Kevin Wiley

“Cold day, isn’t it?” said the man standing next to me at the bus stop.  

“Ah, but at least it’s dry!” I replied.  

“Tis dry, thank God.” This was a typical bus stop conversation in Ireland, where my wife and I lived for four years. 

“You’re not from around here,” the man went on to say. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement: You’re not from around here.   

Of course I wasn’t. It was obvious from my Midwestern American accent that I didn’t grow up there in Waterford. So I said to the man, “No, I’m from west of Ireland.”   

The man knew I couldn’t possibly mean the west of Ireland, as the Irish call the westernmost counties of their island. But he took up my game, winking and smiling as he quipped, “I’d say far west of Ireland!” Then I admitted to him that I’m from that big island far off Ireland’s western shore, the one called America. He laughed, and on we talked until the bus came.   

You’re not from around here. I frequently heard this reminder: that I was a “blow-in,” as outsiders are called in Ireland. Anyone who wasn’t born there is a blow-in. If a person born in Dublin moves to Waterford, he’s a blow-in, even if he’s Irish. So I, a Michigan Yankee who had been in Ireland for only a couple of years, was most certainly a blow-in. For a while, being a blow-in bothered me. But then my wife and I determined that rather than sitting in front of the TV every evening, we had to take the initiative to get involved with our new community. We reasoned that unless we made the effort to find a way to get “inside,” we would remain outsiders. We decided to become the blow-ins who got in. 

You don’t have to move to a foreign country to feel like a blow-in. If you’ve recently moved to a new state, new city, or even a new neighborhood, you might be feeling like a blow-in. You could feel that way even if you haven't recently moved. But if that's the case, don’t despair. Here are some things that we did in Ireland to help ourselves get in.  

For starters, we did all we could to learn about our new community. We read the local newspapers and community bulletin boards (at the library and the post office). We listened to the local radio station. We read a community website. We browsed the local-interest section at the public library. This unearthed a long list of museums, galleries, and tourist attractions we could visit, concerts and plays we could attend, activities we could try out, and clubs or groups we could join. We explored the city. A guided tour of the Waterford Crystal factory amazed us. An afternoon in the city museum taught us the region’s long, fascinating history.

Occasionally we wandered around the city randomly, by car, bus, or on foot, just to see what different areas were like. An examination of statues and historical markers around the city reinforced what we had learned in the museum. The more we learned about our new city, the more “in” we began to feel. We attended orchestra concerts at the local college, poetry readings at the city library, and musical productions in the Theatre Royal. I spent an evening or two each week playing and making friends at a badminton club. I joined a book club. My wife spent several hours a week talking with seniors at a nursing home, sometimes playing bingo with them. Together we took a couple of evening classes. We joined a church choir. What we got involved with isn’t that important; the critical point is that in everything we did, we talked with people. We got acquainted. We made lasting friendships.   

The more time we spent in Waterford, mixing with people, the more we started to learn the local vocabulary. For example, we learned that to “whinge” is to complain, that a “blaa” is a kind of a bread roll that you can only get in Waterford, and that John Roberts Square in the city center is called “Red Square” by the locals because it used to be paved with red bricks. The more we knew and could use the local vocabulary, the more “in” we felt.   

It disappointed us at first that no neighbors came knocking on our door to introduce themselves when we moved in. After grousing about it for a while, we decided to go seek them out instead, introducing ourselves and doing our best to get acquainted. We found that asking for and offering help went a long ways in developing friendships. For example, after I accidentally locked us out of the house one Saturday afternoon, we made new friends by knocking on a neighbor’s door and asking if we could use her phone to call our landlord. Another time, we offered to feed another neighbor’s cats while she was on vacation. These sorts of interactions helped us get connected to our neighborhood.   

All of these activities helped us to learn about our new community, but even more important, doing these things helped us make friends.  Had we spent all our evenings just sitting at home, we would have continued to be lonely blow-ins. Instead, we got so busy enjoying our lives in Waterford that we banished the blow-in feeling—even though we weren’t from around there.   

Kevin Wiley writes from Berrien Springs, Michigan. When he's not writing or reading, he works in the School of Education at Andrews University.