From Misunderstanding to Trust

Around the same time she met with Anna Litewka-Anttolainen, also an active member of the migrant community and training officer in Peace Education Institute Finland (RKI), as well as Sari Lahdenperä, who works as a Multicultural Youth Work Coordinator for the city of Oulu. They started to collaborate in other projects, but it wasn’t until the early summer of 2022 and the first training of the Connect -project, when they were able to define what was the main cause for all of the misunderstanding and rumors, that Faiza heard around her. 

“The problem we want to solve in Oulu is the disconnection and mistrust between people. As immigrants, people are often afraid, because they don’t trust the system. They are afraid that maybe social workers or the police are intervening in their lives. They are afraid to say what they want to say, or what they are thinking of. Some of us don’t even know that you are free to say what you need to say. I know the situation especially in the somali community of Oulu, as I’m one of them.“ Faiza explains. 

“We want to discuss trust in the society” Anna continues, “What interests us, is what happens when there is no trust and how it affects young people, the school world, teachers and ultimately Oulu as a whole. And how the lack of trust affects safety in society. Our goal is to understand how we can create change and start implementing it.”

Faiza, Anna and Sari are especially concerned about the youth, as many of them live between two cultures and try to make sense of themselves and the society around them in a situation, which is not always very supportive.

“I’ve been with the youth in the evening times as a youth worker, and they have told me many of their problems. They feel that nobody understands them. They might be lost between the languages. They don’t have good Finnish, but they don’t either have a good mother tongue and they are just living in the English world. When I found this out, I realized, these people need connection.” Faiza says, and continues, “We are losing some young boys. They are under aged and some of them are getting into troubles.”

There are many cases, when there’s been a fight between the children or youth from immgrant background in the schools, and teachers have been calling a school police to handle the situation, as the teachers can’t use any physical force in the school. Many of the youth or their parents don’t really understand, why this has happened and there’s rarely an interpret who could explain the situation for all of the parties involved. When many of the parents might not be well integrated into Finnish society, they might not know the language or the customs or trust authorities, these kind of incidents create more mistrust than solve anything.

Faiza continues: ”The first generation immigrants, especially those with a refugee background, can have very traumatic experiences in their lives and it’s very hard to trust others. When something bad or shocking happens, many will also contact their own peer group, for example other somali mothers, who might live in different counries of Europe and this again exelarates the cycle of mistrust, as nobody really understands what happened and why.”

The situation is complicated, as there seems not to be common ground with the youth, their parents, schools and other officials. Anna gives an example of this: “It is often thought that when young Finns are together, it is just a group of friends, but when young people with an immigrant background are together, we talk about gangs. The root causes of these are certainly lack of trust, prejudice and racism. And lack of support and information.”

Sari adds a youth worker’s perspective: “When people understand each other’s points of view, we can better begin to understand each other and through that we are better able to be present in the lives of young people. There are more safe adults involved and if there’s trust, we are able to influence even big things.”