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Dive into the NGO world & the life of an expat: Lucile This week’s testimony is from Lucile, a French student currently doing an internship in a Mexican NGO. It’s her second time in Mexico, where she went for a year when she was 16. So far, this is perhaps the best example of what our blog series aims at: talking the truth about living abroad and working in an NGO. In-deed, although she loved and is still loving Mexico, Lucile lived in Northern Ireland and didn’t enjoy her time there so much. She also shares her views on Mexico, including the harsh class differences and the many topics you can’t talk about. But no more teasing, here’s the interview, hope you enjoy it!     Why did you want to do an internship in the NGO sector? I wanted to experience something different from everything I was already used to. I’m working with an NGO for community development projects, and I wanted to discover how to help and mostly to exchange with people who live, think and speak differently. I think they have a lot to teach us. I also wanted to know how it is possible to concretely help people. There is a lot of unfairness in this world that sounds impossible to solve, and there are only empty speeches to give us hope. So I wanted to know how I could concretely act, even at a small scale. I wanted to have another perspective, and my point of view is already evolving, even though I haven’t started working with the community yet. How do you like it so far? Impressions? Any downsides? At the moment, we’re still getting prepared to intervene in the community – we are preparing a literacy campaign along with other projects on the side.  For example, I decided to work on a course of oral and body expression so I haven’t really achieved anything “concrete” yet but I’m learning a lot and I love that. We learn a lot about communities, indigenes, human rights, philosophy, pedagogy, education, and contrasts in Mexico as well as in Latin America and the world. I learn a lot at the NGO and also in my everyday life in the city. I’m learning how to organize many things such as events for fundraisings, meetings, conferences and so on. I like having those responsibilities. There is one downside – well I don’t really know if it’s a drawback per se – : it is so captivating that I spend a lot more time, outside of work, reading and searching about those topics. I love what I do but, yes, it takes most of my spare time and I’m not doing as many things for myself as I would. But when people count on you, you can’t afford a second chance, you can’t be wrong. Do you want to work in an NGO in the future or do you have other projects? I’d like to work in intercultural relations. Because culture is what builds our individual and collective identity and this is what everything is about. So, at the moment, I’m working here because I wanted to see something else and working with NGOs was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I don’t really know if I’d like to keep working in NGOs later. I don’t know if I am strong enough, but I’ll see. I think I’ll try to conciliate both. I’d like to make culture accessible to everyone, maybe. It’s really vague still. In which countries have you lived? For how long? I was born in France. I have already lived one year in Mexico for a cultural exchange (with Rotary International). Then I lived 5 months in Northern Ireland for an Erasmus exchange and now I’m back in Mexico for a few months. What did you struggle with the most when you moved abroad? Did you ever have issues because of the difference of culture? When I moved to Mexico, I was 16. It was the first time I went out of my comfort zone and I left everyone and everything I had known and was used to. It was a great, great, great experience that I’ll never regret, and surprisingly I didn’t struggle at all with the culture shock. I didn’t speak Spanish at all but I didn’t have a choice so I learnt in about 3 weeks. Language was not a problem. I had some homesick moments at the beginning of course, before understanding that time flies and I had to enjoy it. What I struggled the most with; however, was the conservative side of a lot of Mexican people. I had to give up for one year a part of my principles: yes, there is machism in Mexico; no, you can’t talk about abortion so freely; yes, there is a lot of discrimination and class prejudice. This is probably what I struggled the most with and I’m still struggling a lot with this, and even more than before. Four years after, my vision has totally changed. Mexico City is great but it’s difficult. And it’s difficult to accept the fact that you live here while most people survive here. So yes, abandoning some of my ideals, living with the guilt of being lucky, this is difficult. But my exchange year remains the greatest memory I have and apart from that, everything was perfect. When I moved to Northern Ireland, it was totally different. I simply didn’t like the culture there, I thought people were superficial and what happened was that my French identity grew and grew and grew as I figured how lucky I was to live in France and to be French. I really did have homesick moments there. Or rather moments when I really wanted to go away, not necessarily home but away. I saw great landscapes and I made Erasmus friends but that’s all the good that happened. What happened is that I was confronted

For this article, we are going to introduce you to Mathilde. Although she does not have experience in the NGO world, she is a French girl currently living and working in England, so we thought her story was interesting. Plus, her testimony could be some kind of reassurance for some people who might find themselves in a similar situation. Anyhow, we hope you will enjoy this article! Let us know in the comments what you think! It’s no secret that today’s society “pushes” people into a certain path: once you are done with high school, you either go to university if you want a high-qualification job or learn a more “manual” job in order to start working. Mathilde, as most people, went to university. However, after the second year of her bachelor and with not so encouraging results and teachers, she was tired of it. University costs money and obviously, there is no point continuing doing something expensive which you feel is leading you nowhere. I am sure a lot of people have similar thoughts and inner-struggles: “I am not enjoying university, but this is what I am supposed to do”, “my parents will never agree with me dropping out of university” or again “what can I do without any university degree?”. Mathilde was lucky enough to have a job opportunity in England at the exact moment when she felt like she was done with university. So, she just took this opportunity. There is no point being scared, if you have a great opportunity and a chance of being happier with your life, you just go for it! She did a degree of European studies in English, because, like everybody in this degree, she mostly wanted to become fluent in English. So, having the opportunity to work in England was perfect for her: she could quit university, start working and making her own money, and in the meantime, improve her English and practice it everyday. She had every advantage in taking this job really!     In fact, she had already tried to find a job abroad, but with no result. She spent a month or two in Edinburg, location of the Fringe Festival, which attracts plenty of people, but everything was organised far before the summer. So, unfortunately, she did not work in this festival, but she ended up volunteering there at the Foodies Festival, which was a great experience, exhausting but amazing.     When asked if she chose the UK for any particular reason, apart from the chance to improve her English, she explained that she just took the opportunity that was offered to her. The geographical proximity between the UK and France was an important factor as well. “It is easier to move in a country not far from France. I think if the opportunity was in the United States or Australia, I would have thought twice before doing it. If something happens and I have to go back to France, it is less than two hours of flight and one hundred pounds”, she explained. Focusing more on her life in England, we wondered if she struggled fitting in in a post-Brexit UK. She explained it would be a bit complicated the day they will officially be out of the EU. “But technically I have moved in the UK before they triggered Article 50, so I will normally not have real struggle to stay here.” Even for people who are reluctant to settle in the UK now out of fear of Brexit, remember that it is difficult to know exactly when and how drastic Brexit will be. If you are contributing to the British economy, the government will probably not throw thousands of EU citizens away.     Mathilde has actually decided to be living in England on the long term. She has done all of the administrative necessities to be able to stay and she pointed out that, if she went through this annoying procedure, it is not to stay only a couple of years. Besides, “I am not going back until my English is perfect and as you may see I have a lot of work to do”, she joked.     We asked her whether she thought it was easier, as a young person, to find a job in the UK or in France. Indeed, France is known for having a high unemployment rate amongst young people in particular, even for those with high qualifications. “I am mixed between the fact that you can find a job anywhere if you are ready to do any job, and the struggle to find a good job.” But, all in all, she believes that in both countries it is all about being at the right place at the right time. Also about working, we wanted to know what she would say to someone who thinks having a university degree is necessary to find a decent job nowadays. She stated that it was hard to say because it depends, it depends on what someone wants to do or on its relationship to studies for instance. “But let’s be honest”, she added, “when you have no qualification, you will probably start a job from the beginning/the lower rank and then will gain experience, in contradiction with someone who has a PhD and will be more likely to start with a more advanced work.” But again, she qualified her statement, saying that someone with a PhD in math and finds a job in a restaurant, will not be a chef from the start. Now focusing on the whole living abroad experience, we started by asking her how hard it had been for her to move alone to a new country and start from scratch. For her, it has not been that hard, it was mainly, once again, dealing with administration. Adminstration in England is no different than the French one, which means paperwork, calls, appointments etc. “You just have to take care of all of that by yourself, as if you moved

Dive into the NGO world & the life of an Expat: Andrew For this first interview we met Andrew Julius Bende, who is an International Program Coordinator at Crossing Borders. From his background in Uganda to his work in Denmark, we have tried to trace his history, his path in the NGO world and his struggles. He’s the first of our series of blog posts focusing on People Working in NGOs, hope you’ll learn a lot from him, and the following ones 🙂 ! Don’t forget to join our newsletter, you can also become a member of Crossing Borders if you want, or just leave a comment which would be very much appreciated! Can you tell us what is it like to work in an NGO? When I started working in NGOs, I thought it was the coolest thing that I could do. Because you get to meet so many people going around, and they were the greatest guys, like those working at OXFAM. I think I was 19 / 20 years old, I was finishing university and I was already planning to start an NGO. But now, after 12 years of working with different NGOs… It’s still cool, it’s still a great thing, but it is so much responsibility at the same time. You can’t overestimate the necessity of doing work like this. On a daily basis, you have to deal with some of the toughest social issues, or at least in my job as I have to as I’m dealing with migration, integration, working with young people on political participation, on gender equality or inequality in different policy areas. It becomes such a tough job to do, but you also think about the necessity of that work, but on the other side you see how difficult it is to break into some circles: funders are cutting our funding, the public is becoming more and more doubtful of the work done in NGOs, businesses are growing stronger and say that the work done by NGOs is irrelevant. So working with a non-governmental organisation is a great job, is a great thing to do, but it gets tougher and tougher. What was the first NGO you worked in? The first NGO I worked in was my own NGO. I started an NGO back in 2001, and it was motivated by… I lost both of my parents because of HIV. When I was 9, we knew that my father was affected by HIV and he was dying of it, but they kept it as a secret for a long time, and he passed away when I was 12. We knew then that my mother was sick, and she lived with the disease for another 7 years. Throughout these 7 years, my family, my relatives, and my uncles and aunts took my mother to shrines because they thought it was witchcraft. So they went to witch doctors to help her, they went to other people, they tried all kind of things, herbs, medicines, and it just didn’t work. After my mum passed away, I went to university, and got a government scholarship. When I started my Master’s degree, I studied a lot on how Ugandan peasants react and participate in the political life of the country, and I’ve encountered so many people believing that HIV was witchcraft more than a disease you had “control over”, it was something coming from evil spirits. So I’ve created my own NGO in 2001, registered it in 2004, and I’ve stayed there until 2009 when I left for Denmark. The NGO is still based in Uganda, but it works on a small scale with rural communities, and the whole idea of it is to mobilise communities to stand up for themselves, and act at their scale. I think it’s better if it works at a small scale. When I came to Denmark we tried to get some big funding from huge organisations, but the more money people had, the less they were focused on the small people. How was it to start your own NGO? It was exciting, I was young, I was ambitious, I was curious, but I also had just lost my parents to this disease, and I really wanted to make a change. It was a way for me to hit back on HIV, it was like saying “You took away my parents, I’m going to fight you”, so I was really determined to do this. It was exciting, it was purposeful, and I was naïve also at the same time, so it was not much of a strategic and logical process. If you’d ask me to start an NGO now, I would spend more time on planning things. I didn’t plan it at that time, I just opened doors of other NGOs, put a computer in my office, and started writing things down. When I read some of the proposals I did back then I realise “Oh that’s why I didn’t get the money” *laughter*. But I didn’t care because I was driven by this energy to do things, and the willing to have revenge on the disease which took away my parents. When I started working with the local people and see these local women who would have been the age of my mother, and I was sitting there, teaching them about HIV and life skills, and I was looking at their faces and I thought : “They are my moms” you know? I think that my work in NGOs was the best time of my career, and there was no problem with money, the thing was : “I want to go out and do something!”. What kind of advice would you give to your younger self now that you have more experience? The NGO landscape has changed. It’s good to do good things, and have passion and the will to do things, but it’s important to be strategic. There are so many NGOs doing the work that I was

First things first, an introduction seems necessary. The Danish NGO Crossing Borders has started this new series of posts because their staff – i.e us- knows how hard it can be to find a permanent job in the NGO sector and to live out of it. Plus, there is a lack of information on how to achieve that. That’s why we wanted to compile testimonies from people working in NGOs, including how they got there, their advices… Working in an NGO also often means travelling and moving abroad. So, we also thought it could be interesting to hear the stories of people who had to “cross borders”. There are a lot of travel blogs out here, showing dreamy landscapes, leading one to think that travelling and moving is easy. But, as you may know, there are always downsides that people don’t really talk about, simply because bloggers’ aim is to make people dream. But, we think it’s interesting to hear the full story, so that you know that struggling is also part of the process of moving abroad, and is a path to achieving success. So, expect to find interviews and portraits of people from all around the world, of different age, with different backgrounds and ambitions. And hopefully, it can give you a more objective point of view on living abroad and how working in an NGO really is. Written by Alexandre Telliez and Chloé Ladeira, Crossing Borders’ interns and National Coordinators for France

We are all familiar with the saying, ”I’m only human”, the casual statement that indicates anyone has the capability to have a moment of weakness and to make a mistake, and not to be judged or deemed unworthy, just because of that ‘one small mistake’. While it is indeed true that we all deserve a second chance, what we tend to overlook is that this statement implies ‘being human’ as being weak. What does it mean to be a human? There are, of course, a lot of answers to this question, depending on one’s perspective of humanity. As human beings, we all have limitations. After all, no one is flawless. However, on this piece of my mind expressed through writing, I want to take it a step further, to really understand what humans are capable of doing. Humans are like double edged swords. They can be both sides of extreme, good and evil. Human race is one of the most (if not the most) dangerous predators in the history of existence. We surely can find more than enough examples of this. From historical events that took millions of lives such as World War I and II, genocide, ethnic cleansing, nuclear bombing; to everyday crimes such as serial murder, rape, human trafficking, you name it, we have it. The destruction one person can bring to millions of lives is overwhelming, especially combined with great powers in the wrong hands. More often than it should be, one very powerful leader can bring devastation to the entire society. Ever since the very harsh lesson we learned from the two world wars, human race is trying hard to develop into a more civilized world. However, what does it mean to be ‘civil’ when there are still wars going on? The amount of lives fallen in Syria, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, just to mention some, is just simply mind blowing. Haven’t we learned anything from the past two world wars? Do we have to wait until there is no more life left in the world to finally stop the violence? The emergence of humanitarian societies and organizations sure spark up hope in humanity. As I have mentioned before, regardless of all the dark side of human race, there are still many good, righteous people exist in the world. As humans, we often forget that, united, we can bring change to the world. One simple act of kindness goes a long way, whether it is to lend a hand for those in need, volunteering for a good cause, raising money for the disadvantaged, the list goes on. These people that are often not named, are the true heroes who, hopefully, inspire more people to do the same. History is written today, and every day. Compilations of small, good deeds will bloom into positive actions, and positive actions have the tendency to be contagious. Heroes will create more heroes, and villains will create more villains; the future is up to us to make. Which kind of human do you want to be today? Written by: Sienny Thio, a Master’s degree student in Global Studies and Communication studies, with a background in Human Behaviour and Sociology. An active volunteer in various NGOs, involving e-journalism and social campaign.

As I write to you this morning, people across the world are waking up to the news of another defeat inflicted by and large on behalf of Nationalism/Nationalistic short-sighted approaches. The Italian referendum, which did not allow PM Matteo Renzi to centralize more powers on its government hoping thus to diminish within the process the role of the Upper House/Senate proved to be another turning point on the political agenda of an already tumultuous unprecedented year. As it happened, Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in the US rallied people worldwide on the idea that the Establishment failed them or neglected them to the extent of obliteration. The notion of centre-right/left governments made famous by politicians such as Gerhard Schroeder in Germany or Tony Blair in the UK (they themselves followers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism) did not find stable grounds on the more actual personae of David Cameron, Renzi or even Hillary Clinton in the US. The people around this countries did not budge any longer to long-preserved and protected ideas such as free-trade, globalization or freedom of movement, but rather turned inwards and tried to grasp local alternatives to external influences. I wish to provide the honourable reader in the following passages a clear and comprehensive depiction on the movement of nationalism from its inception to a more recent version of it. It is important before we start to distinguish clearly between “nation”, “nationalism” and “ethnicity”, concepts which have a significant relevance when dealing with the present subject. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a nation is “an extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory”. Thus, the concept of nation hovers around three poles: Society: people living together, communicating and sharing the same socioeconomic and political conditions. Culture: people sharing the same language, social habits and historical memories. Race: people sharing the same descent and having passed on a shared culture through a filiation of generations. As you can see, the concept itself is rather slippery and elusive and I am sure it already rises eyebrows. Bear in mind, nevertheless, that the content has attracted throughout the years inscrutable forms. Let us now turn to “nationalism”. Joep Leerssen, Professor of Imagology at the University of Amsterdam, uses the word “Nationalism” on a combination of three assumptions: “That the nation is the most natural, organic collective aggregate of humans, and the most natural and organic subdivision of humanity; and that, as such, the nation’s claim to loyalty overrides all other allegiances. That the state derives its mandate and sovereignty from its incorporation of a constituent nation so that civic loyalty to the state is a natural extension of national (cultural, linguistic, ethnic) solidarity. That territorially and socio-politically, the most natural and organic division of humankind into states runs along national lines, so that ideally there is a seamless overlap between the outlines of the state and of its constituent nation.” Leerssen also considers that Nationalism emanates from the way people view and the describe the world, “that is, as a cultural phenomenon taking shape in the constant back and forth between material and political developments on the one hand, and intellectual and poetical reflection and articulation on the other”. Last but not least, the concept of “ethnicity” implies that “what matters in group’s identity is not any objective perceived similarities or differences, but rather a subjective approach of these items. That is group’s acknowledgment of a shared self-image and the willingness to consider it meaningful”. Let us remember that these terms are only hard samples of a would-be contextualized approach. Time and again, notions such as “nationalism” have become to signify so broad an area that today it is almost impossible to pinpoint or clearly identify its meaning. Allow me though to move from a technical view of the subject to a more mundane one. Nationalism and its immediate close terms were not solely the subject of hardliner dictionary and grammar geeks, butthey also belonged to vast number of literaturepoets and writers. Writing on the verge of the Second World War, George Orwell, the famous English novelist and BBC broadcaster depicted carefully and explicitly the consequences of a deep-rooted nationalism, in which he saw the incorrigible behaviour of a people unwilling to restore a contextually state of things. Books such as 1984 stand proof on that. Other writers viewed nationalism as “a condition of the mind, feeling or sentiment of a group of people living in a well-defined geographical area, speaking a common language, possessing a literature in which the aspirations of the nation have been expressed, being attached to common traditions, and in some cases, having a common religion”. Snyder. By this definition we can somehow visualise the similarities through which the concept tries to make its living. The close up marks only a general localization of the term and can be openly subject to criticism and even refute. Discoursing on the “Feeling of Nationality”, John Stuart Mill distinguishes some of the causes generated by it. “Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation; pleasure and regret connected with the same incidents in the past”. Identity of language, literature and, to a certain extent, of race and recollection have maintained the feeling of nationality in considerable strength among the different portions of the European people. Where the sentiment of nationality exists, there is a prima-facie case for uniting all the numbers of the nationality under the same government, and the government ought to be decided by its citizens alone. When examining Lord Acton’s Nationality approach, one of the main themes centred