“Why have I done this?” This is the question that comes to my mind every day at 7:34 AM, the time when I leave for my lectures after having about five hours of sleep. The reason is not that I do not like the subject of my studies. It is because I am an Erasmus student.

Pentes de la Croix Rousse

30 years ago, the Erasmus programme was created. Since then, each year thousands of students have had the experience of their lifetime. However, after 30 years of a very successful programme it is high time to consider the difficulties that many students face when going to an Erasmus exchange as a result of its distribution.

As students, we have this idyllic idea of how Erasmus is. Everyone that you know has an incredible experience, few people answer negatively to the question “would you do it again?”. I have now arrived to the conclusion that this is probably because 1) most working class people still do not make it to university and 2) those who do probably never think of doing an Erasmus. I was in this last group until just about my very last year of university.

My mother works as a cleaner, my father is a handicapped, undocumented immigrant and my brother is, like many others, a 30-year-old unemployed Spaniard. As the first person in my family to go to university, I never thought that I would end up doing my last year as an Erasmus, but I convinced myself that I would be able to make it work.

In previous years, I had always denied myself even the thought of doing an Erasmus year. Sometimes, my brother would come and ask me: “Why don’t you do an Erasmus?”. My answer was constantly the same: “What if the grant does not arrive on time? I cannot do that to this family”. At that point, he always conceded.

Hotel de Ville de Lyon

Our little family, whose only income is the ridiculously small salary of my mother and part of my grandmother’s pension, cannot afford to send me the necessary money for my living expenses every month. As an Erasmus student you have a grant (€300 for countries such as France plus €100 on top for people with lower incomes in the case of Spain). Even the most frugal student could never live on €400 per month in a country like France.

The idea behind the grant is that the European Union finances the difference between the cost of living your in home country and in your host country. However, this ignores the reality of many students like me, who struggle to finance our studies in our home countries even if we live in the parental home. Working and studying at the same time, we still have to live with our families until we finish our studies and, in some cases, even after we have graduated.

For me, doing an Erasmus means waking up ridiculously early for having the classes that allow me to go to work in the afternoon, arrive in the evenings to my home, make dinner, eat, do all the work required for university and the NGOs that I am involved with and then going to sleep very late to prepare myself for another quite unwelcome day.

I do not have time to socialise, to go partying, to make new friends, to create memories that I am never going to forget, and not even to learn the language properly. And even if I had the time, I would never have the money to do so.

Mur des Canuts, Lyon

This is tremendously unfair.

I wish that I could go for a beer with my mates every day, that I could arrive home before 7:00 PM, that I could have a reasonable sleep, that I could make friends that will last forever. I wish that, in the years to come, I would be able to say with love “Once Erasmus, Always Erasmus”. But I fear that this is never going to happen.

It is time to rethink Erasmus grants. It is not fair that the difference of money received between someone like me and a person with a wealthy family to support them is only €100. It is high time to ensure that every student can sincerely say “Once Erasmus, Always Erasmus”.

Written by Zahia Guidoum Castiblanque, AEGEE-València

Baby birds depend on their mother in order to survive, they receive all the care and food from their loved one. But as they grow older, gain power in bones and voice, as their puff become feathers, they have to go in search of their own life, by learning to provide for themselves.

Everyone is scared when leaving the nest.  In high-school, we all said “I can’t wait to get to  college and be rid of my parent’s nagging”, thinking we own the world and everything would  work nice and swell. But then, we find ourselves in the middle of the world.

I remember  when I left for the first time, from a small and quite town from Romania, Motru, and moved  to study at the university in the big city of Bucharest.

I got one hour late for the interview at  one of the universities, as I got a little bit lost with the metro and bus. I wasn’t used to  getting in one hour to a place, when in my hometown I got in 10 minutes to high-school. I  felt small and scared at the view of the city eating me up. But, as I got to know it better, it  stopped scaring me and started to amaze me. In less than a year, I stopped being the small  person in the great city and started becoming a great person in a great city.

When living abroad, the rules are slightly different, as you have the language barrier, or so they say. I wouldn’t consider it a barrier, but more of a challenge. You get out of your comfort zone and start using your skills. No book can teach you Spanish better than living in Spain for a couple of months. In my twenty-four years of life, I have visited ten countries, twenty-four cities and lived in three of them: Tbilisi (Georgia) Karpathos (Greece) and Palma de Mallorca (Spain), my current home.

I’ve learnt so much in these journeys, about people, cultures, about falling and getting up again, about crying and smiling. At the end of each experience, good or bad, you gain something, after all: no risk, no gain. My first trip abroad was in Georgia, Tbilisi, a country I knew nothing about and I fell in love with the city, the traditional food and the warm people. Georgians have the best cheese pie (chapuli) I’ve ever tasted. A Georgian friend, whom I care deeply about, recommended it to me.

It is very important to make local friends when moving to a new country. So, you will have the best tourism guides for the cultural experience you are embarking on. The feeling of fear and smallness, which I spoke about earlier, does not go away in time. Whenever you enter into the unknown, you will feel a little bit scared, but it will go away in time, as you get to explore the  wonders of the city.

Fear of the unknown is in every person, what’s different is the quantity  of it. Nobody wants to make a fool of themselves, to go to a country where they do not know the  language and to be unable to understand or to be understood. Inter-cultural differences should not be a problem in our educational evolution, but they should be perceived as a  mutual gain. There is a beauty underneath the unknown, in every form it presents itself; bad  moments become experience to learn from, so, in the future, you will become better and wiser.

The world is full of stereotypes – everywhere in the world exists a person like you, or like your best friend, or like your worst enemy. “You sound familiar” and “you remind me of someone” were the two phrases that always crossed my mind while meeting someone new. Good or bad, safe or dangerous, new or old are concepts encountered in every city, all over the world. The idea of safety when thinking of your hometown is provided by the notion of family and is a feeling that will last for a lifetime, the safeness of the nest.

Another thing that can help you while living abroad is this interesting site I recently discovered www.internations.org which is “connecting global minds”. The purpose of the site is to give you moral support if you live abroad, by providing you information about the cities and countries, having a great variety of groups of interest such as: culture and entertainment, dining & nightlife, sports & leisure, business & networking and others. There are many groups of people who moved in the same city or country as you have and are ready to help you assimilate the change better.

Written by Gabriela Cioată, AEGEE-București