Climbing the Ladder along the brain drain.

I don’t know who or where the term brain drain was coined but it is in all senses a reality in third world countries – the mass exodus of young qualified and in many cases not so qualified people to other countries in search of opportunity. But I ask the question what is opportunity?
When I was at university, one of my lecturers suddenly disappeared without a trace. About a year later one of my peers started an interesting conversation after a recent visit to Canada. There he was for the first time seeing, and feeling, the very cold snow. Just walking along a main street in Toronto looking at the stores exploding with Christmas goodies for the families and especially the tourists. Then he stops to more closely examine some toys which he thought his little brother back home might enjoy. And to his surprise, standing there in the bitter cold is no other than our lost professor. Yes OUR professor. Our professor was now working at a toy store in down town Toronto. A qualified electrical engineer, a university professor, now working at a toy store. And here is the shock of it all – as a guard. That my friend is opportunity. Our professor was making ten times more money as guard at a toy store in Toronto than as a full time university lecturer at a university in Guyana. As it is, he might not have had any luck trying to work in his elite field in Canada as standards vary from country to country and recognition of qualification is very precarious too. So it was just “easier” to get a job that would pay a salary many times more than the one at home and make the sacrifices of dealing with the cold and whatever other problems there might be.
Opportunity meant earning enough money to send to family at home, enough to save for a house – in Toronto, and just enough to live in the cold. Opportunity meant changing a comfortable lifestyle with little money to a hard nonstop one with a lot more money.
My name is Jerry and I came to live in boa vista almost seven years ago. I left Guyana in search of opportunity and I found it as an English teacher in the northern most state capital of Brazil- Boa Vista. Fortunately Boa Vista is far from cold but unfortunately too far. Anyway, I started out as a timid 24 year old teacher in the biggest English language school in the city. It was at this point that I started to see, hear and feel the price of opportunity. As time goes by, I sincerely hope that the prejudice of what was so strong six and a half years ago continues to fade as it has since then. As a Guyanese I was branded as someone who does not speak English or at least not correctly. I was regularly the point of jokes that alluded to the possibility of me being a regular user of cannabis and even a source. In retrospect I find it hilarious but at the time it was a heavy price for me to pay.
My most shocking story was yet to come. The mother of one of my students eventually found out that I was Guyanese and she too came to the conclusion that I was definitely not suitable to influence the young malleable mind of her child. Result- a request was put in to have her child transferred to another class where someone more suitable would teach her beloved. Wow!
I was born in Brazil to a Brazilian mother and a Guyanese father on the border between the two countries. All my education was in Guyana and I had lived there all my life until my epic move in 2002. I did primary school in the interior of the country some four hours from the border. I then moved on to the capital, Georgetown, where I did secondary school and continued on to university. I have never worked in my field of studies - Electrical Engineering. Since my move to Brazil I have invested in language teaching, a wonderful journey which started out as a one year experiment. My plans were to teach in Brazil for one year then go back to Guyana. Since 2002 I have been back only for holidays and occasionally as an interpreter.
After three years working at my first employers I left to try my hand at another opportunity, this time as a businessman. The business? Nothing else but a language school. In February of 2005 another teacher and I started a small language school, teaching English as a foreign or second language. We quickly realized that there was also opportunity in teaching other languages and so we hired teachers for Spanish, French, German and Italian. Today we are the only private institution offering that many languages.
So getting back to the quality of my spoken English… today I have managed to gain some respect with regards to my abilities as a linguist and above all as a capable English teacher. Today I have no worries about prejudice. These days I get special requests, students wanting to be in my class. But I admit it was a hard journey.
I have cited here two examples of the Brain Drain. Qualified people in search of better salaries, better living conditions, better opportunities. But at what price? What price do these people pay to live these opportunities? And even more important, what price does the country of origin pay?
The Brain Drain then means that there are fewer and fewer qualified and experienced professionals left in the country, in the cases above, Guyana. A tiny South American country with a population of scarcely three quarters of a million people and a population density ratio of four people per square kilometer, according to The World Bank, can hardly afford a migration rate of hundreds to thousands per year and even worse the migration of qualified people.
The reality of it all however is that we all want better for ourselves and this comes in different interpretations and the roads to better pastures is as varied as the people who seek them. Brazil is not yet a popular destination for Guyanese mainly because of the language barrier but it is gradually becoming a tourist destination for Guyanese which will ultimately increase the flow of opportunity seekers like me. Brazil being much nearer than North America and much easier to enter will in time prove to be very alluring, especially with the new border parameters being defined, the long awaited bridge across the Takutu River and the creation of industrial parks on both sides of the border.
So now I am just another number in the statistics of immigrants from Guyana who is in search of better opportunities in another country, making a name for myself and trying to get enough to one day return to my homeland. Many people never make it back but live an incessant struggle trying to get there. Time is yet to tell what will become of me and whether I`ll continue living here or one day return to the familiar hills of home.


Jeremy Faria
EFL/ESL Tutor
Academic coordinator
Feedback Idiomas.

Postado por: Equipe de editores.