Year abroad nightmares
Three TheSite.org users show you how to cope if anything goes wrong whilst in foreign climes.
A year abroad can offer fantastic skills and experience as well as the added bonus of an extended holiday - this is a great opportunity to have a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience so don't let too many worries stop you from enjoying yourself! That said, reading this advice could help everything run smoothly if you do meet with difficulty.
My story
I'm 22 and in the final year of a degree in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. It is compulsory for all students on the course to spend their third academic year in a Spanish-speaking country. Many students opt for the Erasmus scheme, which allows you to study and take exams in a foreign university, however I chose the more independent route of finding a job for myself and writing a 7000-word dissertation on a topic relevant to Hispanic Society. In September 2002 I started a job as a teaching assistant at a school in Almunecar on the Costa del Sol.
So what went wrong for me? Well, despite having written to the school in May 2002 and confirmed my desire to voluntarily assist 14-18 year olds in language classes, the school rarely kept to its promises. Without my knowledge they often arranged for me to teach classes of up to 12 eight-year-olds without a teacher present nor work set by a teacher, and all this without my having any teaching experience.
Also, no one informed me that two of the boys had autism. As it turned out I enjoyed helping them, but it still highlighted the school's irresponsible nature as the boys had special needs I wasn't prepared for and couldn't deal with alone.
I felt that the school was taking advantage of me as an unpaid teacher. I complained numerous times to the headmaster about the problems but he seemed to take little interest in resolving my situation. In the end I wrote a letter to the school explaining that I was leaving and why. I also emailed my personal tutor at university who was really encouraging and told me I was doing the right thing.
I hopped on a plane back to Blighty to rethink my plans for the year, and some of my uni friends who were studying in Granada offered to let me stay in their flat until I found my own. I went on to spend a fantastic, problem-free six months there.
Other students' year abroad nightmares
Political crisis
Genevieve, 22, and Anne-Mhairi, 23, were working as language assistants in a school in Caracas, Venezuela, when political crisis forced them back to the UK:
"There was already a lot of civil unrest when we arrived but gradually the problems got much worse. One day at the school a teacher told us that the French Embassy had advised its nationals to return home to avoid the increasingly dangerous situation. The protests in the streets were very scary and noisy - sometimes they went on all night. We had to queue outside shops for ages just to get food.
"We tried to contact the British Embassy numerous times, and when we got through we were told to calm down and drink a glass of water! Nine weeks after the French Embassy warning the British Embassy emailed to advise us to leave, but it turned out that unlike some other embassies, they didn't have the facilities to help Britons leave Venezuela in a time of crisis. For example, the American Embassy even had a helicopter to airlift people out of the country."
How it got sorted
"We were particularly scared when a female student was shot dead in a square on live TV, so soon after we managed to book flights and get back to England."
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