Going for evening walks in Mosta and neighbouring villages, I am impressed by the high quality of properties, impeccably maintained by residents. They take pride in them and decorate the windows, balconies and front gardens with a variety of indigenous plants of all colours, showing the care and dedication that owners devote to keeping their investment at its highest value.
People’s homes constitute the biggest investment of their lives, and they work very hard to pay off 40-year mortgages – sometimes into retiring age. Some moonlight with up to three jobs and can afford only short holidays to make ends meet. Others living in the luxury homes in Birguma and San Pawl tat-Targa keep pumping more money into maintaining their 1,200-square metre residences, making sure their landscaped gardens and filtered swimming pools receive the undivided attention of gardeners and handymen.
Having said all this, my heart bleeds when I jog in parts of Mosta full of poor road surfaces and broken pavements. To start with, the area where I live – the Tal Wej area of Mosta – has, over the past 30 years, seen two political parties patronising its residents with promises – subsequently broken – of decent, well-lit roads and pavements. A master plan, by which all substandard roads were to be re-surfaced by 2008, was a fantasy promise. In 2010, we know that residents of Tal Wej have only one choice if they want to realise their dream of a decent neighbourhood: leave the area.
Why do some parts of the village sport roads with surfaces like billiard tables and well-lit playgrounds, while other parts have bumpy roads? The latter places children at a disadvantage, as there are no decent spaces for recreation. Parking is chaotic, because the council allocates no funds for marking parking spaces. It is no secret that Dun Karm Schembri and adjacent roads in Mosta have been the subject of patching over the past two decades. The moonscape style of such roads shames us all as we wait for the winter rains to deepen the potholes for the umpteenth time. But there is no need to despair, because within a few weeks a contractor carries out the patching song and dance routine – a veritable miracle of engineering. Of course, there have been many upgrades in the centre of our villages, but those families who happen to live on the outskirts have to grin and bear it (while realising they are sons of a lesser God).
Yes, it is sad story of jinxed priorities to recall that the nation is embarking on building a grand City Gate and a swanky Parliament building on stilts in Valletta. The bigotry is that the country (at least parts of it) reminds itself that there is no money for ensuring a uniform road infrastructure across the paltry 312 square kilometres. The alternative is the fallacy of road patching. This is no fault of local council administration. The 15-year-old experiment to devolve power to villages and towns via elected, unpaid councillors and mayors has resulted in many improvements in living standards. But their budget is thinly spread on various community programmes such as cleaning and general upkeep, apart from council administration costs and the result is mere underpinning of the problem of the have and the have-nots.
The only consolation is that a few friends in my area have packed their bags and decided to take no more of the misery of dusty roads in summer and puddles in winters. To choose to sell up and move to better kept and maintained villages was a brave decision. Everyone knows how traumatic moving house is, yet they dug deep in their pockets and stoically took the plunge of buying an alternative home – leaving us to cope with patched-up roads and broken pavements.
Such voluntary migration has seen families selling homes often built in the classical terraced house style, with beautiful architectural décor boasting balustrades and traditional stone finish facades. Such beauties are razed to the ground as developers change the street vernacular and erect ugly concrete flats on three floors and a penthouse: a pyrrhic triumph that exacerbates the parking madness. True, on its own migration was great for the smarter families who exited the zone and set up residences in areas such as Naxxar, Birguma and Bahrija. But their migration was one of choice, as nobody forced them to leave. This is not the case for the thousands who packed up their belongings to search of a living wage in distant countries.
Perhaps it is as well to define human migration. The text book explains it as the movement of people from one place in the world to another for the purpose of taking up permanent or semi-permanent residence. So yes, my erstwhile neighbours in the Tal Wej area (among others) do qualify as migrants. But this domestic migration is insignificant compared to what motivated the thousands who left the country in the 1950s. By far the most significant movement of Maltese occurred after the Second World War. In the 1950s, a bleak economic future saw the rate of emigration (so lovingly called “low culture”) reach 11,000 in one year. This was indeed a mass exodus, with whole villages, particularly in Gozo, practically depleted of skilled workers looking for work. What started as a trickle became a chain-reaction flood, with somebody taking the plunge and then inevitably encouraging his relatives and friends to join him. Emotions ran high. Many could not take the strain of separation and hardship for more than a few months, and returned, disillusioned and penniless. Most, however, managed to save enough to come back to Malta, find a wife and return, to build a house and start a family in semi exile.
Just contemplate the sheer numbers of Maltese living abroad, which now, by all accounts, is comparable to and even exceeds the total population of Malta. Migrants who left Malta 50 or 60 years ago took with them a basic Maltese culture that reflected their origins and way of life. In the 1980s, another type of migrant began to leave Malta – people and their families who were better educated, who had a respectable job in Malta, (so called “high-culture”) but who, for political reasons, found the going too tough. These migrants consisted of doctors, engineers, lawyers and managers who found Mintoff’s political kitchen too hot for their liking. They packed their bags and headed for top jobs in South Africa, Dubai and other Gulf States, while others turned to Britain, Canada or New York for solace.
The earlier 1950s group settled in Australia and Canada. Most of them got to grips with life and managed to overcome the original difficulties and made a career for themselves. A few decided to return to Malta as soon as the political climate permitted them to do so. It is therefore of some value to distinguish between “high” and “low” among migrants who decided to part company with their native culture. This culture includes the daily way of life, Maltese food, entertainment, firework displays, band clubs and village festas. Gone is their love for the rich Maltese history, archaeology, arts and the finer aspects of life. Such finer aspects of living were never given any priority in their pecking order. The prime objective was to familiarise themselves with the host country culture and integrate with a particular style of living. There was no governmental cultural department in the host country that tried to rescue their heritage.
Yes, unfortunately this is the cost of migration: a dying culture. The significance of this to young Maltese living abroad is considerable. Without doubt there is a downside to the social phenomenal wake of migration to faraway countries and certainly every effort should be made to maintain the language and culture within the Maltese communities overseas, even though this appears to be quite a task. With regard to language maintenance, it is clear that the children of Maltese migrants are unlikely to speak the language, and therefore there is every possibility that it will disappear in the near future and remain only as a remnant restricted to pockets of aging communities singing the migrant blues.
[email protected]