RP
I was once buying an armchair on facebook marketplace. The woman selling it asked me to bring my passport with me if I wanted to pick it up from her place. Huh?
Anonymous
After months struggling with a healthcare issue and being bounced like a basketball from (clueless) doctor to doctor, I am now at the end of my tether. I’ve had enough of being treated like a second-rate citizen, being talked at rather than to and not being listened to. I’m fed up with being patronised and spoken to like as if I were an uneducated simpleton. I’m sick and tired of being told the source of the pain isn’t the injury detected using the MRI; which I had to pay for myself because even that I was refused. I’m disgusted with the way doctors treat severe pain as if it were a common cold that can simply be sorted with a few paracetamol tablets. I’m beyond annoyed at being told that exercise to strengthen the muscles is the answer to all evils even after I’ve explained for the untempth time that most days I can barely even walk let alone exercise. And don’t even get me started on ‘sometimes the brain sends pain signals to the body that are difficult to explain’ thinly veiled type of BS of ‘it’s all in your head’ and ‘if you weren’t so hysterical’ followed by the talk of how antidepressants have proven very effective in such cases.
Anonymous
I was recently attending an informal dinner before a seminar meant for about 30-40 people. During the dinner, a colleague that I have known for several years suddenly threw a very irrelevant question at me: “What is your socioeconomic status in your home country?”. I am the kind of person that wants to be approachable to my colleagues. So, keeping that in mind, I started explaining and even over explaining myself. Since the question from my Finnish colleague caught me off guard, l don’t know if I was able to give a satisfactory answer. Now, here’s my concern. Was this question asked just out of curiosity? Was it asked because this person thinks I am escaping my socioeconomic situation from my home country? Does this person somehow think lowly about me already?
After that day, I have been feeling very insecure in general. Of course, this incident wasn’t the only one I have faced in Finland. I’m still working out the best response to such questions in the future. Although, what worries me is that if I am too outspoken and straight with my replies, would that seem overly repulsive? Will my colleague think that I am being rude?
At this point, I am sick to my stomach trying to figure out how to process this. If my ethnicity, skin colour and pre-conceived notions about my socioeconomic status precedes me, then, will I ever feel fully accepted in this country?
Anonymous
I rented out my apartment to an Erasmus student who came originally from Germany and had begun her studies in Zurich Switzerland, my home town. She came to do her Erasmus at Aalto and was bad-mouthing Switzerland very much, how racist Swiss people are, which I do acknowledge since I grew up in a multicultural family in German-Speaking Switzerland. I told her that alas, she would most likely encounter similar experiences here in Finland, as I had been living in Helsinki for roughly 3 years at that time and gone through some very nasty things e.g. people spitting at me, telling me to speak Finnish not German (once I took a call from a Swiss friend in public, very bad decision). Of course people are entitled to their own oppinion, but I believe that nobody has the right to belittle other people’s experience and deny the fact that there are racist elements in Finnish society.
Anonymous
We ordered window cleaning to our appartment and once the person came behind our door who was supposed to do the job she looked at me, a black man with my then three year old son and said: People your colour don’t pay and refused to enter the house. My wife contacted the company and we made comments on their Facebook page to which they responded to by disabling possibility to review them on Facebook the company CEO kept referring to past experience and insisting they are not racist… contacted the police and they said there is NOTHING they can do but how unfortunate.