Striking out on my life-changing adventure

Some people can tell the most amazing stories about their life-changing experience. Sorry. I can’t top adventures like climbing the Mount Everest and meditating with Tibetan monks. However, my story might not be too mundane, since it has been quite a rocky road until I got to my life-changing experience. 

At the age of eighteen the ‘Matura’, or school-leaving examination, seems to be a huge insurmountable thing that you don’t know how on earth you’re ever going to accomplish. You expect that getting the certificate to show you passed will somehow be life changing. But as soon as you’re finished with school, there’s just a big hole in your chest, filled with the question ‘What am I gonna do now?’ Fortunately, I had asked myself that question a bit earlier.

I made up my mind to get out of Austria, out of the tiny village I was born in. I had to break out of the narrow-mindedness and conservative conventions of the country people, who are born there and live there until they die. I longed to encounter people with different attitudes towards life and I knew they were somewhere out there. I just had to find them. This is how my rocky road to Cork began. 

If you don’t have a few thousand Euros in your bank account and no clue where’s the best place to start looking for a job abroad, it might take some time to find the right thing. For me, it felt as if I’d tried everything: from au pair in America, to the European Voluntary Service and back to au pair. A few months before graduation I went to a cultural care au pair meeting, but I was soon forced to realize that I wouldn’t be able to afford the costs for the organization, the flight and the visa. Then, I heard about the European Voluntary Service, which provides the opportunity to go abroad for free. Waiting for months, to get a positive answer for the project I had applied for, I was devastated when they eventually told me that it wasn’t going to be funded by the European Union.

By the time I got this message, it was already November. Mildly spoken, my parents were urging me to go find work in some office, but I stayed stubborn. Turning my sights back to becoming an au pair, I found out that you don’t need an organization to find a family for you. You can always go and look for yourself. Via aupairworld.net I found a host family in England. But then another barrier was placed in my path: The British host family cancelled everything, just two weeks before I was to have flown over to the island. Again, I didn’t give up - and my endurance paid off. Three days after that awful e-mail from Britain, everything was set to go to Cork, Ireland.

Some of the people in my village asked me how I could go to a foreign country all by myself, to people I didn’t know. Because I was never able to give them a proper answer, they just shook their heads at me, when I told them with a big smile on my face that I couldn’t wait to go to Ireland. Every minute of my long search was totally worth it. I felt a freedom I’d never felt before, because I was doing this all on my own. Also, the responsibility of caring for two children made me more independent. What I miss most back here in Austria, apart from my host family of course, is speaking English and being surrounded by the language at all times. My English improved significantly and I felt completely at ease when talking to a native speaker. With the self-confidence I gained in Ireland and the thousands of kilometers of distance from my village, I was able to make a decision I wouldn’t have been able to make at home.

Approximately ten people in our small community are attending university. It is a way of life most villagers don’t want to live or can’t imagine living. With this background, I’d never seen myself as a student, but in Cork I got to know a different point of view on life. Finally, I could see that there were more possibilities than just getting a dull office job. And here I am now, in the middle of my second life-changing experience, about to strike out on my next adventure as Erasmus student at UCC Cork.