“All I hoped for was to get a scholarship at a good university and earn my master’s degree,” Yonas says. “I had hoped to find educational opportunities in developed countries, but when you finally get what you hoped for, it feels like a fairytale.”
University Corridors for Refugees (UNICORE), a scholarship programme promoted by 32 Italian universities and supported by the Italian government and UNHCR, mean Yonas is now living in southern Italy and studying for a master’s degree in computer science at University of Bari Aldo Moro.
Yonas remembers clearly the happy moment he shared news of the scholarship with his family, at the end of another long working day. “They were tired and exhausted [but] when I told them I won a scholarship they jumped off the couch laughing and crying,” he says.
Soon, it was time to leave Ethiopia for Italy. Even as Yonas boarded the plane he was asking himself, “Is this real?”
“It was like a dream,” he says. “You don’t believe what you are seeing. I wish I could repeat that moment in the plane, it was unreal, just unbelievable.”
Today, he is living the dream, and he is not alone. Two friends who studied with Yonas at Adigrat University in northern Ethiopia, Tesfay and Gezae, also won UNICORE scholarships to Bari. Although the programme offers scores of scholarships each year, not every applicant is successful.
“There’s a lot of educated people there who didn’t get this chance,” says Yonas. “They are so smart that they could change many things, but they couldn’t continue their education because for some reason they didn’t get a scholarship.”
He encourages other countries to follow Italy’s example by providing opportunities for further studies to refugee students. “If Italy could change so many lives, what if other European countries, the US, Canada, or other countries could join in? More lives would change,” he says.
For some, the apparent absence of a regular pathways forward caused them to choose another, dangerous and illegal path, with smugglers and traffickers.
“I had fellow students who were studying with me at Adigrat University. A few of them left the university in the middle of their courses and travelled to Libya,” Yonas says. “Some of them managed to get to Europe, while most of them suffered in Libya.” Some were forced to give up hope of reaching Europe and return instead to Ethiopia, while others perished on their journeys, in the desert or in the sea.
Yonas understands why they made the choice they did. “Most of the refugees went through Libya because they gave up on the system and chose to take a risk to attain their goals,” he says. But for himself, the illegal route was not an option. “I never thought about travelling through Libya. I finished school without getting distracted by thoughts of travelling by smuggling.”
ENDS
