I take a rare pause in the fish world… well kind off… fish is not ever totally away in my life! It has been a long year. Lots have happened… from a lot of good work with people around the world (like with my friends in RMI) including our MoU with Thailand to getting the Seafood Champion Award.
nutters galore
Yet in life, there is no free lunch… and while I spent 186 days away from home, the ones dealing with my absence is my family, particularly my two awesome kids. True it has always been like this for them, I used to get on boats now I get on planes, but for them is the same….
As with the families of so many fishers… my family see me go and then come back for a while… and then go again… and that is a reality I’m totally aware of. I have yet to meet a fisher that doesn’t get emotional when talking about those “back home” which in many cases nowadays they may not have seen in years.
How is to live like that, and particularly when you parents are immigrants, especially when they are from different cultures from each other… is what caught the attention of two of Radio NZ producers that were doing a series named “where are you really from” and “conversations with my immigrants’ parents. After my daughter, Kika contacted them with “our’ case and they came and spend 2 days with us in August this year.
The outcome of that experience is two podcasts and a small movie. The 1st podcast “Conversations with my immigrant parents” explore the dynamics in our bicultural house (pseudo-Argentinean & Dutch) inserted in a bicultural country (British & Maori). The 2nd one is called “Voices”… and is more specific on the initial surprises that settling in a new country bring when you compare it with the ones you come off. The little movie is below.
It was a very interesting experience, as it made us realize quite a few things as a family and for me as n immigrant… I don't see myself as an Argentinean really… that is just where I grow up, in a native (as is pre-Hispanic colonization) stronghold in the border with Paraguay, but mostly from an eastern European immigrants stock…
My job is to be almost a “professional immigrant”; I go placers to share life with my local counterparts while living and working in their environment. Furthermore, I had already spent some time in the pacific before coming to NZ, so what it surprised me was its Britishness of NZ… not its Polynesian roots
The experience made me realize that I just feel like an immigrant that is very happy and really at home in NZ… a very new country that is per se struggling with its own identity as a settler society, that has not yet assumed its deeps roots in Maori identity.
But is the voices of my children and my wife that shine in the podcast, as their vision of the reality we live in, makes me really proud.
I will treasure these podcasts as a time capsule of what my family is in 2019… as things will inevitably change, and what is “our” immigrant story into NZ.