Xenophobia and the North Atlantic

I just had a run in today with a man who goes by the name of Hans Birgir Hansen. My readers in Tórshavn may know this man, who often writes in Yggje Tíðindi and sometimes hits the nail on the head with his opinions, but not often. My 'conversation' with him started off in Nero, the local ice cream shop. I bought a cup of coffee and sat down to read my pages and write a little bit. He was going on about cheap labor by foreigners ruining the market for everyone else. I got the impression, I am not the kind of guy he likes; I wasn't born on the Faroe Islands. The suspision was confirmed on his return to the library, where he took out the paper and insisted I look at the opinion piece he wrote. He then proceeded back into Nero to confront the lady behind the counter, a lovely young woman who doesn't have the correct skin color, understood as to mean at least one of her parental lines crosses through Africa, but I could be mistaken and the line crossed another region outside of Europe. After being told he is not welcomed to enter the back room, he left, only to return again. This time, he stood in the library and it seemed he was waiting. Well. I walked back to my computer in the reading lounge and he started to stare at me. Then he took his mobile and started to talk, very loudly, about the same ol' thing, plus about how I was sitting here. There will always be people like him who will stand in my way, but I think the tide of time is against him.

But, for now, Hans Hansen has his opinion piece and his influence in the union and I need to deal with the difficulty of finding work with people like him in high places.

To Integrate in the North Atlantic

The North Atlantic is not a hospitable place for anyone to settle down and start a society. Any community in the region must exploit the resources of their surroundings in order to survive. In the case of the Faroe Islands, the historical resource exploited, which still accounts for over 90% of exports, is fish. The same is true for Iceland and Greenland. I can also name sheep and wool, but not much else. While domestic production has shifted to now include services, the society as a whole is still heavily dependent on nature to supply the raw materials needed to drive its economy and sustain the community. So far, the North Atlantic community has lived in the margins, carving out just enough to survive and continue. These slim pickings has a number of consequences, ranging from extremely high prices to high unemployment, both of which makes putting down any roots in the region that much harder.

To have no room

What is it like to feel like society is pressuring you from all sides? You wont know unless you are there for something more important than the pressure. If you have no reason to stick around, then you likely will leave and find a place where you can live a life and make ends meet. I can't.

Hard to find any time

New title. A Decade in Scandinavia.
I moved to the Faroe Islands in 2010. I have been here for a year now. I have been in the region for a decade come the new year.
What a difference a decade makes.

Here is a quick autobio of what I have been up to my entire life.

I grew up in an academic house. My dad worked at Argonne National Lab until Clinton's cuts. My mom was an internal medical student in Denmark. My dad had a Ph.D. from the Poly technical University, now DTU, in Quantum Physics.
Despite this, my home had real big problem. Mom and dad fought all the time. Dad drank. Mom was the do nothing, throw nothing out pack rat that never kept her word to me or even tried.
I didn't have much of a school education. My mom took me out of school in the fifth grade and didn't keep her promise to find me another school or buy the school books to teach me at home.
So from the middle of the fifth until I was 19 I was sitting at home in front of the computer. Then I moved to Denmark and was seated with learning a new language and catching up in school. By 2008, I had been to an international college studying communication and globalization, an agricultural school, a language school and I took a normal HF degree. I have worked as a farm hand, farmer, fruit picker, warehouse worker, logistician, forklift operator, retirement home orderly, postal worker, delivery man, builder, bartender and now as a fisherman. I met a girl when I first moved here and I have three kids today. I am not even 30 years old and I have done more than most over their entire lives, in terms of diversity.
So where do I go from here. I hope to leave the Faroe Islands and study Laboratory science in Denmark and follow through on a physics degree at Københavns University.
But enough on the future for now.
I think I will stay on the past, at least for a little while.

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