Maria Eugenia Bravo

Maria Eugenia Bravo was born in Chile and came to London in 1975; she was a university lecturer in Chile.  She talks about her work at the Refugee Council in the 1980s, helping refugees to gain employment - and about the cultural barriers they face.

Listen to Maria (mp3, 812kb)

Transcript

'I’m proud of being part of something.  Because we were academics and we could see immediately where the needs were.  So as soon as we start working with the Refugee Council we could start saying this is needed, this is needed.

'We had to have these services geared to people who are coming from outside, who have problems in validating careers, yeah, people who don’t know how to do a curriculum vitae for the British employer. And we also look at employment in a very different way. So people need to learn all these skills. 

'And in my country when you look for employment, you never say "oh I am fantastic, I am the very best person you can have" [laughs]. This would be, this is absolutely, you cannot say that in my culture, you don’t sell yourself in that way. That would be to be absolutely, it would be such an arrogance. You never say "I am good for this", "good for that", "I am the best", you never say that. You would be socially dead if you do that.  It’s bad manners, it’s considered, other people can say how good you are, but not you.

'And for us this was the most difficult part, to learn to sell ourselves to an employer, try to persuade employers that we were the right person. Because we normally don’t say anything [laughs]. We show our papers and in an indirect way we can try to show how good we are, but we don’t say it. 

'When I work with other refugees I found out that we were not the only ones with difficulties of this sort. There were people from India, from Sri Lanka, from Muslim culture, saying "I cannot say this about myself, it’s arrogant", yeah, you see [laughs].'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit