Translated by: Gonzalo J. Acosta - goneacosta[at]gmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
Why Hungary?
I did not even know how to find the country on a map neither I cared; I believe more in landscape’s borders and cultural uniqueness than political borders. Spaniards usually ignore what is beyond the Pyrenees, and I was not an exception with my scarce knowledge on geography. Budapest seemed to me like a mystic and oriental city, bordering between bohemian and magical, with such an exotic name and the wonders narrated on a television documentary I saw just moments before I knew that place was going to be my next destination. “A matter of destiny” was the answer I found to what I asked myself at the beginning.
Do I believe in destiny?
In the past not at all, it was just a manner of speaking, of saying in few words that I made a choice or that I was chosen, nearly by impulse, and allowing my heart to choose for once, instead of my head, that was asking me to travel to a more useful country for my own future prospective... Maybe Netherlands, famous in the past for standing in favour of individual freedom and cosmopolitan... Perhaps Germany, a place to improve Goethe’s language which I began to study in the old days... All are visions and pragmatic plans of volunteering and the opportunities of life in which almost all of us sin in these times.
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Many youngsters consider a mobility program such as the EVS (economically endowed as a youth scholarship) instead of using it as a way to help (themselves) in life, as a path to learn or improve a language; or a professional perspective, therefore distorting the initial purpose for a particular one.
Many fellow countrymen aim to the United Kingdom and it backfires on them. It’s an expensive country for the typical Spaniards, whose salaries and their parents´ don’t reach the Union’s average. The reason of their choice is the need of a sojourn there to improve the compulsory use of the English language, therefore there’s a lot of demand and few possibilities.
British people are not very interested in a program that is not enough to nongovernmental organizations, because they can count on multiple and granted resources to obtain national financing and support to any kind of social action.
Despite reality and frustration, once reckoned and dismissed the idea, it won’t lead many to consider the real objectives of an opportunity such as the EVS. Perhaps just a few will dare to live in another country that will teach them other things, which at the time they will not be able to appreciate to what extent can be advantageous for them. Many new young men, European and rich, who daring just doesn’t add up, regardless lodging covered, the bigger or minor amount of pocket money, and the educational and personal value they will obtain by helping and knowing others.
At the new countries of the Union and the East, prices were on other paths, as a result of living in a non-consumer based financial logic until they joined the Union’s club and now they are forced to abandon that logic at a globalizing light speed through the European breadth. The concept of volunteering was then converting into paradoxical and contradictory, choosing a less classic country, the opposite of the previous example happens and you can go, with all the expenses paid, to where minimum wage is lesser to what you get as an all-paid volunteer for maintenance and pocket money. While the new rise in prices in the European way arrives, a foreign visitor can learn to live without strain in a more authentic way, just like the locals, without squandering in vices that leave you penniless right away and trying not to be affected by the feeling of earning as much as an employee sometimes; feeling which some organizations use as a particular ethical justification in order to stick their hands in the cash box assigned to volunteers, in this blessed free world where everyone tries to profit from everyone and everything else.
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In the past I didn’t want to believe in destiny, because I wanted to be free. Now I have to accept the predestination by which if you walk a certain path you will reach a different destination that if you choose another, though maybe both paths take you to the same destination...You just decide the road and life provides the obstacles, the stones in the path that each road determines... For the poet that does not fear fate there is nothing but a path that he, as a traveller, makes as he goes... For the saint, fate is that feeling that you have been pointed to a path which you have always looked for without knowing, since one does not know everything about oneself, and it is too hard to be free without others helping you to know your enslavements...
What matters is not to believe blindly, that is the easiest; what matters is to be aware of what you do at every moment and that what you do and yearn for is a part of yourself, the others that are or will be with you, and others you don’t even know but you are going to be lucky to meet.
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Freedom is a complicated subject, ever since the world is world, way before we knew it spun, man has been yearning, with the same intensity, to be free as much as to be a slave: free from the dangers of nature and competition with others, slave of craving for immortality and power; free of having to make mistakes and slave of having to make choices that provoke uncertainty and fear.
About freedom and the significance of being a volunteer or charitable, of which we, superior and wise westerners, like to brag about so much, a sentence to ponder by Lisa Watson, Australian native: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because you think your liberty is linked to mine, let us work together"
We really fear what we do not know in proportion to the curiosity that corrodes us to know what we do not. When the time comes to propose to oneself an adventure such as leaving behind what we know and take a chance on the unknown of what may be, we do it fearing that what will occur may or may not be what we wish inside. We seek to satisfy the typical thirst for knowledge of the human being about this world and other beings, another world at least more complex.
We hold on to ideas we do not know although we wish to know, like holding on to the mast of a sinking ship. Ideas do not change, they are ideal and they resemble the pleasure that we feel when we get between sheets after an exhausting working day; maybe we have nightmares when we sleep, but we won’t remember them when we wake up.
So, what happens when you are used to sleep between two sheets and covered by a blanket when it is cold, and you find yourself on a bed protected by a comforter and in a room where dawn is three hours before than it was at your former home? If there are no blinds at your new home, you can use a blindfold to avoid the sun waking you up so early or, if you are a housekeeping maniac, this change of habits will make you lose less time on making the bed, because you extend your comforter, and that’s it, it’s made… Damn inventions!, I spent lots of years between bed sheets, many between cottons as well, how am I going to get used to these lonely comforters that caress you instead of tucking you in?
The odyssey will begin, after waiting for so long, and after so many problems that bureaucracy and bad intentions lay down on your path. The day comes and you have to leave to a new life... it will only be a few months... if you are not comfortable you can go back to the warmth of your home when you please... perhaps with the bitter taste of defeat, of not having been able to face a challenge, very different in appearance of the ones you face in your country or city daily life...
If you dig, at the end maybe it is not such a dramatic challenge; anxiety appears because you are not aware of the survival strategies that you have assumed year by year, surviving in the environment you were meant to live in, and when you consider yourself, either you like it or not, Spanish or French or Chinese, you leave, you leave your homeland...
You leave, but in a very different way from those who are less lucky than yourself, those who love their country even though it is a mess, and have no choice but to live precariously, as emigrant foreigners, in another country whose rules are different and normally will be hostile, in order to get a place to live where luck, financial bad luck mainly, takes you.
*
Over half a year after the choice was made, lucky, though having had to wait longer than planned, leaving almost everything behind to take a chance on this adventure, the time was coming to “grab the bull by the horns” and dismiss the anxiety for the loss of what is known, and start dealing with this fear to the unknown: fear that the expectations and impressions lived on my first journey to that future country were wrong and that I was going to lose time instead of getting back the lost time.
<<Life gives you surprises, surprises life gives you, oh, God>> as the song says. We have to be aware and alert for surprises to be sweet instead of bitter.
Half a year before I embarked on the European experience, I had the chance to travel to Hungary for the first time, enthusiastic with the idea of finally visiting part of the land which we know here as the European East. I wanted to see what was left of that social system that gave so much to talk about, the past kingdom of scientific socialism under the communist utopia. To see how its people managed to live, facing the sudden change of regime, without buying the common vision of losers as defeated and distant people. I wanted to amuse myself as a tourist admiring the dignity of Budapest, capital city known as the pearl of the Danube.
A coincidence made my travelling companion someone knowledgeable about the kindness and peculiarities of that particular country. He had already lived with Hungarian students in previous ERASMUS experiences in the neighbourly Austria and visiting their homes many times. He would take advantage of this new instance to see his friends again so I was getting my senses ready for a traveller experience and not that of a mere tourist, in order to know and learn the best way of living among those who, so far, were foreign to me.
The surprise finally came, but not in the friends of my companion (who gave me the first impression of hospitality, joy and torment characteristic of Hungarian nature, which later I would be able to recognize), but from my companion himself declaring an unconditional love, almost mystical and incredible, to those friends he met as a student in Austria. He tried to justify this admiration, completely visceral, with the fact that Hungarians were the only people that always had helped him in a selfless way... It seemed to me a reason enough, thinking that blind solidarity and authenticity is no longer usual among people from democratic societies of the old Western Europe.
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We arrived by air, with that feeling I always had in my first flights of magically teleporting from a world to another one, in few hours of flight above the clouds, without being able to gaze at the landscape and population changes of overland journeys. We headed south directly from the international airport, through highways that reminded me of those our forefathers endured in my country before they were European. Our destination was a small city, a province capital, which ?without knowing? was to be my home next year. It was a region of broad plains that reminded me of the land where I came from, with the difference of having an exultant vegetation, which my country, starting the process of desertification, barely enjoys now beyond the rainy north where my family comes from.
Budapest, the Eastern Paris, still remained to be discovered, while I was amazed by this other Hungary (the authentic one, as I was constantly reminded by the Hungarians from outside the capital) where you can breathe a certain magic, product of centuries of exultant nature and self-sufficient peasantry.
Hungarians have a strong feeling and style of its own, the most traditional barely seen nowadays in museums and tourist attractions as the anchored in time town of Hollóko", cultural singularity eliminated by modern times after being exiled by the Soviet collectivization of the lands these communities grew. As a mock of fate, when the Soviet system collapsed, just a few peasants were able to take hold of big land extensions, therefore turning into new rich farmers who don’t know well how to spend this unequal wealth provided by the honeys of financial laissez-faire.
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I remember my first visit to the near city of Pécs, Hungarian college city, Mediterranean by excellence, illuminated by abundant hours of sun and the history of several cultures that left their mark: Romans, Jews, Turkish, and, after the Soviet parenthesis, the return of the Catholic, influencing the city and crowning it with its cathedral.
It was time to visit some friends of my travelling companion, since some of them lived there and others would travel to visit him. We stayed in a residence of a Catholic school right in the middle of downtown. There I built my first impressions about Hungarian nature and their way of living in the impasse between Soviet regime and European hope.
We met a local student hosted there, excited about our encounter, who had been learning Spanish for a few months without any help, speaking and understanding it in an amazing and enviable way. He made me reflect on the fact that his love for his mother language and culture was not blind enough to allow himself the luxury, that we allow ourselves at my country, of being ignorant of other languages and cultures, because of our small and, until a few decades back isolated, Iberian provincialism, along with a fateful educational system for the study and practice of other languages and the bad habit of translating everything. I was surprised that this coincidence recurred with the encounter of more people who knew about my country and culture much more than what a Spaniard would hope for, knowing so little about his European neighbours.
Although Spain ranks so highly in the popularity charts as a vacation and paradisiacal destination, this is no excuse to remain ignorant about how life is lived beyond our borders. Another thing is that we really live in a paradise, which actually is for tourists filling our beaches. We were promised it would be for the typical Spaniards when becoming European people; but not so much for those who live in the presence of such price rises, low wages, and so many changes brought by modern age, turning sour our natural lively and Mediterranean character.
Beyond any particular thought, we should meditate why we keep such similar opinions when speaking about ourselves and our countries, amongst the youth of the new and old Europe.
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A little surprise, a personal interest, unimportant to most of people, stands in my memory with the worth of discoveries often made by travellers but not by tourists.
From the window of the room where we were, a big old stone statue could be seen, of a bearded old man, dressed in a tunic, in the Roman way, seemingly reading a book, different from the typical statues in the area and out of proportion for the place where it stood, a little backyard seen from that perspective. Urged by curiosity, I decided to go down and go through the half-opened door that led to the backyard and try to find something else. When I got there I found, with great amazement, that the statue was not alone, but flanked by eleven similar ones, imposing and equal in size, at the edge of a patio filled with children playing football; a strange and amazing discovery.
What did those old statues, half hidden in such an unexpected environment, represent? The times when art wrapped people’s lives had long gone; art has been moved into other spaces, aseptic and confined, like museums and squares. So what was this anomaly about? I found no answer to this until I laid eyes for the first time on Pécs imposing cathedral, a modern construction with its façade crowned by twelve nearly equal but more modern statues, representing the twelve apostles of Christianism. Carrying out an investigation at the new Alexandria’s library that is the Internet, I found out that those mysterious statues I had seen in that school’s patio, were built in the 19th century to decorate the rebuilding of the cathedral, being the cathedral’s current ones from the restoration executed in the 20th century, forcing the transfer of the old ones to rest among the screaming and laughter of children at school playtime.
To build is more expensive and slow than to destroy. A common characteristic in the process of construction in the European Union, thanks to the so-called cohesion funds, is the continuous work in cities, capitals and communication networks that all new and old partners of the Union continuously suffer.
At the town where I lived my European experience as a subsidized volunteer, we had a mayor, charming defender of the old generations, who shut down the alternative possibilities of leisure and cultural expression for the youth population that could have existed in that small but dynamic town as province capital. As soon as this mayor got a check from Brussels, with the epigraph "to build" printed on the back, he put his hands to work to pave, actually to pave streets and squares all over again, disregarding the real need to do so, while the surprised residents watched in astonishment these urban changes.
<<Welcome to Europe!>> I said them <<We went through the same, and now we have pretty highways and things like that; it takes us a little less time to go to distant places, but a lot more to go to work or enjoy our cities, thanks to the constant construction projects>> They were not yet aware of what was coming, being used to live over a decade and a half lacking new infrastructure due to scarcity of resources, and barely maintaining the old regime’s infrastructure conceived to withstand time and human usage but neither aesthetics nor minorities likings.
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These are happier times for the eastern countries of the past iron curtain, coming out of an occupant regime that guaranteed their survival, vagrancy, education and the calm of an assured future at the expense of their freedom and fat chance of consumption.
The lack of freedom to consume seems like the biggest sin of the extinct Soviet society. It should be considered a crime to think that if you need bread or milk, logical things to maintain basic needs, that you should conform with getting bread or milk instead of spending hours walking around a free modern supermarket looking for the bread or milk of the brand and characteristics that the media freely suggests to you to improve your health, wellbeing and way of life, creatively pairing the advise with subliminal references about the increase of your sex appeal, if you consume a certain bread. Apparently, modern technology makes bread and milk no longer bread or milk, turning them, as the rest of the basic products, into aphrodisiacs.
Another criminal act of the Communists is that ugly thing of standing in line to get what you need. Thanks again to freedom and technology you can buy whatever you want without waiting or queues, through the Internet, unless, of course, you do not have Internet or the money to get what you wish, in which case you won’t stand in line because it would be pointless: you have no right to stand in line, no one will give you anything like it happened when you stood in line in shortage times... in times of rationing, when lines where made so that everyone would get something.
The new generations of VIP Europeans stare anxiously at the opulence that television shows about the old partners of the European club. They are not the only ones, from Africa they can also see how in northern television money is given away by playing the fool in futile contests, effortlessly and without merit and they conclude that it is necessary to flee to that North or Europe of Reward, where money must fall from trees if it is given away so easily...
We, young men, are impatient and Easterns seem to long for the day when Brussels checks enable to earn a sufficient wage to allow them to buy a private house that will belong communally to the Bank with which they will get the customary mortgage, instead of the State as it would happen in the Iron Curtain´s Europe of their parents and grandparents.
Asking many young people of the least rich Europe, of that unknown Europe but more dynamic though stigmatized by the old Iron Curtain, part of which doesn’t even belong to the Union, <<Why would you like to live and belong to the European Union?>> I am surprised by answers such as: <<I would like not to worry about how to make it to the end of the month, if it wasn’t for that I would be comfortable with the place I live and with my life... in the rich Europe you don’t have to worry about making it to the end of the month... you earn enough money, right?>> I leave it to you, who are reading this, to answer this questions.