I often get asked by Slovaks what I am doing here.
They don’t mean “what do you do for a living?” – rather, they are asking “why on earth would you choose to live in Slovakia?”
The answer is simple: I think this is a great place. But many of the Slovaks I talk to find this hard to believe.
It’s not that they are not proud of their country. Rather, they are fairly sure that things must be better elsewhere.
This assumption can be both an impetus – in some areas, Slovakia has quietly overtaken its supposedly more developed neighbours (try getting an ultra-reliable, lightning-speed internet connection in Vienna for less that €20 a month) – and an impediment – Slovaks’ self-image as a poor country helps feed nationalist resentment when it comes to foreigners, especially refugees (“they’re coming to get what little we have”).
Meanwhile, many Slovaks have moved abroad and appreciate life there. One such, who clearly believes that the grass is greener there, is now taking a leading role in a US political campaign.
Barbora Hurd was born in Ružomberok and is now a US citizen. She is the star of a campaign video for her husband, Jeff Hurd, who is seeking the Republican party’s nomination for a congressional election in Colorado next November.
For a US political video, it spends a remarkable amount of time talking about Czechoslovakia.
This is not, we learn, a happy place.
Priests are martyred for their faith, Soviet tanks roam the streets, the shelves in the shops are empty, and the Communist Party presides over a system marred by “shortages, lies, inefficiencies”.
Barbora is worried that her adopted homeland is at risk of ending up mired in the kind of existence that, she says, she and her family endured under “the iron grip of the communists’ rule”.
