How different is Carrigtwohill from the community you grew up in?

 How different is Carrigtwohill from the community you grew up in?

 

“I  remember when we moved house at the age of twelve to Dublin, and within about a year a hearse took a dead person away from one of our neighbours houses and my father, who had been from a tiny village, not even a village, from a little community in Donegal came in and said, “what kind of a place do we live in, where somebody dies, a neighbour, we have no idea who they are, who their people are, what is that?” and he was just astonished at his own existence.”

“You know, I remember sitting down on the gable of the house with my father and could tell me the story behind every single house in his village in Donegal, who they were, where they came from and in Dublin I came from a place where there was no sense of community, there was no thing that bound us together apart from family” 

 

“That really made an impact on me at twelve years of age, and when I got married and we had our first child, I said to my wife “I'd love our children to be from someplace, not to live someplace but to be from it” and we decided once we had kids that we wanted to be from a place”

“I lived in [another town] also, and I found that it wasn't a very coherent, it wasn't inclusive whereas Carrigtwohill, from what I found when I was researching it, seemed to be a place where you are welcomed and they love new ideas, new people as opposed to being threatened by us.” 

“I think that that probably is the overwhelming theme of the village, we have people from all over Eastern Europe, if you want to be on your own and invisible that's fine, but if they want to engage in the community every single door is open for them, from the Historical Society which is incredibly important, mapping out the history of the of the village, through to the Meals on Wheels for elderly people looked after.”

“All of those things are inclusive, so there is a sense of once you're prepared to put out, you're not treated like an outsider, you're treated as somebody who wants to commit to the place and your effort is welcomed, that's my experience.”

-Frank Hanningan

 “In consideration, you know one of the few things I found as a culture shock when I moved here is the fact that women smoke so much, and it was like now you know with very revolutionized culture when I went back to Ethiopia there were loads of women's smokers , and it just means that they're not hiding and there are smoking openly, so before we didn't see that but it's not really a big deal you know if you smoke you're considered a “bad person or maybe not clean” but those are very closed minded ways of seeing you know tying people to their habits.

“You learn those things, but culturally people do not really talk to each other, they don't give a lift to each other in Ethiopia. If a neighbor or my mother is dropping us to school and the neighbors are waiting for a taxi there was no law, well now there is a law, but before you could fit as many people as possible into your car, you have that communal responsibility help, you almost feel guilty driving off without asking.”

 

“There isn't such a thing here, my neighbor who is now my very good friend when we gave her a lift from the train station when it was raining and she was asking us so many questions, “why did you decide to give me a lift?” so you know it was so strange for her. You have to learn that you don't only have to highlight on the fact that our culture is different I've learned how to widen the horizon of my thinking beyond saying what is different from my culture, but I have learned how to say why is it different I want to learn why is it is different so that I don't actually offer it to people and offend people because just because it's OK with me it doesn't make you OK with other people so it's different in a way.”

 

“The fact that you don't care about the neighbor’s kids if you see them out or something it's not like that in Africa, like the entire village raises a kid it's different here. That's the individualistic ideology in every European’s head. I have learned that there are bad cultures in every culture and good cultures. So what I have learned is to take what's good from the Irish culture and to drop what’s not good or bad practice from my culture and then use everything by giving credit to the original culture you know not forgetting where my culture comes from and also giving credit to the new culture that I'm learning, so you don't have that much of identity crisis or guilt or forgetting my own culture. You're living here so you might as well practice it and learn it and leave it without neglecting your own culture and origin, that’s what I think.”

-Aida Gebremeskel