"Spread your wings and fly" -- pretty much every musician, poet and cliche enthusiast.
In the summer of 2006 I left New Zealand far behind, as I embarked on a spectacular series of
While the years in Japan were defined by specifically not fitting in, and the time spent in Holland was a quest to re-integrate into Dutch society, being back in New Zealand finds myself with a whole new mission statement. Now, instead of reintegrating, I am reimmigrating - or re-migrating for short. I guess the point of migrating birds is that they fly back to where they came from, otherwise they would have nowhere to migrate to. So maybe it makes more sense than I'm able to comprehend right now.
Either way, this weblog at ruvaman.blogspot.com has been going strong since the end of 2005, however, there was a space of two years before then that I hardly wrote at all. This coincided with the time I was living in Christchurch. The place didn't seem to inspire me, it's just so flat - and I'm not only talking about the landscape. So, naturally, when I decided to re-migrate, I chose Christchurch again. I must really hate myself, or love a challenge. (Hint, I don't like working too hard, or at all). At least now this time around there are earthquakes to lively up the place a little bit.
Nevertheless, I am learning that immigrating can be a very difficult process. For example, sometimes it can take months before you can even find a place to live. Granted, for me it took two days and the first place I looked at, but that shouldn't undermine the previous sentence I just wrote. No, life as an immigrant is full of hardships, like illegal immigrant labour.
Yes, I have been exploited already with heavy physical labour. For legal purposes, this paragraph is not true (even though it is on the internet). Neither can it be proved, even if it were. Thanks to the earthquake, there are many buildings waiting to be torn down. This requires menial and back-breaking labour, and that usually requires illegal immigrant labour. That's where I came in. I set my alarm for 6am, tried snoozing, and three minutes later there was a 5.1 earthquake. "Fine," I thought, "I'll get up already." At 7am I arrived at the site. I was given a hard-hat, a reflective vest and instructions that if I hurt myself that I should "go out on the road and pretend that you have nothing to do with us." Basically, it was more than 11 hours of moving piles of rubble into new piles or rubble. And then, at one stage, a pile of lumber that I had moved earlier, had to be moved along a little bit further. That was about the most exciting and unexpected thing about the entire day, other than lunch (which I prepared myself the night before). The next three days I felt so sore as if I had been beaten relentlessly with sacks of potatoes by angry lesbians.
So as you can see, the hardships of being a remigrant are brutal and eye-opening. These are the kinds of things I will endeavour to convey here on The Great Re-Migration, and who knows, some of the stories I tell may even be true. And one of these days, I might even get my feet off the ground and this will be a real-life Feivel goes West story. And that is what The Great Re-Migration is all about.
"If I had wings I'd fly away from here
But wherever I land people would think that I was weird
They'd be like why do you have wings
Did your mom have sex with a bird or something?" -- Jon Lajoie
