English: The importance of friends

Rule: Your friend and you will have something in common
Exception: When your friendship becomes the thing you have in common

One of my first days in Ireland I was crossing a street with my youngest, Stefan, in a pram, on our way home from school where we had left the other kids. A lady was waiting next to me at the lights with her toddler in another pram. She turned to me and said:
- Excuse me, are you not Isak's mum?

Isak, my boy, turned out to be in her boy Barney's class. She lived on my way home and thus Sally became my first friendly face in Ireland. Maybe she was that observant about my situation because her husband was non-native. A few days later another mum made a similar approach. Her boy Mikey was in my Kristoffer's class. Niamh turned out to be one of my very best friends in Ireland. And she had lived some years in the US.

In church the first one to really talk to me, not just polite chit-chat or handing out invitations that never got any closer to a real meeeting, was Ulrike. She comes from Germany but has been living in Ireland for many years. My other closest friends in germany were Stuart and Breda (with their children all living abroad) and Sara-Jane (with a Spanish husband).

That made me form a conclusion that the knowledge from sharing a life with an immigrant or sharing first-hand experiences of being a foreigner made you more aware of other foreigners. That is, until I came to know Elizabeth and her sister Bernadette. Both Irish. Both living in Ireland (and nowhere else). Well, Bernadette did have a daughter abroad but she only came to know me from Elizabeth, who came to know me through her daughter Karen who befriended my daughter Petra.

So, without having first or second-hand experience of being a foreigner, Elizabeth still gave me her hand of friendship and has stayed my friend through the years. It has even survived me moving back to Sweden. our friendship is what we have in common and from that point of view we learn things about eachother, and it works because she is as curious as I am about how it is to be on the other side.

Last, a word about Bernadette. She provides me with a home in Ireland whenever I go back, she does laugh at me when I am crying in front of the telly wathing how Len dies in Emmerdale...but she also shares my obsession for Casualty and Holby city. We buy the same kind of clothes from Penney's. I feel at home in her home. That - is a gift. A gift of friendship that she offers me.