Nepotism on the Faroe Islands

The Faeroe Islands is an isolated community in the North Atlantic with long family histories, where fathers pass their trades or companies onto their sons. Everyone knows everyone else and it is difficult to separate business from friendship. Your co-workers sit in the same church, live in the same village and you can drop by for a cup of coffee without calling ahead. It is a quiet, safe and rooted by deep traditions and norms. To hire your friends and family first is second nature, no matter the job, and to do otherwise can cause friction in the community. However, the isolated community in the middle of the North Atlantic is no longer isolated from the rest of the world, and is being influenced by technology and culture that was before foreign to it, and with the immigration of technology and culture, new norms that the Faeroe Islands never knew before.

The world is evolving, and a global culture is slowly forming, marked by films, foods, languages and sports. Along with common sports such as football and hand ball, and films that are shown the world over, comes norms and morals. Every culture in history has been introduced to new norms and morals at one point or another, as a gate way to participating in an global economy, telecommunications and society. The Faeroe Islands is no exception. New norms are making in roads, and it is no long true, that everyone knows everyone else. Still, there are some bastions that have a strong foot hold in the culture, the chief among them is nepotism.

The definition of nepotism is, according to Wikipedia, favoritism granted to relatives regardless of merit. If you grant your son a job, despite others performing better than he, then you are practicing nepotism. If you were passed over for a job, despite being the most qualified candidate, and see a relative of the person hiring granted the position, you were the victim of nepotism. Most of us have experience with nepotism in one or another form.

But is it okay?

We all should respect the rights of ownership and dominion over property. If the owner of a business chooses to give the business away, no one can dictate who the business is given to, for example, a child. The dream of handing down the family business is strong in all people. Nepotism can be a necessity in this case, where a child must be raised for the position. To those working for the company, it may seem like the child was never qualified for the job, that they are more deserving of the rewards given to the child. Ownership of a business doesn't require any qualifications, other than you are legally allowed to own a business. However, to run a business, owners must know something about business, and that can require a little bit of on the job training.

In other instances, nepotism has nothing to do with necessity, but protectionism at the expense of others. The dangers of nepotism is how it affects society. Even when you do not work for a company, organization or office, the nepotism practiced there can effect you personally. If an person is hired based on family relations instead of qualifications, you are at risk of receiving unqualified service. When you file a request at the local kommun office, you have the right to be served by the most qualified person the kommun could hire, and have a reasonable expectation for professional and competent service. This is not always the case, and receiving incorrect information or unqualified service can result in cases lost, appeals denied and personal economic damages. In these cases, nepotism was never a necessity and should never be tolerated. Like wise, when you apply to work for a company, you can experience nepotism in the form of a hiring manager favoring a cousin who just graduated 10^th grade, for a position that receives public funds, money to which you contribute to through taxes.

But, what can one do you protect yourself from this practice?

The best advice available is to write a letter to a news paper, telling the reader where and who is practicing nepotism, and how it has unfairly hurt you; if you were hurt by this practice, others are also at risk and should know about it. You can also tell your friends, this company or that office may not have the most qualified employees, enabling your network to make more informed decisions, if they will spend their money for services from a company that has questionable hiring practices, or if they should be careful when dealing with a public office.

In the worst cases, your legal rights may have been violated. By hiring unqualified people, both in the private and public sector, professionalism suffers and discrimination based on race, gender or political affiliation can become an everyday occurrence. The papers you file can be lost, or mistakes can be made in standing cases. If these occurrences are intentional or not, you still have the right to professional service and the kommun should strive to provide you with that. In these instances, it is best to contact a lawyer.

As time moves on, the Faroe Islands will need to adopt new norms if it is to participate on the global stage and be considered a peer among governments. Old bastions of culture and society no longer support or advance it, but weighs it down. The Faroe Islands can move on, as it integrates with the rest of the world. As a foreigner living here, it is part and parcel that I help the society free itself of a few of these chains.

- Servus

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.

Sailing in Denmark

Sailing is big in Denmark. It is difficult to overstate that when comparing Denmark to countries such as the United States, any South American or African country or even the U.K. There are about 406 islands according to Wikipedia and economic factors have lead to only 70 of them remaining populated in recent decades. Add onto those 70 the Faroe Islands and Greenland and you start forming a picture of a maritime culture. That culture has historic roots that rivaled the U.K. during its greatest periods.

While I was crashing with my mother's cousin, who I will refer to, incorrectly, as my uncle from now on, I sailed with him on several occasions and became repeatedly sea sick. But, I must admit to a certain attraction with sailing. The freedom. The peace. How cool it is to say you have your own yacht.

Father Knows Best - When Government 'Helps'

Welfare isn't something I view as shameful. If you have been on the public dime, I wont look down on you and say you are a dead beat living off of my hard work, because I have been there. If you are a social worker who deals with the unemployed on welfare though, I will think of you as a waste of public money who should go out and get a productive job.

That is not what most people expect from a tax paying citizen, but I said it and I mean it. I say it because when I was on welfare, the case worker did nothing to help me and threatened to take away my welfare if I tried to find a job on my own. Well, not directly threaten, but made clear she was not happy when I left for a job interview when she had nothing planned for me job wise. It was around that time I changed my view on government. I went my own way, as I said before, and turned things around as soon as I started ignoring the social worker, kommune and governments 'demands', which really were empty threats.

A night out on the town

Tórshavn is special.
Not special as in it is a small fishing village special.
Or historically special.
What is special about Tórshavn are the weekends.
Cities have a night life. Chicago has a few bars and clubs. New York has Madison Square Garden. Copenhagen has Tivoli. Ibiza, São Paulo, etc. So the fact Tórshavn has one is not what makes it special.
What makes Tóshavns night life special is how the streets are packed every Friday and Saturday night around 2 AM. The clubs and bars are so close together, the edges of each club's crowd blends together and it becomes a single carnival.
Yes, you see this in Miami and certain cities in California too. But how can one expect that in the middle of the North Atlantic in a highly religious society?
The weekend speaks volumes about the kind of society the Faroe Islands is. They love to party here. They love to drink. They love having fun. This city has a quality of night life that cities either are jealous of or want to prohibit.
It is all very strange to me.

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.

Please leave a few comments. I always enjoy them.