Despite having lived in Ireland for more than eight years, Maria Isabel Meza-Silva (30) is still not on board with Irish mealtimes or portion sizes. Meza-Silva moved to Ireland from Colombia in 2017.
“Lunch is our main meal [of the day]. We have rice, chicken and salad for lunch. I remember coming to work and everyone was having ham and cheese sandwiches with a pack of crisps. I said, that’s not lunch, that’s dinner.”
Additionally, she does not understand why so many Irish people have such a big meal for dinner and eat at 5pm or 6pm, when she typically eats at 7.30pm or 8pm. While Meza-Silva has completely embraced Irish cuisine, especially a Sunday roast, she has retained her Latin American mealtimes and portion sizes.
Though she moved to Ireland from Colombia, she was born in Venezuela, a country with which she has a complicated relationship.
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“Growing up there it was amazing. It was just friends and family, it was easy. I love Venezuela,” she says.
Her parents moved to Venezuela in the 1980s from Colombia. They had been together since they were 15 having met through her mother’s brother.
“Back when they grew up, there was lots of violence in Colombia because of the war on drugs and all that type of stuff. Venezuela was a prosperous county, with the oil and everything, there were a lot of opportunities.”
Meza-Silva’s parents did very well in Venezuela, her father founded a successful business and for a time it seemed as if they had made the right decision in leaving Colombia for Venezuela.
However, everything started to change in the mid-2000s. Venezuela’s economy suffered a dramatic downturn, and crime rates began to rise exponentially.
In 2009 she and her family were the victims of a violent robbery.
“It was like in the movies, how they tie your feet and hands. We were there in my room with my mum, my brother and two friends, while a guy was in our apartment robbing stuff.”
A week later her parents decided that it would be best for her, her mother and brother to move back to Colombia, while her father stayed in Venezuela to manage his business.
Meza-Silva says nearly eight million people have left Venezuela since the early 2010s.
She settled into life in Bucaramanga, a small city near the border with Venezuela.
In 2013 she began studying industrial engineering at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city. Learning English was a requirement of her degree. Her father thought it would be best for her to go somewhere where there weren’t many Spanish speakers so she could concentrate on learning English. Three weeks later Meza-Silva was on a flight to Ireland.
“I knew nothing about this island,” she says.
She spent six months living with a host family in Lucan.
“I remember my host mum welcoming me and was telling me things but I could only understand maybe a quarter of [what she said].”
She began applying for jobs in Ireland but had to return to Colombia after six months to finish her degree. She had already met an Irishman and began dating him, and the couple had a long-distance relationship.
Then in 2016 her father was murdered in Venezuela.
“This was how violent it was back then: he was just at a barbecue and then someone shot him.”
Meanwhile her relationship ended, but then she received a job offer from an Irish company in 2017, and agonised over whether or not to go back to Ireland.
Her family were still dealing with the legal fallout from her father’s murder.
“I just felt like I was running away from home.”
In the end, Meza-Silva’s mother convinced her to go as she told Meza-Silva that this type of opportunity was what her father had worked for all those years.
When she moved to Ireland, Meza-Silva worked in manufacturing, and it came as quite a surprise to her that it was such a male-dominated industry.
“I realised how privileged I was growing up. My dad was an engineer, it was a given that I could be an engineer because he always said, you can do anything you want.”
She recalls working on a project just after moving to Ireland where, though she had the technical capabilities to lead the project, she was told not to tell the company they were contracted to what she was doing as they were “old-school”.
“They felt that because I was a woman and looked young that [the company] weren’t going to take our results seriously.”
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After working in manufacturing for a few years, she started to get more involved in promoting inclusivity and diversity in Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Today she is the Stem Passport for Inclusion programme manager at Maynooth University.
“If I talk to people about manufacturing they will say, oh it’s a dirty job or it’s a man’s job. I want girls to know that they can do it and feel like they belong.”
She and her partner, Ricardo, also from Venezuela, who she met while volunteering, recently bought a house together in Meath. They want to stay in Ireland long-term as they have built a life they love here. However, they are planning a trip to Venezuela next year as Meza-Silva hasn’t been there since shortly after her father died. On her trip she is hoping to create happy memories and heal her relationship with her native country.
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
