It is difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a young man who has lost his past life. The room of his house, his street, his city. Family and friends at the front or scattered around the world. His country, in short, destroyed.
For Bozhena, a Ukrainian student at the University of Barcelona (UB), the turning point at which she knew that everything was going to change, for the worse, was the explosion that blew the glass out of the windows of her house in Kiev. “My father turned on the television and said, ‘Well, it’s started.’” Thus, without a subject or with an elliptical subject that the whole family understood.
When the war broke out, Bozhema was 19 years old, he was in his first year of university, on a campus he had not set foot on, due to the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic that had confined the entire world a year before. “The first time he entered a physical faculty was in the spring of 2021 in the historic building in Barcelona,” explains Cati Jerez, coordinator of the Support Program for refugees and people from conflict zones at the Fundació Solidaritat UB.
Bozhema felt tremendously alone when she arrived in the Catalan capital, even though it was a dynamic, young city, full of possibilities. She longed for her home, which no longer existed, for her father and mother, for her friends. And her nostalgia was mixed with feelings that did not allow her to move forward. Like her disloyalty for not fighting for her country or her guilt at being lucky for the opportunity to rebuild her life in a safe country. Her painting, with the use of red and black pigments, helped him capture scenes from her past.
This is what Bozhena conveys in the documentary Refugee Girls, directed by Leonardo Cinieri, which has reflected the reception of two European universities (Universitat de Sapienza and the UB) to refugee students. The other two protagonists are Robina, an Afghan student in Rome, and Sofiia, who is studying dentistry in Barcelona.
The three were able to enter the country with a student visa. In the case of Bozhena and Sofia, both friends and Ukrainians, they achieved it thanks to the Fundació Solidaritat of the UB which, together with the Barcelona City Council, grants scholarships every year to 15 young students in a refugee situation.
The scholarship covers a year of transition to university (they learn Catalan and Spanish, in addition to helping them land in the country and get to know its culture), tuition, accommodation in a dormitory school and full board. They also receive psychological assistance and are trying to close agreements with foundations that guarantee oral and ophthalmological health (they already have an agreement with the Barraquer Foundation), since many young people, despite their young age, have suffered from food deprivation which has affected his health.
To access these scholarships they must already be university students and have approximately 30 credits approved at another university.
This program has been running since 2016 and has served a hundred refugees in a very vulnerable situation.
The refugee crisis is getting worse. In the last edition, the foundation received about 500 applications in total from different conflict zones or refugee camps. Almost 9 out of 10 applications are boys, but scholarships are awarded based on parity criteria. “Women suffer more violence in general and yet they have fewer opportunities.”
“It breaks your soul with each of the requests,” reveals Jerez, “there are many stories of suffering.” For many of them it is their only hope of getting out of very complicated situations where they live and suffer a lot of violence, she adds. And there is little normality. Only 6% of young refugees access higher education, compared to 40% of the general population. For this reason, almost all European universities try to provide support to these students.
“It is no longer a question of solidarity,” considers Jerez, but of responsibility and human rights. What happens, however, is that economic resources are very limited.
The coordinator explains that at the film forum held last Tuesday, with the viewing of Refugee Girls, which was attended by other Ukrainian students and many professors who are now working at the UB, tears flowed due to the common feeling of pain and hope. “They are students like the rest, they want a normal and ordinary life, they don’t even want to see themselves as refugees to others, but what they have experienced and what they still experience is unimaginable for their classmates,” explains the project coordinator.
Bozhena has launched a network of refugee students to support each other and help new arrivals to integrate into society and understand the demands of teachers (in Europe teachers expect much more autonomy and contact from their students than in other countries where the teacher is an authority and the student’s role is more passive).
The emotional documentary is the result of a collaboration between La Sapienza University of Rome, the Mediterranean Universities (UNIMED), the Fundació Solidaritat of the UB, the Association of European Universities (USA) and the International Organization for Migration (associate partner) within the UNI(di)VERSITY Project financed with the support of the Erasmus program of the European Union.
