This past autumn I was in Italy, waiting for the results of my exams and for the beginning of the courses. It was a feeling I’d had for a long time, but it had always remained latent, behind a mountain of other worthless commitments. Suddenly, I felt with an extreme urgency the need to leave, to discover something new in the world, to meet different people. I had the desire to put some obstacles in front of me and to test my strengths and my limits as well. I don’t know how to better describe this feeling and this need, but I think it’s basically something about knowing ourselves better.

Thanks to the possibility to spend some months abroad with the Erasmus+ Programme, I started searching for any kind of organization that could need an intern. I was ready to accept everything that could have helped me to leave from my comfort zone; I didn’t mind if it was repetitive work in a company’s office or if it was hard physical work in the fields. It was exactly when I was lost in this stressed research that I found SCI or, more probably, that SCI came towards me.

I took my plane on a foggy morning at the end of February and immediately, I clashed with the first difficulties: I didn’t know French and (ehm…) not even Dutch, and my scholastic English wasn’t sufficient to express myself well. How could I communicate my feelings and fears? How could I do a good job and build strong relations? I started thinking that I had been too optimistic about my strengths, I realized that I wasn’t absolutely ready. Well, while traveling in a foreign country, I was also traveling inside myself. But I would only realise this a few months later…

I had the pleasure of being welcomed by the SCI Belgium team in Brussels. It’s the French speaking branch and they’re a group of smiling people with plenty of energy. They are that kind of people who are ready to say that it’s their fault for a glass that you broke, if you know what I mean. Only a week later, I was also welcomed also by the only permanent staff member of the VIA Belgium office, the Flemish branch, in Antwerp. An incredibly strong girl, soon re-named “the viking”. My train trips between Brussels and Antwerp were like passages to parallel worlds: I had to deal with two offices, working teams, languages, cultures. It was amazing, but it was also frustrating. I wasn’t really part of anyone of these realities: I was stranger twice.

But had the chance to find an environment where sharing reciprocal worries is like a duty, and I couldn’t have found a better way to start feeling at home. We soon exchanged our experiences and not-experiences, that’s to say regrets and fears. In my case, they were fears about not being sufficiently active or helpful, about showing that I had to start from point zero.

But this is exactly the point: you can think you’re traveling alone, and maybe you had effectively planned your trip alone and you are only with yourself for most of the time. But, in reality, everyone is looking for something, everyone is doing their personal trip. And in this personal research you can cross each others’ ways; for some months, some hours, maybe only just a few seconds. But it will be sufficient to understand that you’re maybe not strong enough alone, but that you have the possibility to build something even higher with a lot of other people. Call it a shared dream or a family, it’s part of you as you’re part of it.

They told me it would be an office job; I participated in music festivals and campaigns in lost Flemish fields. I expected to find employees behind mountains of documents; I met people full of dreams and fears behind mountains of cookies and avocados. They told me I would work in English; now I can say something of a certain sense in French and I’m used to listening to Spotify advertisements in Dutch.

Three months are barely sufficient to feel at ease abroad, but they’re enough to grow fond of a lot of people: volunteers, workers, activists (borders are rarely clear). They’re sufficient to leave a little piece of heart behind you, and to let seeds be planted in you. I’ll bring them wherever I will go, and I promise that I will let them grow and that I will share their fruits. Because this is how it works when you get in touch with the SCI world: you can think you’re leaving it, but in reality you are an ambassador.

Thank you. For your time and your energy; for your patience and your comprehension; for your warmth and your openness.

See you soon…