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When you begin your EVS, you’re so excited and full of expectation, that you imagine that every single moment will be happy and amazing. But while you work as an International volunteer, things will keep happening, both in your work and in your personal life. Also negative ones, of course.
Thus, in some periods you just need to take a break from your life.
I lived one of such moments in the beginning of March, due to a drastic and painful change I had to do in my personal life. Everything seemed really hard back then, and it was difficult to find the energy to actually focus on my work.
But, luckily, free days are there for a reason.
Gata!
I left for a travel of two weeks with one of my friends and housemate, a tour of the Balkans that from Bulgaria led us to Macedonia, Hungary and Serbia.
We had a lot of fun, of course, but I also had the chance to know things about culture and politics that I ignored before this trip, and they were not always positive ones.
We arrived in Skopje, Macedonia, around eight in the evening, after two days spent travelling and visiting Sofia.
At the bus station, we were welcomed by our host, a Macedonian boy found on the Couchsurfing app.
He was extremely nice with us and offered to show us the city, together with his cousin. We happily accepted, surprised by such kindness.
The weather was nice and the we were eager to explore the city. Our hosts stopped to every interesting point or monument and explained us its meaning and history. Eventually, we arrived in front of the Parliament, in front of which we saw some people with big cardboards filled with writings we were not able to decipher (of course).
But our hosts promptly explained us the cause of the protest.
In those days, the Parliament was voting a law which aimed to introduce Albanian as second official language in the Country.
Then, they added something that was really too much.
‘Albanians are shit’.
In the moment I heard those words, the blood freeze in my veins.
Because I spent seven years of my life with an Albanian boyfriend, and his culture became part of mine.
I was so upset that I just wanted to come back home, straight away, and it was impossible for me to fully enjoy the rest of the evening.
I kept thinking to those words, and the extreme hatred behind them.
I can’t say that I know so well the situation in the Country, but it was quite traumatic to experience this kind of racial hate, even from my position of ‘outsider’.
Among other things, they referred to the Albanian community as a group of parasites came to eventually occupy the whole Country, colonizing it in sneaky ways.
And, if I can understand the resentment one can have perceiving that something can put your identity in danger, and the rage coming from a problematic social issue, it’s objectively unbearable to refer to someone as ‘subhuman’ or ‘mutant’.
Because these terms were actually used.
And the words has a meaning and a power, they’re not just words.
They express the intolerance towards a minority that is, actually, not so small in the Country, and that deserves to see its rights granted.
I know very well these dynamics, because in Italy is quite the same, with political parties of the right wing) accusing the immigrants, above all from the African and Muslim communities (but also from Eastern Europe) to be parasite who receive all the benefits from the State, who steal the work from Italians and who endangers the national identity, its culture and traditions.
I also saw the same here in Romania, towards the Rom community, and the Hungarian community in Transylvania, reflected in the crooked, sad and almost sarcastic smile of the owner of our hostel in Budapest, who told us about it while we were doing the check-in.
And it’s in Budapest that I had the most sour of the thoughts, while strolling on the bank of the Danube river, in front of the most beautiful Parliament of the world.
Because there, if you walk slowly, you can see something bizarre.
A long row of bronze shoes, of every shape and size, scattered along the river.
It is a monument dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.
It was realized by the director Can Togay and the sculptor Gyula Pauer in 2005, and it refers to one grim episode of the Soah, happened in the capital of Hungary, when members of the Jewish community were taken from the ghetto, brought on the Danube bank and killed on the spot.
Looking at it, a question raised in my brain.
Who were those Jewish people ?
Members of a community.
What was that community ?
A minority group more or less integrated in the society of the Country.
Like the Albanian community in Macedonia.
Like the Hungarians in Transylvania.
Many people will say that is different, that I can’t compare the two situations.
To those people, I can just answer that I can’t see the difference.
At all.
Because the Shoah didn’t begin with the gas chambers, nor with the lagers.
It began when people started to consider other people like subhumans.
When people started to refer to other people as ‘shit’.
It began in the hearts and in the minds of people, not in the rooms and corridors of the Parliament.
And this is awful.
Because it’s real, it’s near, and it seems impossible to stop.
But in this darkness I saw a spark of hope.
I see it every day, from the beginning of my EVS.
Is in the eyes of my colleagues and friends, in the people who believe in this big, varied and tolerant community called Europe.
Because all the Macedonian people that, like me, were volunteers in Craiova, showed a great tolerance and respect when I told them this story.
They strongly disagreed with our host, showing sensitivity, comprehension and the awareness of being part of something bigger, of Europe and of the World.
I came back home, realizing that this EVS experience I’m living is much more than the work I’m doing, is something more important, it has a higher meaning that goes beyond the mere learning of new skills.
We’re learning of being not only citizen of Europe, but aware people.
Aware of our differences and similarities, our rights of human beings.
Aware that tolerance is the only key for a bright future together.
Aware that understanding and acceptance are the only weapons we have against ignorance and hate.
Aware of an history that was indeed very dark.
And that we don’t want to live again.
