the Faculty of Education teaching courses in intercultural studies. She worked in administration developing student tutoring and counselling.
The following year she started to work in the Kosovo Education Centre, Prishtina, Kosova as part of an agreement between the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the KEC. Her tasks included contributing to planning different projects together with the local staff, for example programmes for in-service teacher education, or planning and building didactic centres in the Kosovar regions, as well as seeking funding for the projects from different donors. She also took part in implementing the programmes as well as monitoring them. Päivi was a contact person with some foreign education institutions, for example, the South East Europe Education Cooperation Network.
The following year, she was recruited to work in a bilateral development cooperation project between the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Serbia-Montenegro, which aimed to reform teacher education. However, te research team here at the University of Oulu had been successful in applying research funding from Academy of Finland, and after less than one year in Serbia-Montenegro, it was time to return to work as a researcher at the University of Oulu, in a research project connected with development studies.
Päivi's research area is intercultural learning both in theory and practise, and currently with topic is intercultural learning for international cooperation. She is also working on a case study focusing on intercultural learning within a multidisciplinary student/teacher exchange project between Finland and Kenya. She visited Bolivia in a researched exchange programme.
During fall 2003, she was asked to establish a Finnish researcher network on education and development. They have around 70 persons in the network, working around similar questions and meeting at least twice every year.
Päivi's talk was about very global issues related to policy as they are applied in situations in the global environment as well as, to some extent, in a small town as Oulu.
The room was packed for her lecture - so I got myself a good audience!
I approached the subject from a completely personal viewpoint and based all the subject matter around the personal experiences and knowledge of Annikki and myself.
I usually judge the pulse of my audiences as I speak, by focussing on four individuals, if possible, of quite different age groups and also dividing them between the sexes. I can judge from the facial and physical reactions of the audience whether I need to tone up or tone down my rhetoric.
It was a plrasant surprise to see the audience sitting there in pin-drop silence taking in my words.
Three CHAFF participants had taken the trouble to attend, and although Pentti was trying hard to keep up with the speed of my talk (i English) and the mass of matter that I covered, assisted by Matti sitting next to him, I know I left him quite far behind.
The audience was amazed at the range of experiences of discrimination that Annikki and I (and our family) had been through since we met in 1963.
The question posed by me was whether the level of racism had increased or decreased since we moved here in 1984. Can anyone guess the answer to this?
The theme of my talk was that even two minor and unknown individuals can make a difference in changing viewpoints, even if they have to face suffering and dilemmas in their personal lives. I urged them to be activists like a few of the audience I had come to know, Heikki Mankinen, Eija Isoviita, Emilia Frantsi, and Henna Juusola - who had done wonders along with Paivi Jurvakainen of the Red Cross, in organising the successful UN Week Against Racism.
In the 45 minutes I used for my talk, I did manage to cover a few of our experiences, but it was only a very very small portion of the matter in my possession.
Maybe it is time for a new book about the subject of "migration" as our sequel to the "Handbook for Survival in Finland"!
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