Let’s recap on what we have discussed so far:

1) One Thing We MUST Begin Doing NOW As African Immigrants

2) What Every African Immigrant Ought to Know About Recording and Sharing Success

This article has been written to give  you some ideas about areas where we as African immigrants need to share useful information with each other on a mass scale. It has two parts:

1) What I personally think is more important and what I value. MORE IMPORTANTLY:

2) What I have observed we as a community need to learn

What I Have Observed We Need to Learn

Getting Started Making an Income

Here folks need all the help they can get. There are a few situations when it’s especially necessary:

a) When a young adult arrives in a foreign country never having worked or been job searching a day in their life.

b) When someone comes from a poor family who put all their financial resources to send them abroad and have left them on their own.

c) People who are transferring over to a country to pursue an occupation but have a long transition, preparation and “one-more-damn-form-to-fill” period between their overseas arrival and working in their job.

Here people need to know where they can begin making money instantly. Not necessarily a lot, though if you know how, do tell. Just enough to get by.

One of the aims of this blog is to explore “alternative and unique” ways this can be done so that this is never a problem.

Material Success

Once people do get a job and begin working, and if their visa is in order, there is a tendency to get very very comfortable and stuck in a rut. You’re not growing. You’re not making as much of a contribution as you can to your community. You are not even close to maximizing your potential.

This is where people who have succeeded materially at an extraordinary level need to begin writing autobiographies and how tos so that they reignite the passions of the comfortable and give them a new pinnacle to aim towards.

Relationships

This is the area we’ll ask for the least help in and yet know the least about. One of the worst consequences of losing our tribal societies is we lost a sense of continuity of education in this area of relationships.

This world is constantly changing so fast that the rules that governed our parents aren’t the same rules that govern us and probably won’t be the same relationship rules that govern our kids. (As a sidenote, have you ever stopped to think about how weird, or probably repulsive, a lot of our generation’s sexual habits would be to our grandparents….we have changed A LOT as a people)

As long as there is this thing called man, and there is this thing called woman, majority of us will always be sexually attracted to each other and feel kinda incomplete if we don’t at least have some relationship with members of the opposite sex.

Why something so quintessential to the human experience isn’t part of the everyday school syllabus but logarithms are is beyond me.

As an immigrant it’s even worse. Not only were there “no solid rules” to begin with, but now you are in a country where the rules are entirely different. A world where people are more and more about “private space” and “individual ambition” as opposed to “just sitting connecting and sharing”.

When I began writing this section, I thought I was just talking about romantic relationships. I have realized I am not, even platonic relationships. If you have any sort of rock solid bond with another human being abroad in spite of the circumstances, you need to share this.

What I Think We Need to Know?

Marketing Impulse Control

We need to sit down and teach future immigrants how to avoid constantly jumping on the next material trend and entering themselves into debt so that they can live like a rich man on a pauper’s salary.

This is just my personal issue though. I don’t see why you should be buying leather seats, a plasma screen TV and a sports car when you have to work 14 hour days just to pay for all of that. Shouldn’t you build your financial foundation on a life of frugality first and then once you actually HAVE an excess of capital, live like you do?

Eating Healthy

Next time you are in an African function, look to your left, then look to your right and then look to the center. Tell me how many of those people have love handles that can only come from excess junk consumption or if not how many have a very high metabolism that pretty much gets rid of any signs of junk in take.

We eat like crap more often than not. We need to eat better. We have greater access to information and are much smarter than that.

Unique Immigrant Experiences

If you have gone off the beaten path and done things that people thought were undoable abroad, record your tales and share them with your fellow immigrant and enlighten us that we constantly remember that no life is not static and human life is indeed a fluid concept.

All breakthroughs and great innovations come from outside of the boxes, mental or otherwise that we chose to live within. Share your insights from outside this box and help the people within it expand.

Can you think of any other areas we need to record success? Have any thoughts on the matter? Leave a comment below.

In the next, and me thinks, final edition of this series, I will share some quick ideas on just how to present your message to make it most compelling and useful to other African immigrants.

Ladies and gentlemen if you have not, please sign up for and give me feedback on:

The Immigrant Survivor Guide Newsletter

If you are a fan of this article or blog, I encourage you to join and give me feedback ( ) on my Immigrant Survivor Guide Newsletter by putting your first name and email address in the boxes below.

I Hate Spam, So I Won’t Share Your Email With Anyone.

In newsletter, once a week I send you short emails that give you actionable tips that you can immediately apply to make your immigrant experience better including tips on:

i) Making friends

ii) Finding employment

iii) How to stay healthy on the run

iv) Things to prepare before you immigrate

v) Staying in touch with people from your home country

vi) Tips on how to transition from a student to a permanent resident and/or citizen in Australia etc etc.

So please join, and give me feedback, by putting your first name and email in the boxes below:

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Be blessed and bless others,

Mwangi

So What Must We Begin Doing NOW as an African Immigrant Community

We must make it a habit and/or a ritual to record any and all successes we have as African immigrants AND share them with our fellow African immigrants who may not be “up to our level”, no matter how small or large our successes.

Why is This Important?

Let me ask you a question: How many of you STRUGGLED when you first landed abroad?

You struggled to understand the weird words that were coming out of the foreigner’s mouth. You struggled to understand why they weren’t talking and acting like normal people would.

You struggled with public transport. You struggled getting your first job. You struggled on your first day of class. You struggled to understand all the paperwork and documentation necessary to make things happen.

Important Question

Now, how many people came before you and went through just what you went through? How many do you think took as much if not more time to get to pretty much where you are?

Reducing a Learning Curve

What if JUST ONE of those people who came before you said:

OK! I am now relatively settled in this place. Boy that adjusting and acclimatization process was rough. I don’t want other folks to have it that hard, spending 3 years just to say “they got here”. I think I will put this down into a free manual and just share it with all the new arrivals when I pick them up at the airport or see them in the church or community gatherings.

Though the Above Idea is Just an Abstract Example…….

….it’s not a ridiculous impossibility. Just think about how much quicker the learning curve would be for the incoming immigrant had JUST ONE guide from JUST ONE immigrant.

Now imagine if 5 immigrants got together,exchanged notes and did the exact same thing. So where one person was weak, or wrong or went the long way, someone shows them the alternative better or shorter way.  Where there were other holes in one view of the world, someone else covered them up. How much shorter would their learning curve be?

This Happened For Real

By far, one of my least popular, “but so useful I think it should do well” series is How to Immigrate to Australia within a week (most of the hyperlinks above are from that series). That guide actually got written after I helped a new person settle into the country.

The first day she arrived in the country, she already had a job. Within a fortnight she had:

a) A bank account that was transferring money to and from her country.

b) Accomodation and all the accomodation accesories bought and paid for.

c) An understanding of how to get around by public and private transport.

d) Knew the websites and places where one could find work.

Now, when I started job hunting, it took me close to 6 months to find my first job. She managed to get a job on HER FIRST DAY.

This simple habit can save people so much on time, money and emotional energy it’s not even funny.

Don’t We Already Do This?

Now to a large extent we as an African community already do this in a very informal person-to-person way. When my family and I first arrived, there was a family that showed us around and told us things like:

People will always want to touch your hair. They love natural African hair.

But what I am talking about is:

a) Sitting down putting it into a form that can be mass distributed and mass consumed.

b) Distributing it so that one man’s insights can reduce the learning curve of many, not just immigrants.

In short, how the lessons from one man can help elevate the consciousness and decision making of other children of the soil about to make a trans-ocean migration.

On the next article in this series I will talk about HOW we can go about doing this effectively.

To become a part of my attempt at doing what I have just described check out:

The Newsletter

If you are a fan of this article or blog, I encourage you to join and give me feedback ( ) on my Immigrant Survivor Guide Newsletter by putting your first name and email address in the boxes below.

I Hate Spam, So I Won’t Share Your Email With Anyone.

In newsletter, once a week I send you short emails that give you actionable tips that you can immediately apply to make your immigrant experience better including tips on:

i) Making friends

ii) Finding employment

iii) How to stay healthy on the run

iv) Things to prepare before you immigrate

v) Staying in touch with people from your home country

v) Tips on how to transition from a student to a permanent resident and/or citizen in Australia etc etc.

So please join, and give me feedback, by putting your first name and email in the boxes below:

I Hate Spam, So I Won’t Share Your Email With Anyone.