My exchange experience in Belgium is undeniably marked by my residency at the Josefa Foundation, which represents a renewed approach to migratory phenomena, assertively positioning itself against the often stigmatised and tendentiously homogenising perception...
Being able to integrate this environment, translated by the vision "All migrants", cultivates in me a captivating respect for the specificity and uniqueness of each one's path, filling my daily life and reality not only with a community commitment, but also with a precious exchange of different points of view and perspectives of life, of learning.
I feel that since my arrival I have witnessed a huge change in myself. Not only externally, on a physically concrete migratory level, but also internally. I have learned that this is perhaps the essence of our processes: a constant metamorphosis, the different roles we acquire when we act as proactive subjects in mapping out our routes - the changes that occur on our path make us attribute value and meaning to it.
I have learned that migration can incorporate the recognition that yesterday's path is not the same as the one I choose today, the recognition that it is not always the same; it can incorporate an inner journey through what I was and what I have known; through what I was, what I knew, what I am, what I know, curiosity and impatience about what I will be one day. All these versions of myself are not necessarily contradictory, they coexist: I have learned to feel good about my ability to look at myself and find divergence, sometimes totally polarised.
But this is the complexity of the human being, this is the expression of its expansion, this is the richness of the phenomenon of metamorphosis: the simultaneous existence of different versions of ourselves, of a plurality of paths, of the ambiguity present between what has already been travelled and what remains, daily, to be travelled; it is the transposition of metamorphosis to the level of daily action - things change, if there is solidarity and action. And the best thing is to be able to share them, to share the change that comes from within, towards the outside, towards the rest of the world.
Madalena
