Edward Dutton

‘It’s not rude to pester here!’ laughs Elisangela Heiderscheidt but she’s partly serious. ‘Don’t believe people when they say you half to learn Finnish! You can get something! You just have to move your ass!’

The Brazilian former chemical engineer has been
in Oulu since October 2006 and remembers being directly told by the employment office, ‘You won’t get a job if you don’t speak Finnish.’ If signed up for one of the employment office’s ten month long
intensive Finnish language ‘Mamu’ course but couldn’t get onto one.

‘There’s a waiting list and you get onto it according to how long you’ve been here. So I was just left waiting at home for the phone to ring.’ Elisangela claims that she’d still be doing that if she’d followed the employment office’s advice.

But she didn’t. ‘I sent my CV off to chemical engineering companies. I even got a few answers! There’s my CV is good but there’s just no place for at the moment.’
So Elisangela started to send her CV off to hotels. Before she came to Oulu, Elisangela had been living in England for five years where she met her Finnish fiancée. She’d originally come to England, ‘for six months because I spoke no English and wanted to learn it!’

Despite turning up not speaking English, Elisangela managed to get work in hotel house-keeping. Forced to learn English ‘because you have to speak in English there so it’s really easy to learn,’ Elisangela was a supervisor within three months and eventually got a job at the Wentworth Golf Club, which is regularly patronised by celebrities. ‘At the interview, they were asking me all about what I thought of celebrities! They wanted to make sure I didn’t just want the job to be near celebrities!’ Elisangela recalls.

‘Open Mind about Foreigners’

And it was this experience that she was able to put to good use in Oulu. The hotels that she wrote got back to her and interviewed her over the phone. They were impressed that they didn’t have train her. In January 2007 she had an interview and before long she had a job.
The hotel where she works, Sokos, has various young staff who have travelled. She’s sure that this is at least part of the reason why her inability to speak Finnish was not a problem.

‘Many people here have been abroad,’ she tells me. ‘They have an open mind about foreigners and how much you can add . . . So you should just go for it! But you can’t be picky. You have to take what they offer you.’

Her advice to immigrants looking for work is to realise that things work totally differently here, at least in her view.

‘It’s like they need to see you’

‘In a country like the UK if you send someone a letter and your CV, they will write back even just to say no. Here . . . Finns do not write back!’ She insists that you have to really persevere with Finnish people. ‘It’s not rude to pester here!’ she says with a half smile and advices that you don’t just write to people but email them a few days letter, ring them up and try and make an appointment with them.

‘It’s like they need to hear and see you,’ says Elisangela. ‘It’s not like that in other countries.
She’s also been very interested in the Finnish lack of small talk. ‘They talk to you about things just related to the job that you are applying for. There’s no small talk at all!’ she laughs.

‘I was going crazy!’

But she is convinced that the employment agency is wrong and immigrants that don’t speak Finnish can get something. ‘My advice is to just move you ass!’ she tells me. ‘Get out of your house! I’d been here for six months it was freezing outside and I was thinking, ‘Oh! What am I doing here!’ I was going crazy! You have to get out and find something yourself . . . there are things you can do without Finnish.’ However, Elisangela certainly thinks that foreigners that want to live here should learn the language so that they can integrate, ‘Well, just like in any country in the world really.’

Of course, Elisangela misses a few things about both England and Brazil though she seems intent on staying in Oulu. She’s worked together with people in Finland for a long time – and gets on with them - but she’s never been to any of their houses. This would be bizarre in Brazil where she feels that people ‘are much more open.’

She’s also found the scenery amazing. ‘I’d never seen snow before until I came to Oulu!’ she tells me. ‘It’s beautiful! How can the country be so different between the summer and the winter? It changes so much!’

‘Almost Naked’

And the two weirdest things for Elisangela are the Finnish penchant for salted liquorice and sauna. ‘In the cinema my sweet bag would full of chocolate and all different colours and my boyfriends would just be black!’

As for sauna, a Finnish friend couldn’t understand Elisangela’s reluctance saying to her that it was common in Brazil to go around in really revealing bikinis. ‘I said to her, “There is a difference. We are almost naked. You are naked!”’

As the interview finished, Elisangela wanted, once again, to encourage immigrants looking for work who do not speak Finnish. ‘You can work freelance, you can back to college . . . there are things you can do other than just sit at home waiting for someone to call you!’ she smiles.