Waiting for the summer to come...a reflection on the Skype exchange

photo by marirs

I would never think I would enjoy this experience so much. At the beginning I must confess that I was really nervous: my American peer and I didn’t know each other, so it was not always easy to keep the conversation going and avoid embarrassing silences! However, when I started skyping in larger groups, the conversation was livelier and more stimulating and there was a very friendly atmosphere that made me feel comfortable and at my ease. I felt free to talk about anything with my American peers. To be honest, both of us were more interested in talking about our hobbies and everyday life than about the death penalty and the problem of immigration, but even when we did so most of the times they seemed eager to cooperate and to say their opinion. One thing that surprised me was the easiness with which they expressed their political preference: in Italy this is often a “taboo” we prefer to avoid while talking with someone we don’t know, while for them it was not a problem to say that they agreed or disagreed with one candidate or the other. I also noticed that all of them knew Berlusconi, but they had no idea of who Romano Prodi is! It sounded weird to me, given that in Italy mass media usually transmit a lot of information about American politics. Evidently, in the US there is a different system of information and a different degree of knowledge about what is going on in the rest of the world.

As I already thought, I had the confirmation that life in a university campus is completely different from the kind of experiences we associate to university in Italy. First of all, for the American students it was absolutely normal to spend months far away from home to study and in this way they learn faster what being autonomous and independent means. Secondly, American universities seem to be very stimulating places to live in: they are attended by people not only from all over the United States, but from all over the world as well! In this way, I think it’s easier to broaden your horizons and to grow up without prejudices.

The exchange was also very useful from a linguistic point of view: we chose quite a difficult topic to develop, the death penalty, which compelled us to enlarge our vocabulary and to learn expressions and constructions we didn’t know before, such as to deter, death row inmate, to sentence and so on. Of course I had the chance to improve my listening and speaking skills as well and to learn to maintain my concentration focused on what was said since I was supposed to give a constant feedback to my interlocutor.
To summarize I hope to keep in touch with the American students and maybe to meet some of them when they come to Bologna next September!

Debated issues...

photo by luisa brehm

Another Skype exchange, another American partner! This week I’ve talked with Artem, with whom I’ll be working on the final project during the next month. After the usual problems with the headphones and the starting of a conference (Alessandra and Sara were supposed to talk with us as well), we decided that the topic of our research will be death penalty: it won’t be an easy issue to deal with, but I think it’s a very interesting and challenging choice. This project will hopefully help us to understand the reason why in some American States this kind of sentence is still used although the international community strongly ask for its abolition. We could also compare the American reality with the Italian judicial system. In our country death penalty was substituted long ago with the “ergastolo”, that is life imprisonment; however, the period of confinement has been recently reduced to some twenty years, a kind of punishment that a larger and larger part of Italian public opinion doesn’t consider sufficient for people guilty of heinous crimes. So, what’s the best solution? Is it something in between? We’ll see.
My group and I spent the rest of the time discussing another much debated topic: immigration. Artem comes from Ukraine, so we asked him if he feels that his everyday life is affected by his different origins. He explained to us that he doesn’t consider himself an immigrant because he’ll be staying in the USA just for four years to complete his studies and then he’ll come back home; beside, American universities are sort of “melting pots”, taking in people from all over the world, therefore in such an intercultural environment he certainly doesn’t run the risk of feeling a stranger.

However, he said that the American society tends to treat immigrants in different ways according to their nationality and – above all – to their financial conditions: as I wrote in the forum, Artem acknowledged that people coming from Europe are usually far better accepted than immigrants from Latin America and other poor countries. This happens for two main reasons. The first one is that while Europeans generally move to the USA with a legal permission to work and study in the country, Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Jamaicans, Filipinos flee from the conditions of extreme poverty they experience in their homelands, ignoring American immigration policy and crossing the frontier illegally. Secondly, Artem reminded us that people who struggle everyday to eat and survive are ready to work even for very low salaries, thus becoming way more competitive than their American colleagues. Therefore, they are accused of stealing American people’s job and for this they are excluded from social life and compelled to live in very closed congregations relegated in certain areas of the cities. We shouldn’t forget that Italian immigrants in the USA experienced this kind of “ghettoization” as well: “Little Italy” was the Italian neighbourhood in New York. By the way, Artem said that the situation has changed over the last decades and now Italians are no longer associated just with “pizza” and “mafia”, but with commitment and high quality as well thanks to their hard work. I hope that the other ethnic groups will go through the same kind of social transformation as well in the near future.

What do we know about immigration?

photo by celikins

Last year I took the exam of “Geografia della popolazione”: if you’re interested in the issue of immigration I strongly recommend it to you because it offers a complete picture of the situation in Italy and abroad. As we all know, we could talk about it for hours, listing the different points of view, but here I’ll try to be concise and to sketch just some few points of the problem.
For many years, Italy was a country of emigrants: up to the end of the second world war millions of Italians fled from the desperate economic situation of their motherland, looking for better conditions of life in Germany, France and even overseas, in the United States. Then, in 1947 the Marshall Plan was introduced in the European countries belonging to the Western sphere of influence in order to restore their struggling economies and this provided the trigger of a new virtuous circle. In the following years, Italy entered the era of the so called “economic boom”, characterized by a large expansion of job and consumptions. As a consequence, by the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, our country (that before was merely a land of passage on the way to richer European countries) became - and still is - one of the targets of a new flow of immigration. However, this more recent phenomenon is completely different from the migratory waves of the first half of the twentieth century for at least two main reasons.
1 - The new immigrants don’t come from either our European neighbours or from the poorer regions of Italy, but from North Africa, East Europe, Asia, Latin America. This people bring with them ways of living that are completely different from ours and this often leads to a “clash of cultures” that can even become very violent when fear, prejudice and intolerance merge together.
2 - While in the past there was a predominance of “pull factors”, now the “push factors” prevail. This means that when our grandparents migrated to the United States in the interwar period they managed to find a job quite easily because countries like that had already reached the full employment and need foreign workers to fill the vacancies. In this way, little by little, those people got integrated in the new society by showing the natives that they had come to work hard and nothing more. Nowadays, Italy is very far from reaching full employment and immigrants either are employed in those sectors of the market of job that Italians reject (such as cleaning, working in factory, taking care of old people…), or they fall in the net of criminality, thus contributing to increase the hate towards foreigners in our society. Most of the times, people who get ready to leave their poor village in Senegal or in Romania know very well that life won’t be easy in Italy, but they come all the same because of the “push factors” that operate in their countries: famine, diseases, lack of job, dictatorial regimes and so on.
As you can see, the situation is not easy at all. In my dreams, a fairer judicial system punishes the foreigners who are guilty of a crime and allows those who work honestly and respect the laws of our country (who are the majority, although newspapers and Tv don’t talk about them everyday) to live in peace with the rest of the community, without being afraid that their children are beaten at school by some stupid bully. Multiculturalism IS POSSIBLE, but it must be promoted by the State and by the public institutions, otherwise another wave of racism will force us all to shut ourselves into our houses for fear of the "other".
Of course, the issue is by far more complex than what I wrote…

Elections again...

photo from ilmartino

This time my Skype exchange was briefer than usual, what a pity! Leah was absent, so Sarah asked Cristina and me to contact Marigny. I was eager to know another American student, but unfortunately when we started our conversation my two mates couldn’t hear me! I spent more than half an hour trying to solve the problem and I managed to join Cristina and Marigny when there were only fifteen minutes left.
Although brief, our chat was interesting all the same. The main issue was political elections again: we explained Marigny that in Italy there is a very large number of parties and each of them has its own candidate to premiership; however, only the Popolo delle libertà and the Partito Democratico seem to have a concrete chance to win right now because they form a coalition with other political groups and they have a nation-wide net of offices and groups of support that let people know their programmes. By the way, vote wasting is a constant issue in Italy: the main parties generally fail to receive a high percentage of votes because people have the possibility to choose among many (maybe too many…) other possibilities, therefore the winner cannot count on a solid majority in the Camera and the Senato. This, in turn, means that whatever faction is elected, it will find many difficulties in ruling the country and passing new bills because the Government’s decisions could be easily rejected by the two legislative organs.
As I wrote in the Wiki, we also talked about how people decide who to vote: in America, as well as in Italy, many electors don't even know the programmes of their candidates because they are too difficult to understand; they choose on the basis of either the political preference of their family, or the charisma of this or that politician, or the possibility to identify themselves with his/her life, personality and aims. For example, as Leah had already told me, it seems that Obama is more charismatic than Hillary and his successful career let black people hope that they too can defeat racism and discrimination and get the position they deserve in the society. In the same way, in our country people who have started an activity on their own feel to be better represented by Berlusconi, who followed a path which was similar to theirs; however, the other side of the electorate thinks that he’s too ironic and self-confident and prefer to choose someone more reliable and down-to-earth.
I also told the girls that a couple of days ago I watched the ad of the Partito Socialista, which alludes to the fact that Jesus was a socialist as well. I’m not judging the political contents of this party, but I think that mixing politics and religions is quite anachronistic nowadays…

Well, just a handful of hours and we will know the results…

Final paper.... :-S

Oh my goodness, the time has come to start thinking about another paper and it seems yesterday that I submitted the first one!!! This time our paper won't be a reflection on what we've done so far, but a comparison between American and Italian way of living. What aspect of this two cultures am I more interested in? Although it may seem quite banal, I would say education: last semester's exchange with American students from Albany and the chat with Chiara Olivi confirmed me that the whole American educational system is very different from the Italian one and it might be interesting to descover the way in which a different school path influences the preparation and the cultural awareness of the students in the two countries. Are American and Italian students equally competitive in the world of work or are the ones more prepared and successful than the others? Are there some elements that Italy could "copy" from the American system and viceversa? I'll start thinking about it...

Chatting, laughing, discussing

Last week I missed the Skype exchange because I had to take an exam, so this time I was eager to talk with Leah again! My friend Marta joined us as well: she is in the group that has been doing an exchange with Polish students from Poznan, but since many of my classmates were absent last Wednesday she offered to help us.
At the beginning we had some problems with the programme: Marta seemed not to be able to join the conversation and when she finally did I couldn’t hear her and Leah any longer! What a mess!!! Thanks to Sarah’s help, at last we managed to start our chat, which was even more pleasant than the first one: Marta and Leah introduced themselves to each other and then we talked about our Easter holidays and Leah’s spring break. We found out that Marta travelled to America a couple of weeks ago and visited New York and Philadelphia. This was a useful springboard to begin a discussion on national stereotypes that basically confirmed what had already emerged from the Cultura questionnaire: we said that when we think about the United States images of endless, wide roads, huge skyscrapers and beautiful top models immediately come to our minds; Leah, on the other hand, usually associates our country with breathtaking landscapes, Milan fashion shows and food! We ended up by comparing our alimentary habits: what we eat for breakfast; if we usually eat out or at home; whether in the USA people who are allergic to gluten can count on the State paying for the gluten-free products they need (like in Italy); if the general assumption that Americans only eat junk food while Italians stuff them with tons of pizza and spaghetti everyday is well-founded or not…
We would have gone on for hours if Leah hadn’t remembered us that the topic of our conversation was supposed to be politics! She completely wrongfooted us with a very simple question: “Girls, could you please explain me the political situation of your country?” Oh, my gosh!!! Mart and I look at each other, speechless: where could we start from? First of all, we tried to explain that Romano Prodi’s government collapsed because it failed to obtain the trust by both the Camera and the Senato and this opened the way to a new electoral campaign. Leah asked us what we knew about Berlusconi (Sarah was right, he is famous all over the world!) and we gave a very neutral answer in order not to influence her opinion: we said that he is a clever self-made man, who managed to become a very successful executive and then to enter politics; many people appreciate this qualities of his, but others think that he hasn’t always been completely honest and that he must have many skeletons in his cupboard. We also added, however, that this time making up our minds and decide who to vote for will be very hard: left wing and right wing governments continue to succeed each other, but none of them seems to be able to effect important changes in the situation of our country and therefore people is very disillusioned by politics.
Leah is going to vote as well (and for the first time in her life!). She was very critical about the usefulness of the media struggle between Hillary and Obhama: she explained us that while at the beginning the two leaders’ supporters respected each other recognizing that they were all on the same side, now each faction overtly hates the other and it is entirely possible that in November the supporters of the loser will prefer to vote for Mc Cain rather than giving their vote to the winner. America has its own problems as well, therefore!
As I said, the chat was really amusing and involving: in three it was easier to keep the conversation going and to confront our different points of view, so I hope to have another Italian “Skype-mate” the next time as well!

photos from flickr

Happy Easter to all of you!