MIGRATIONS
Where we are born, grow, play, work, retire and die determines our health. Place, according to the World Health Organization, is a determinant of health and this explains why a built environment is also a determinant of our health. Place matters in everything we do. Place reinforces and validates our identities, and values, and shapes the context of our perspectives.
This article is an abridged version of a speech that View Global Services Inc provided to newcomers in Canada recently. The theme of the event was to motivate and inspire newcomers to make sense of their new immigration status in their new place - Canada.
As we know, it is extremely difficult for ordinary Ugandans to get the coveted Canadian visa, and more so, harder even for those who apply and are denied. Those who make it to Canada, however, have opportunities to succeed in building for themselves a meaningful life through hard work and accepting integration in the multicultural place that Canada offers.
The lesson learned in legal immigration is that changing places has numerous advantages. A person may have limited opportunities and skills to thrive in one place, and yet in the next place, these opportunities become boundlessly useful. Migration is the benefit of globalization.
An analogy using a bottle of packaged water illustrates how value changes from place to place. “The water bottle is probably 20 cents in a Costco supermarket,” he said. When you buy the same water bottle in a convenience store, it is probably $2.00. For the same water bottle brand, you pay probably $5.00 in a restaurant and pay $10 for the same bottle of water on a plane or a five-star hotel. The lesson is that our values change from place to place like that water bottle. It is up to us to find the place where we are valued the most.
Place matters. My high school physics teacher, Mr. Kijjambu, once challenged us to travel around the world to complement our learning – to expand our horizons. He always rebuked those who found themselves born in one place, lived, studied, worked, and died in that same place. Mr. Kijjambu cautioned, such as an unexamined life, and warned us about falling into the grip of poverty. He reminded us that poverty has a way of constraining one’s hands and legs and closing both their mind and eyes to prospects in this world.
Arguably, many people are afraid of change. Migration is energy and resource-consuming. Stability, and settling in a familiar place where one has an established social network and a routinized way of life provide safety and comfort. That, too, is undeniable. Valid. Legitimate.
The limit of such thinking, though, is saturation and stasis. When ideas in society become saturated, such a society can develop. The lack of development also limits prospects leading to a scarcity of resources. How the societal resources in such a situation get distributed or shared among the people becomes unequal leading to conflicts and poor health.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the place one lives matters. Africans and the poorer communities were the last to receive vaccines. Being born in Uganda for instance is not the same as being born in Japan. By being born in Uganda, your life expectancy is set under 60yrs while anyone born in Japan is expected to live to their 90s.
Place matters because it provides context for your material and living conditions that determine your health, and validate your identities and values. Although Africa is constructed as permanently needy, even within Africa, some internal legal migration should be made possible. We share ideas, improve our capabilities, and build a better world if we found better places suitable for us to realize our true potential.
END.
