[Bassim]

Dear people
Please, would you help me and proofread this text.

I have to emphasise that following text does not pretend to be neither sociological nor scientific work, nor it is free from generalisations. I have written it right out of my heart, following my personal observations, feelings and the experiences of other persons who are in the same situation as myself.

I have to admit that before I came to Sweden my knowledge about this far away country was rudimentary. In school we read August Strindberg's novels and heard about the Nobel Prize, but that was all. I loved to watch Pipi Langstrump on television and later on, Ingmar Bergman's films and I drooled over the women singers in ABBA pop band. I was also watching on television Bjorn Borg winning Wimbledon five times and Ingmar Stenmark skiing down the slopes like a magician, winning all possible competitions.

When I was a teenager I saw Swedish tourists on the Adriatic coast and I noticed that the majority of them were blond. They laughed and joked and I thought they were such lovely people.( Unfortunately, at that time I did not know that the Swedes on a holiday behave differently when they are back in Sweden.

We arrived with a ferry to the Swedish port Ystad in June 1993. The war in Bosnia was still going on and we were happy because we had escaped hell which would continue for three more years. My first impression was the cold wind blowing through my thin t-shirt. The flags' ropes hit against the metal posts repeatedly. Such a cold wind I have never experienced in my homeland, not even in the winter. Here it was a sunny day, but one needed a thick jacket.

I noticed perfectly clean streets; not a single sweet wrapper. But they were empty, cars went by and occasionally a cyclist, his head hidden inside the collar of his jacket. For a second, I felt I was back in my hometown which street were also empty now because of the fear.

I went into a supermarket and was overwhelmed with the abundance of goods there. I had not eaten properly for months and I bought a chocolate which I had not tasted since the beginning of the war. The chocolate did not taste as a chocolate at all; there was too much cocoa butter. Later, I would learn that all Swedish chocolates taste the same. One can eat a half of kg of it and still one feels one has not eat chocolate at all!

Sooner I would learn that Swedish traditional food is also tasteless. The only spices the Swedes used in the past were salt and pepper and first in the last thirty years they had started to use spices from other countries like curry and garam masala. Once I spoke to an immigrant who came here for more then thirty years ago and explained to me the horror when he ate a bean soup which was sugary and when he tasted bread, it was made with sugar too.
However, when one has just escaped the war one does not care so much about trifles like food and cakes. One has just been born again and forgets the possible difficulties that awaits him in the future.

After my experiences I can say that in the life of many refugees and immigrants who come to Sweden we can discern three phases:
1. Excitement with the new country.
A refugee is so overjoyed that she or he do not want to hear anything bad about the problems that they can expect in the society where people are not so open as in the other places. They do not believe the immigrants who have not succeeded. They do not want to hear there are walls in the society which are impossible to climb over.
2. Encounter with the reality
After a few years a refugee has learnt Swedish fluently, he got a good education and all degrees they demanded from him. He is well motivated and wants to show the Swedes he can work as hard as they can and he is better educated than they are. But, when he calls the employers, they treat him with disrespect; he is never called for an interview. Someone advices him to change his name into a Swedish one!
3. Deep disappointment
Years have passed. Too many years. Our refugee is a broken down person. Nothing can make him happy any longer. He does not feel as a human being, rather as a soulless thing that nobody wants. He has sent hundreds of applications and never got an answer. The only job they offer him is a taxi or a bus driver. His friends and family members who moved to other countries have already been working for years. They have bought houses, make big money and travel to far away countries on holiday, while he goes every month to the job centre where an official looks at him as if he had rabies and sipping coffee from the cup tells him, "Unfortunately, nothing for you this month!"
Finally, if he ever gets the job he has been yearning for for years, he has lost the joy for life. He remembers the people he has met in the past and first now he understands they have told him the truth.
Indeed, there is something wrong with this place!

To be continued...