Translated by: Alfonso Amo Hurtado - alfon78[at]yahoo.es
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
At the entrance of the Delphic Oracle was inscribed <<Know yourself>>. Ancient Greeks, when they wanted to know something about themselves, went to a priestess to understand the truth from the Gods, who always talked in mysterious ways.
If you dare to know something about yourself, one option is to travel and meet new worlds and people who talk to you in mysterious ways, being able to get messages from the Gods that help to know oneself.
- Great! Why not give a try?
It is not easy to know oneself, most of the travels are not initiation rites anymore, but programmed ones. The only priestess you could find, thanks to that modern creation called tourism, is a professional guide who comments on the random anecdotes from places, locals and attractions that exists on your touristic destination, and tell nothing about yourself.
In the past, many Mediterranean locations where places of inspiration for romantics painters, as well as mythical rest places for rich landowners. Nowadays, the welfare economy unrests the tranquillity of these idyllic places with loads of postal consumers, turning from the travel as inspiration and personal discovery to a common decorational exchange.
We, the youth, thirsty for experiences, still have the opportunity to live adventures travelling. Our budget does not allow us for tourist guides and international hotels, having to work or ask for economic support from the family to get some money; taking advantage of some discounts and a lot of international youth hostels and venture into Interrail, low cost flights or international grants, bound to strange and unexpected odysseys that will make us come back home wiser, or settle down in unpredicted places.
Cheer up! The world is full of people like us, aliens in search of their home. Seafarers of the horizon trying to make new neighbour communities. Travellers without final destination, open-minded and beating-hearted, without forgetting that, though the sun rises every morning, tomorrow may be a different day.
<<I am looking for a place in this life or I go on paid holidays; party or chaos, discovery or isolation>>.
Many young people are able to go into an experience like EVS or the International Civil Service to live abroad to study, to improve a second language or to do an internship which will make easier to expand your views, or even stay longer to earn more than in your home country; or make a new life with a partner born from the experience abroad... You can always think about another grant or destiny, in case of boredom or frustration, thanks to the opportunities of the European utopia, and the certainty of being able to come back home and to your old life whenever you like...
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We are still under the innocent opinion that the need of knowing other countries can be only justified by a professional interest that one can apply in a near future, as good persons who had to be useful and live to work.
Once the seed of the opportunity to move throughout Europe has been planted, the official institutions are making efforts to increase the citizen´s competences to be efficient in the recent society of knowledge. Going out from your usual environment and being able to adapt oneself to new surroundings and learn from them is considered something relevant, which has to be recognized professionally: intercultural skills, communication skills, learning to learn… Competences necessary to fulfil, together with the specific ones, the requirements for a job, and to be productive and competitive in the new millennium’s society.
Nowadays, most of us do not work in the primary sector, but in the service sector, where needs are generated. Technological development will allow that a minority of the working force supports the world’s production.
The labour market, after all the effort and struggles for the right of workers, discovers the paradox of demanding people with no bonds, able to change residence or country to accomplish the needs of the company, with no social or familiar burdens which may stand in the way of high qualified workers, qualified to increase the benefits of shareholders and executives. This would lead to some young people, qualified and members of the international net of unemployed, fond of movement and adaptable to circumstances, being raffled on the labour market.
As a traditional life cannot be enjoyed, because it is too old for the needs of the postmodern service sector, at least an economic relief would be expected for our dedication to the company. To escape from the vicious circle of making a living out of grants and internships, that is so advantageous for employers, without social benefits, where paradise is an insufficient salary, that allows you to get into debt up to ridiculous levels, beyond your own grave, to live for things that you buy and consume.
Is this the idea of competition that is pursued in the future European citizens? Wouldn’t it be the managers the ones who have to recycle themselves and adopt the competences that they demand on their employees? Why the young people who represent what is needed at a working level in the global society are not employed, but marginalized in their national realities? This is a small example of the differences in the economic globalization, which is announced as evident, equalitarian and inevitable for everyone.
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The list of personal intentions, admitted or not, that are the reasons why we decide to do extraordinary things, is immense.
In my particular situation, I was sure that my experience in Hungary would be in a personal level, without suspecting how personal it was in the end. I was not looking for a clue or a magic solution for my future, except when I took the initial decision when my pragmatic education made me think, as I said, in projects useful for me and my illusion about being successful in a future, thanks to my experienced curriculum, as others are thanks to their masters.
Years later, my future is uncertain, as everyone’s, but encouraging and, what is more important, making my imagination flies without fear to lose. That is a fault that we make too often, spending time, energy and self-esteem on the easy road. But now I am rejecting a cheap self-esteem, a written and boring future to turn it into a real one according to my capacity, my dreams and steps through the walk of life.
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It is hard to be aware of what your subconscious knows perfectly well. Reason does not appear just because, nor required by a superior power or moral: it only appears when it is exercised, like a muscle. Conscience is something young and inexperienced that must be exercised, real far from the life wisdom that the old unconscious hides and from what reason tries to know by making discoveries.
I remember a revealing anecdote, that situations where you realize the deep reasons behind some actions without being conscious about that. I was in a concert, invited by a good friend of volunteers and a great support: Bálazs, one of the important persons that deeply marked me in this adventure, and returned me the faith in human beings. We met some friend of him and started talking about some problems of communication and life together that appeared in the beginning of my stay within other volunteers, where he tried to mediate and play it down. Suddenly, without knowing why, like a revelation from some oracle that took him as a medium after some beers, he told me something totally unrelated to what we were talking about, which I took as certain in my unconscious but that never appeared so explicit in the conscious world: <<You came here to have another vision of life>>.
<<My ERASMUS year doesn´t reduce to my life with my flatmates at all, by mixing with other ERASMUS experiences I discovered myself and many things about my own culture and country. I found out that I’m not a typical Spaniard in little things like; I don’t tend to stick together with my country-fellow students, I don’t shout, I can actually speak a bit of english, etc. I also found out that quality of life in Spain is years ahead of the one in England.>>
Francisco Hidalgo [Published on 2008 at http://www.20erasmus.eu/experiences/view/633]
Twenty years ago, many pilot projects were carried out in Europe to know how that needed social Europe, that dreamed European citizenship, became real in the next generations. One of these projects was the international students exchange programmes, following the model of wealthier countries as France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Having to overcome the initial opposition of these rich countries, and with the work and support from some utopian politicians and Europeans students associations (as the AEGEE), an European programme for students mobility was created, the well-known ERASMUS programme, and nobody could imagine then the results that nowadays can be seen: an ERASMUS generation leading a Europe of European citizens, beyond their personal and regional identity.
There are references in other fields. I think it is not excessive to think that in the past, a whole generation of present day European politicians was educated as young boy scouts, being responsible for the creation of European programmes as YOUTH and “Youth in Action”, with an interest in civic and non formal education, as precursor of democratic citizens.
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Africa, considered by many a tribal continent where civilized Europeans went to give lessons on politics and society in exchange for the small incentive of their raw materials, wasted because of the lack of technology. Technology created by our curiosity and insatiable wanting for conquest and growth.
Europe, where those wanting for exploration and conquest transformed the ideas of a minor region of the planet in global thinking; a tribal continent where artificial borders remained strong, due to the repeated impossibility of dialogue between different concepts of life and race among its countries.
Temptations of segregate and isolate in a small terrain have collided during the History of Humanity, with the wants or needs of expand and become bigger. Countries had no problems in unite to form politic or economic federations when it was necessary or advantageous. The origins of the European Union mixed the political need for Peace, the economic need for reconstruction after the War, and the hopes of redefining cultural concepts that were obsolete in front of the new ideas and new generations who demanded changes.
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The resistance from Europe to get rid of its ideological feudalism still affects the new Europeans, as the rich ERASMUS students, so different from the emigrants who maintain our economic cycles with their cheap work force.
Erasmites are the present day and future citizens, better trained cultural and socially, with access to superior studies and able to travel and live abroad. They are a mobile, dynamic, open and multilingual generation.
Beyond the expectations, studies on their attitudes during the ERASMUS experience usually point to an initial preference for the company of their compatriots, with the same cultural background, something predictable because of the mutual support and exchange of opinions about the new experience. Then, they tend to socialize with other ERASMUS, what makes easy the European, multicultural experience specific of this programme. Surprisingly, the lasts to make bonds usually are the native students from the country where the studies are taking place.
Mobility programmes try to make Europeans know each other. We follow the ghetto mentality without being aware of that: foreigners preferring to know other foreigners instead of natives from the country they are visiting. Not only erasmites are to blame: also the lack of interest from natives towards foreign students. We all are eager to know people from other cultures when we are abroad, in particular encounters or experiences. But we don’t show the same interest in those foreigners of our everyday life, who walk with in the streets of our globalized society of persons where less of us live where we were born or grow. This kind of socialization makes possible what seemed crazy: a European citizenship, that few could define or feel as a private identity, is being created spontaneously. More and more young people can identify themselves first as European, then as citizens of the country where they were born. And what is more surprising, feeling that way, they are more pessimist about a better understanding and real union between European cultures.
The “European Dream” fails if an effort is not made, not in having the curiosity about other cultures, something natural in man, but in being conscious that the only way to build basic rights of respect is through dialogue and listening other's reasons, respecting other ways of life.
European diversity, one of the signs of identity that the Union stands with his motto “United in diversity”, should allow us, after pulling down the inner and outer borders, to be what we always dreamt to be.
To avoid a situation of total war about particular interests, dialogue is required between flexible positions to live creatively and comfortably in an intercommunicated, multicultural, hipercomplex world. Experimentation instead of magic illumination is necessary for a new concept of life, required in these days when communication between individuals, neighbours and cultures is more and more difficult.
How is possible hope in a future of sons of erasmites who may erase present psychological and social barriers, as their grandparents did with politic barriers? The union of people instead of nations or regions? Maybe the answer is in that theory about the marriageable age of the ERASMUS students. Love, the need of being with someone who fills the empty spaces that one cannot fill alone. The need of new horizons instead of all the thoughts, words and good intentions.
We live in a sea of cultures that offers the opportunity to choose the one that we identify more with.
Many will stay motionless in their traditional and national parameters, apart from the social demanding of where they are living, coiling instead of opening to other possibilities.
The lack of flexibility, the logics of black or white that is characteristic of the western world, makes the dissatisfied to change tradition or religion: Protestants holding Catholicism, Catholics into Islamism, or Central Europeans, finished the soviet atheism, tempted by the religious market and sects from this and other continents, eager of new worshipers. We adopt the inconstancy of fashion or recover the most popular and nostalgic of the past customs.
Some dare to make new life styles, and would be isolated and excluded in the search of more power and respect for one cultural, political or social concept over another.
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There are two important stateless and ethnic minorities in old Europe whose members have in common to consider themselves as brothers, apart from where they come from, and being scorned as different. One of them is the youth. Young people always tried to cross borders and improve their lives in other places. The older generations built borders and established expensive and exasperating visas. They look at their descendants with distrust and disdain, and block the mobility and longing for movement peculiar of these ages, except when travelling as tourists with wealthy parents. The other is gypsies, infamous for their attributed negative characteristics, who are not pardoned for their nomadism and isolation, sometimes obliged, sometimes voluntary. They are the two unresolved matters of the European migrations.
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In my country, gypsies are looked at with distrust and lack of consideration. Many make a living out the street markets where middle class people go looking for bargains. As good merchants, they are characterized by their loquacity, and if they show signs of ostentation, people tend to think that they make fortune in an unlawful way. This is a concept that can be applied to riches in general, but is considered more evident in gypsies for the fact of being gypsies. As the statement says: <<The jug goes to the water so many until it finally breaks>>. Considering them as thieves and criminal for centuries, it is no surprise that some of them decide to adopt that role.
Before the massive immigration in my country, for the sake of democratic integration, gipsies were the most benefited from social aids, and thousands of free housings were built for them in specific areas of the cities which they were not looked after nor well maintained, according to social customs. That appearances made them the target of the anger from the middle classes that couldn’t understand why they were put at the end of the lists of social aids when they were paying their taxes and bills religiously, and that careless minority obtained them more easily.
There is a famous anecdote about them having mules standing at ease in the stairs of their free buildings, being this an example for the rest of the citizens of their savagery and making them not worthy of the economic efforts for their integration. A social anthropologist, experts that rarely are consulted to solve cultural problems when they are the most capable to shed some light over the matter, may argue that once obliged to leave their shacks to be accommodated in new houses, they must find a place for an animal that was the most important instrument for their living, and not simply a pet.
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In Hungary, the bad reputation of the gypsies was not an exception, although their music was an important value in Hungarian folklore, as flamenco music developed in Spain thanks to the musical abilities of the gypsies. The image of antisocial criminals was even stronger there, after the soviet party denied their social peculiarity, banned their nomadism and segregated them, as they did with other minorities, and as always happened in every country they tried to settle. I never heard a positive comment, it was always the same negative stereotypes as in my country, that appearances seem to approve.
The surprise, and my first contact with them, will appear in my first training course for European volunteers in Hungary. The organization decided that we were going to be accommodated, during the activity, by a gypsy family´s house, a summer residence they could afford thanks to the good incomes they got from commerce, where several generations were present. What a surprise! We could enjoy a cultural immersion into their traditions. But, even though we were young, open-minded Europeans in a very specific project as volunteering, we looked with distrust the two worlds that coexisted culturally that week.
The curiosity to try their culinary specialities, even learn to make some of their desserts; to learn the process of making the adobe bricks that their houses were made of; or to make firewood, among other ludic activities that we made, did not made us forget the fact that sometimes we felt uncomfortable in front of the looks the men of the house when we were with the women, because the men only appeared when the work to do was masculine, as cutting wood.
Another surprise was listening again my mother tongue, thank to the meeting with some volunteers from my country that I was lucky to meet there. Also one of the women of the house, cheerful and suggestive, more or less the same age of us, turned out to speak really well my language. Surprises of the adventures of life! She had some friends from Valencia that she visited often, and thanks to them and to flamenco music, she got interested in the language, and learnt to speak it with an astonishing fluency.
She was married to another gypsy, and lived together in the same house with her mother and her mother-in-law, who doesn't get well with. She longed for the freedom and autonomy of her age and times, so she discussed it frequently with the mammas while she told you privately and in Spanish, how fed up she was of having to be obedient to them. She talked to me about her dream of living in Spain, with that brightness in her eyes and that romanticism in her words that is common to all young people in need of breaking the chains of tradition to walk new roads.
They were gypsies different from the stereotype: they were not poor, they even had email addresses. It must be emphasized that was poverty and the resistance to be assimilated by the modern states, eager for eliminate differences and centralize power, what made them rejected and persecuted, as happened with Jews, keeping in mind the evident differences. Peculiarity is always dangerous for the power, and will try to exterminate or assimilate it. It is not unusual that sometimes people talk about "clash of civilizations", because there is no culture or custom that will accede to change or dialogue for a real coexistence, after centuries of rejection or treasons.
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All equal, all different. The exotic is attractive, even sexy, when adopted for a limited period of time, or for a specific circumstance. The real thing is different when you have to live with the exotic. Then it transforms into difference, and there is no longer pleasant or attractive. It turns into a threat if it makes you change all your conduct and behaviour patterns that you lived with; if it shows you the negative in what you believed was good about yourself.
The negative of the exotic is not in the difference: it is in being no longer good or valid many things that we considered that way, and is in that moment when, to avoid disappointment, the ghetto makes rise and the cultural conflict appears, following the maxim <<seeing the straw in your brother's eye, and not the rafter in your own>>.
- Be realistic, ask for the impossible, ask for the Moon.
In my utopia, I thought that mixing with different people from different cultures during my European experience would be a great opportunity of living in the cosmopolitan house that I so enjoyed when I started to travel, as well as a valuable aid in the process of adaptation to the new world that was waiting for me.
- Even the Moon has a dark side.
I feel that we continue to commit the sins of modernity, the sins of the thought that gave the history of people a divine and essential meaning, regarding culture as a tattoo that is magically printed when one is born in a particular place or another. A tattoo which transform our human needs in cultural needs, as if the important thing were to speak one language or another instead of talking with persons about our worries, and get angry when we are not understood; to get used to eat certain kind of food instead of eat whatever we find when we are hungry, when there is nothing culturally more elaborated; to think that the responsible of the way you work is a past political system, as some volunteers that I knew thought, instead of blaming the carelessness of the way you treat the ones you think should work according to how you do it or how you wish them to do it.
All equal, all different. Cultural conflicts are mere excuses to wash our hands and blame the messenger for all our non satisfied needs.
The utopic situation that globalization and multiculturalism might lead us if we insist in transform these two words and unite them in the new term of worldalization (citizens of the united world), would be interculturality. Culture would be made up by dialogue between different views of life, paving the way for a unique and integrating Human Culture, and not just simply peaceful or interested coexistence.
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The different ways of understanding life and reality, both culturally and personally in present day societies, is not restricted to the historical-geographical field that is randomly determined by the place where someone was born and grown, but extended to the dialogue between the personal cultural tradition and the other traditions that offer their own perspectives about the needs of the new generations that are not satisfied by their own culture. In the past, the young people must create or recover those traditional or avant-garde ideas to satisfy their need as citizens of a different world than that of their ancestors.
Nowadays we should look at the phenomenon of the global knowledge of different cultures as an opportunity instead of an inconvenience, which perpetuates the competition between political and religious ideas.
It is not choosing between the catalogues of existent cultures that the global village offers; nor changing the shirt for other of a different colour. Maybe it is about sharing shirts, about designing and sewing our own shirt, or in a shared project, first with the designers’ guild that you belong to as a member of the new sect-society that resulted from the class-society.
Utopia is possible, as it is happening in cooperative and altruistic projects like open-source software or cultural projects like Wikipedia. Maybe we should bring back tailors and forget about the standarizational and fanciful prét-a-porter.
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Talking about identity crisis, about not knowing which cultural patterns to follow, where are you coming from, find your place… I had the opportunity to know two models of cultural identity crisis, paradigmatic, in two volunteers from my city.
One of them embarked on the EVS in Hungary with the excuse of learning the language and culture of their ancestors that had to emigrate to those Nordic countries, massive welcome areas after World War II. The other one, a volunteer from East Germany (I emphasize East, because I believe in the influence of certain political or cultural systems over the way people confront new realities, and according to my particular experience, it is very different the way that young people from east and west Germany face new realities and challenges) based her decision in this magic feeling, maybe romantic, or postmodern, that I felt identified with, which states that a land visited in the childhood, or even unknown, that you knew about through books, calls you with siren songs.
The first volunteer maybe chose to be in that cultural conflict, sometimes as an excuse for personal conflicts, to develop her perspectives of future, probably studying or living later in another country. The second one, with an extraordinary motivation, coming from the run down area of the powerful Germany, instead of living as her unconcerned and nihilist fellows from federal Germany, consuming and thinking about Germanizing any place where they stayed, she looked for different handles in this volunteering experience to fulfil her dream of living and belonging to another run down culture that, without promises of a better economic future, offered the hope for a better personal life.
What was surprising about them, unlike the rest of the volunteers that I lived with, was the friendship that they approached those cultures with, cultures that they already knew or longed for, cultures in which they were eager to deal with in depth. That disposition allowed them to avoid or reconstruct all the negative things that other volunteers from the Welfare State were telling, to whom my new environment was a terrible and vague place, trying to throw pessimism and frustration to the newcomers.