When Foreign Affairs Minister Tonio Borg last visited Australia, an elderly lady, a grandmother, approached him with tears in her eyes and begged him: “When you go back to Malta, do please tell them that we love Malta. Tell them that we never stopped loving our country and that we can’t come back because our children are here.”
Dr Borg recalled the touching moment yesterday, at the official launch of the Council for Maltese Living Abroad. The council is made up of representatives of Maltese communities in all the continents around the world as well as experts in the field of migration.
The grandmother’s story is a very common one among the Maltese people who settled in Australia. “The 50,000 Maltese who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s are getting older, so there are problems in that they are now resorting to speaking Maltese again,” said Edwin Borg Manché, a council member referring to studies showing that, in their old age, people tend to start speaking in their original language.
He asked the Government to help “so we can offer them a better service when it comes to language”. In Melbourne, he said, a number of volunteers visited the elderly so they would have the opportunity to speak to someone in Maltese.
The pull to the homeland is felt even in the Maltese-American community. “On special occasions like last May, when Archbishop Paul Cremona came to California, people mill in from everywhere and, all of a sudden, everyone becomes Maltese,” said Louis Vella, another council member representing the Maltese community in the US. “It is good to hear Maltese – old Maltese – being bandied about.”
The older the emigrant gets, the stronger the pull towards the home country. Joe Scerri, who has lived in Canada for the past 45 years, said: “The bond doesn’t weaken.” As a council member, he brought to light the possibility of Canadians with dual citizenship getting some sort of a non-resident ID card that would show that they are Maltese too.
“We need to highlight the fact that the idea of migration has ended and is now replaced by the concept of a Maltese generation that lives both in Malta and abroad,” said Dr Borg, who is the council’s president.
The new generation of emigrants are no longer crossing the continents, opting instead to pack and move to European Union countries. Their problems are mainly of an administrative nature. “We have a situation where the Administration needs to come to terms with the fact that the emigrant would still be living part of his life in Malta,” said Franklin Mamo, a council member who lives in Belgium.
He said that the largest number of Maltese living in Belgium were aged 0 to 9 years. “The average age of people who migrate to Belgium is 35 to 40, so they will be starting a new family,” Mr Mamo said.
The council will work to promote the communities in their country of residence, their ties to Malta, the preservation of culture and language and integration in the country of adoption.
It will also strive to set up a Maltese Cultural Institute, an effort lauded by Tourism Minister Mario de Marco, also present at the meeting: “This will be crucial in the promotion of Maltese culture outside our shores as well as in intercultural and diplomatic strengthening.”