Hello everybody,
This is an open letter of sorts. Because I felt the need to explore and explode my thoughts.
I am currently a EVS volunteer in Hungary. I had the occasion to engage a three week trip that gave me a lot of time to think about that.
The first part of the trip was the mid term training, an occasion made to start reflecting with other volunteers about the EVS experience: what are we doing, how good it is, how to get the most out of it. Confronting my experience with the others, I started to look back on the seven months I spent so far, and I realised, it was a bad time.
Sad to say, I worked for an organization that was more bent on the money it was getting from the European Union than on any kind of quality of neither the volunteers’ permanence or the contribution of the organization to the society. Many times, trying to speak about those issues, I heard the phrase: “we don’t really care about you” or “if you don’t like how this works, leave”.
And I’ve been much luckier than other Hungarian EVS volunteers. A couple of them also reported having no actual work to do, but being in the organization building for the given amount of weekly hours. In fact, unemployed workforce.
Fact is, most hosting organizations are enrolled in EVS because it’s just a way to receive fundings from somewhere, keeping the organization (and ultimately, people’s jobs) alive. So one may understand why they might be concerned in using the workforce of new volunteers to do better, but it seldom is one of their top priorities.
In short: Hungary is poor.
Most of these associations’ goals are to deal with “people with fewer opportunities”, so, literally, poor people. And I don’t need data to understand that there is a lot of them in the country. You can just look outside the window, and see how every afternoon there is a different person rummaging in waste bins.
Or better yet, just take a train, one slow enough to pass nearby the smallest towns of the country. The ones in which multi-nationals industries did not step foot yet, making it the “purest part of Hungary” you might see. From the train window you could see really quiet places. You might think “peaceful”. Until you see that some houses are surrounded by barbed wire.
That is a powerful image that fits with the rest of my impressions about this country.
Yes, after seven months, i got only “impressions”. For many reasons i can enumerate quickly: language, time, skills.In fact, if you cannot speak Hungarian, don’t expect the average person to know English or any other language. Lots of ticket office dramas started at the train station with that. That means, in more immediate terms, that if you want to connect with the local society, you have to learn Hungarian, which requires time, a lot of time, and possibly a teacher. Like the one that was supposed to be provided by the hosting organisation, but wasn’t given because, guess it, they did not want to spend money on it.
And so, in most cases, you’ll be out of actual Hungarian social tissue. Out of the news livewire. All you can get for understanding the place, is looking at it, hearing stories about it. Sometimes the country lands in international news, and it’s never flattering; the government is under the rigid authority of a political party who is reportedly modifying the Constitution and the law for its own benefit, strong of a wide (although artificial) consensus. Words are the government is Anti-european, nationalist and xenophobic, controlling arts, culture, instruction and industry with some kind of an iron fist.
The more you learn about this attitude, the more you see it hidden in some Hungarians. They are no different from the country house surrounded in barbed wire; most of them are hard to open, their emotion stays hidden behind their worries: to become as poor as the people around them is their biggest fear. It paralyzes them. So in the end they do not care about what happens from the government, from the city, from the people around them. Which gives free hands to people who are trying to drive the nation to be completely surrounded by barbed wire.
I don’t mean to condemn the whole country or scare you out of it – quite the opposite. By serving EVS, you can find people who had the luck to travel outside of the borders, see other cultures, get an open mind through their educational life. And there are lots of EVS projects run by organizations that are actually making a difference, doing something good, and trying to improve the place they live in. I just wanted to point out the risk to you: some rare times, you’ll face a wall like I did. But do not forget for a second that the only presence of volunteers, of people from abroad, is a chance for more people to know that there is something else out there, a place called Europe, where all different populations belong and can be reminded we all deserve equality.
EVS is promoting an open world, and Hungary, in these times, needs it the most.
So I tell you: come and see the ugliness of this country. But see the beauty of it, too, and take part in saving it.
Hugs,
Daniele Latella
L'isola del rock n' roll 