From Russia with love
News
Minorty Report, Pt. 2: Like other immigrants, Russian couple picked Barrie to start a new life
Posted By Marg. Bruineman
Updated 1 month ago
KEVIN LAMB PHOTOKorina Ossetchkina and her family at Springwater Park on Sunday, May 16th, 2010. Photo for immigration story.
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This is the second part of a three-part series that is looking at who calls Barrie home:
Korina Ossetchkina and her family were looking for some place a little less busy than Toronto.
They had come from Moscow, not considered small by any measure, but when the Ossetchkinas immigrated to Canada, it was to raise a family.
They initially thought Maple might be a good fit, and they gave it two years, but it wasn't the serene, small city they were looking for.
And then they found Barrie.
"We love it, it seems like there's no better place," said Korina, now a mother of two.
"Why it worked for us ... from the start we lived in a Canadian environment (not clustering ourselves with other Russians).
"It was tough, for sure."
They miss Russia and the children are proud to declare themselves Russians, but they've acclimatized themselves to Canadian life and consider themselves Canadians.
Settling here has worked out well.
The focus was to give their children a safe life with the freedoms democracy offered.
But both Korina and her husband, Victor, had tradeoffs.
As professionals in Russia, she an accountant and he an engineer, transferring those skills was not an easy process.
Victor simply didn't bother — certifying here meant going back to school and starting from scratch.
So, he continued operating the business he had started in Russia seven years before leaving his homeland. And he relied upon his other skill here. As a black belt in karate, he now runs his own karate club.
Korina first took a job as an accounts clerk, that's a big drop from the job of accounting director she held in Russia.
"To be a landed immigrant, the qualification requires a university degree," she said. "But if you take a look at what they are working at in Canada, they're drivers or clerks."
That's a story repeatedly heard in Canada.
For immigrants it's a struggle to get something beyond "survival jobs".
For Canadians requiring professionals like doctors, it's frustrating.
"We do have some labour market shortages in several areas and strategic skills based immigration can be very helpful economically," says Barrie MP Patrick Brown, who tracks the migration. "As for credential accreditation, this is an ongoing challenge for new Canadians. The government has increased funding for the foreign credential assessment office but we still face many hurdles from professionals associations.
"I am working with about 10 new Canadians in Barrie right now who are attempting to go through the difficult process of foreign accreditation,"?Brown added. "I hate seeing doctors drive taxis or deliver pizza rather than save lives, and we need to do a better job as a society to recognize these degrees."
He points to the flourishing cultural communities in Barrie.
For new immigrants like the Ossetchkinas, the first job at hand was learning and perfecting English. Victor took an English as a second language course offered through immigration services, which also offered daycare for their two-year-old daughter.
Korina thought her English was pretty good, but, upon arrival, she realized she was very difficult to understand. When they arrived, Korina was pregnant with her second baby. So when the baby came, she worked on her English through a secondary school certificate correspondence course.
After entering the workforce, she worked her way up the ladder, taking on more senior accounting positions. In the last three years, while working full-time, she's been taking accounting courses. She figures in another three years, she'll have her certified general accountant designation and be a recognized accountant.
Finding the time to study while working and raising a family is a challenge complicated by the fact that it's all in English, not her first language.
Some of the words and phrases, she's found, are not in the dictionary.
But she figures she's halfway there.
In three years or so she'll have her designation and that will come with more handsome work opportunities.
Next Saturday, Final Part:
A look at Barrie's multiculturalism
