Modestos Latsinoglou is one of hundreds of Greeks who were forced to migrate to Australia in 2011 because of the Greek economic crisis, in order to pursue better future in Australia.
He arrived in Melbourne in October, alone. His wife and 12-year-old son will remain in Greece until Modestos is in a position to bring them over. Modestos communicates with his family for 2 hours every day through skype.
In Greece Modestos worked as a concrete boom pump operator in his hometown of Drama, before the contracts ran dry for J&P Avax, one of Greece’s largest construction businesses.
Modestos looked for a month for another job but he couldn’t find one. Before coming to Australia he considered the US and Canada.
After painstaking research on the web in Greece, Modestos flew into Melbourne on a temporary visa. He immediately did the rounds of local colleges offering accredited ‘English as a Second Language’ (ESL) courses and after weighing up the options, chose the Institute of Tertiary and Higher Education Australia (ITHEA).
“The only way I could achieve what I wanted, was first to enroll as a student to improve my English. I didn’t do this just to get the student visa, but because if you want to stay here you must learn English. If you don’t speak English you can do nothing here”, Modestos told ‘Neoskosmos’.
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