Tania Anderson is a Swiss-American-British blend blissfully starting a new chapter in her life in Helsinki.

BOTH practical and beautiful: kiitos. My first Finnish word. Maybe the first world learnt by most foreigners in Finland. Kiitos is easy enough to get one’s mind around, yet it differs enough from other European expressions of gratitude to be reminded of its non-Indo European exoticism!

I recently found out, however, that this short pleasant word conceals a pit-fall unnoticeable to the untrained ear. A Finnish friend of mine pointed out that most foreigners say kitttos as opposed to kiitos with false emphasis on the ‘t’ as opposed to the ‘i’.

Like any person wishing to make Finland their home I quickly realised that kiitos would not suffice. Time for an intensive “Finnish for Beginners” language course! Little did I know though, that in signing up to learn more words I would be sharing the class with 19 other students from 17 other countries. Amidst learning the Finnish word for “brother”, I learned about the Nigerian significance of siblinghood. I also found out how many people in my class were like me and had moved to Finland for love, and how many had moved to seek asylum, or due to family ties or for work.

Being from the EU myself, I was both humbled and impressed by others’ tales of their Whys and Hows in coming to Finland, and the bureaucratic hurdles they have faced upon that journey. Despite our difference in origin, we were equals in two ways: firstly, we all shared the amusing reality of badly babbling like infants in a strange language; secondly, we could all be likened to lost soldiers fighting our way through the bureaucratic forest of Finnish immigration laws.

Alas, in the past few weeks I have realised that the common reality of being “fellow immigrants battling our way to a stable income and social security in a new homeland” was a mere illusion!

Unlike many of my fellow students, I got past Finland’s borders without even a hint of doubt thanks to my handy “fortress EU” UK passport. However, later stages of Finland’s immigration bureaucracy, have led me into a Kafkaesque maze of seemingly endless corridors, only to find another cul-de-sac with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction. Asylum seekers, like a couple of my new friends, are entitled to the “Asylum Seeker’s Right to Work” under Finnish law. I completely agree. It makes perfect sense.

For those who fall short of strategic labels (“Yes, I am an EU citizen without Social Security”, “Not a student”, “Looking for work but not officially unemployed”, “Not married to a Finn but perhaps some day”) even getting registered into the system at the police station proves impossible! I feel like a ball in a pinball machine being “pinged” from Maistraatti, to KELA, to the immigration office, to the unemployment office and back through.

How does one prove in a paper-centric world a desire to build a life and work here? The answer is quite simple according to the system’s polite henchmen: “Find work”. Another Catch-22. How else can one reply in such situations other than with “Kiiiitos (sigh).” The maze continues.