Transnational mommy

I start this section of my blog introducing myself. I am a journalist from Colombia, who is in Leuven, Belgium, doing a master’s degree in Anthropology and… I am pregnant. 

Being in an alien society isn’t something new to me, but I have to reckon that I have involved myself in this process little by little. I lived alone in Bogota, 9 hours from my home town, for 4 years. I lived in London for almost two years and I have been 6 months in Belgium. In the first city, I faced different costumes and some kind of loneliness, but it was not difficult because I was in my country, I knew the language and I knew how things were. To the second city I arrived with my savings, some scant notions of the language, some acquaintances and without any idea about anything.  To the third city, actually town, I arrived with a loan, registered in a serious university without any notion of the language and with my boyfriend.

So, from the information given above, it can be inferred that to be in a train stopped in the middle of nowhere without understanding what is going on is normal for me. As well as being governed by unknown laws that aren’t written in my language, eating food that I don’t know what it contains or being questioned, from time to time, about my incomes and how I get them. 

Nevertheless, being pregnant really is something completely new in my life and the uncertainty to be a migrant is not fun anymore.  

This is my situation: I will be giving birth in three months time and I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING CLEAR. I don’t know if my mum will get the visa to come to visit me; I don’t know who is going to take care of my daughter when I’ll go back to classes after the delivery; I don’t know if my boyfriend will be able to renew his visa in order to stay with us until I finish my studies; I don’t know if I will be able to carry on paying the studio where I live… In conclusion, I don’t know anything! But I have the hope that all these things will be sorted out in a miraculous way, and I would like you to accompany me through this process.

I have to inform you about some things. The first one is that this account will be as well an exercise of the exemplary research of my class of Ethnography, so it might get boring sometimes; the second one is that English is not my mother tongue, so my texts will be full of mistakes (feel free to correct them through the commentaries). And, finally, the third one is that pregnant women are fussy, so in this section there will be plenty of complaints that, to some of you, might seem exaggerated. That’s all.

Welcome to the new section of my blog!