Brazilian Students Report on their Exchange Programs in Africa

Portuguese Translation of the Week

Mozambique, a country located in East Africa, recently declared its independence in 1975. Currently, the African country has attracted Brazilian researchers and students in search of new experiences. According to Patricia Shiroma, the supervisor of the Office of Institutional and International Relations at PUC São Paulo, exchange programs are the perfect opportunity for personal growth. "The main reason for this is because it is the first experience of having to take care of yourself, manage your budget, deal with new situations, and live alongside people of different origins and with different cultural habits," she explains.

Moçambique, país localizado no leste da África, teve sua independência recentemente declarada, em 1975. Atualmente, o país africano tem atraído pesquisadores e estudantes brasileiros em busca de novas experiências.  O intercâmbio é um momento de crescimento pessoal para a supervisora da Assessoria de Relações Institucionais e Internacionais da PUC-SP, Patrícia Shiroma. "A primeira razão para isso vem da experiência de ter de cuidar de si mesmo, gerir as economias, lidar com situações novas, conviver com pessoas de diferentes origens e com hábitos diferentes dos seus," diz.

This article has been translated from Portuguese. Click here to read the original version on Terra.

Samuel Araújo, a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), went to Mozambique to conduct research for his Masters, but his relationship with Mozambique began in 2010. He worked as a research assistant for a project on institutional relations between Brazilian and Mozambican universities.

"Since then, the country intrigues me, because it is both very similar and very different in comparison to Brazil. Although both were colonized by Portugal, we dealt very differently with the situation. While we, Brazilians, make jokes about the Portuguese, Mozambicans still view them with bitterness, which can be explained by there more recent decolonization," he says.

From what he picked up during his stay in Mozambique, he highlights the culture: "several elements, many colors, beliefs and wonderful food," he notes. Additionally, the researcher says that Maputo's history is very well represented in buildings and monuments throughout the city. "The country has one of the highest rates of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, combined with public problems of all sorts, which led it to receive many project proposals for international cooperation and multinational companies from around the world," he explained.

Raquel Altoé, law student at the Faculty of Law of Ribeirão Preto (USP), chose Mozambique as her exchange program destination because of her interest in Africa and the fact that they speak Portuguese. "Since I came on a volunteer program to work with low income women and children, the shared language helped our interaction and made it easier to establish a connection," she said. She intends to stay there for two months during her break from university. She explains that despite speaking the same language, she still gets confused on a daily basis because of the different terms and expressions that are used. She says that people there speak with a different intonation, and at the beginning, she had difficulty understanding them.

Although Mozambique is attractive to many, some Brazilian students still prefer to go to Europe – specifically Portugal. Among the students at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) who applied to exchange programs in 2012, 31% chose to go to France, followed by 17% to Portugal, and 15% to the U.S.

Article translated by Anna Cardenas, Staff Intern for the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center.

Photo courtesy of Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz via Wikimedia Commons.