In Spain like at home: expectations and difficulties related to the move

In Spain like at home: expectations and difficulties related to the move



A project that was created to facilitate the process of moving to Spain and adapting to a different country, providing a support space on the web aimed at all those Italians alone or with families who are in Spain!

My name is Martina and I am an Italian in Spain.
I arrived here with clear ideas about the destination, Granada. A city that I had got to know during a trip and that literally enchanted me. I chose to do it in a fairly steady period of my professional life: 5 years of university, a 1-year internship and a qualification exam. So I have not abandoned work positions already started, I arrived with the determination of "let's start here".





Leaving one's homeland, one's loved ones, the habits that spontaneously fill the days was not excessively disastrous: the choice to move away from Italy was dictated by a strong desire to change something. It is with the passage of time, almost a year after the transfer, that I am becoming more and more aware of being in the role of observer with respect to what flows and evolves among my family, among my friends, in the activities that entertain the situation close to me that I inevitably left in Italy.


In the initial months euphoria and fear mixed, and reshuffled… In addition to the lack of
experience (recent graduate) now adds the language problem, will I be able to work in the field of study for which I studied? Will I be able to create a social network? Will I be able to build deep friendly relationships that go beyond bar chatter and express concepts without making them trivial? Will I be able to balance my desire to maintain my Italian spirit while managing to integrate with the Spanish?


The network of Italians present in the area helped me to understand, especially in the initial period, how to obtain the necessary documentation to be able to work, how to ask for a general practitioner, how to proceed to request the approval of my qualification. Undoubtedly, word of mouth was the most effective means for me to be able to deal with it. I perceived the lack of a support network that could address all these questions: this is also because the regulations change, and the tips of the Italians already present in the area on many occasions are "old" information.


I moved alone, but who moves with their family? Which school to choose for the children? How does school placement work? How to reconcile family, work, documentation in a culture that does not belong to us, and without a family network in the area that can help?


Hence the idea.
With a group of Italian psychologist colleagues, many of whom have already moved to Spain, others close to doing so, we understood that we shared many of the difficulties that followed the move. We have formulated a questionnaire which aims to investigate what are the strengths, but above all the problems, that everyone has experienced in this process of emigration and subsequently integration in a land as close to Italy as it is different.


The idea is a project that can accommodate all these doubts and facilitate the adaptation process, providing a support space on the web aimed at all those Italians alone or with families who are in Spain. Based on our personal experience and our field of study, we believe it may be important to have a space for sharing the whole emotional sphere that revolves around the migration process.


The first step is the questionnaire that can be seen below, which aims to collect the various
migratory experiences: we ask all those who are in Spain or are thinking of moving to help us in this initial phase of work.








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