Kati Come Home

If president Toomas Hendrik Ilves had his way, Mary Tamm (see story below) would know lots of Estonians - because she would abandon her life in England and return to her ancestral home to live!

On a trip to the US of A to speak at the UN on behalf of Europeans everywhere, Ilves popped in to Estonia House in New York to have a chinwag with the local emigres and urge them to think about dropping everything to migrate to a small, cold, foreign country.

“Thank you for keeping Estonianness alive,” he said, using a phrase that is difficult to translate without it sounding silly. “But you should know that Estonia has moved on, and awaits you. It is no longer a poor country, but has grown powerfully, and I urge you to come to Estonia and see all this for yourselves.

“We have come so far that you might even think: perhaps my income in America is a little higher than it would be in Estonia, but my children could be educated in Estonian, we could eat Estonian bread, and live an Estonian life,” the president continued. “So think about coming home. We need every Estonian we can get.”

Now, much as I love rye bread, it hardly constitutes a convincing argument for moving half way around the world. Nor would the Estonian education system form much of an incentive, given how inflexible it is. And it's easy for our Toomas to exhort others to follow in his footsteps when they led him to the presidency: salary is probably not quite the issue for him that it would be for others contemplating such an upheaval.

There's something wonderfully romantic about these calls to home, although they're completely pointless: the only ones likely to heed them are the elderly, and they're hardly going to contribute to the gene pool any more than they already have. But then Ilves is a diplomat to the last, and what else are you going to say to a bunch of lifelong expats frankly. “It's charming in a quaint sort of way that you maintain some semblance of being Estonian despite the fact you would obviously never consider leaving your comfortable life here to actually live in the country” wouldn't exactly cut the mustard.