Florian Fangmann sees a bit of the end of the tunnel. This Franco-German runs the French center in Berlin (co-managed by the CEI, Center for international exchange)
. Before the pandemic, it welcomed around 3,000 French people each year, who came to families across the Rhine to perfect or learn the language of Goethe. Today, he has regained about half of his reservations:
“We are at about 50% of the activities as before the pandemic. It is really increasing day after day. It is true that it is a lot of additional administrative work, it is sure that people are still doing even more be careful. You also always have to see in foreign countries in fact regulations, but now for the summer, I worry a lot less”.
As a result, the team is working hard to speed up the pace of registrations and the organization of stays for young French people:
“Many projects have been postponed. That means we have almost a year of projects to catch up on. Everything was organized and finally we can leave. It’s a big challenge to organize everything in parallel in the projects that have been postponed, the new projects, and then plan ahead for the next few months”.
The most complicated, during the Covid crisis, summarizes Florian Fangmann, will have been to manage the quarantine of young people who contracted the coronavirus during their stay in Germany. We remember these teenagers stranded for several days on the island of Malta after positive tests.
During the pandemic, individual stays have also increased significantly, as they are much easier to organize than group trips. For the French in any case, for sure, language stays have a bright future ahead of them:
“We are convinced that it is increasingly important to send young people abroad to discover Europe and the whole world. It cannot be replaced by digital technology, being in front of the screen and talking to people who are abroad, for example. It’s the exchange and the physical experience that counts”.
What worries the French today are the consequences of the war in nearby Ukraine. Germany borders Poland, which itself borders Ukraine:
“We are in Berlin and all the trains coming from Poland to the west almost pass through Berlin. At the central station, here, every morning, I see the refugees, it’s quite touching. Now in school classes and in the youth centers there are more and more young Ukrainians. You can actually feel it here on the spot and in Poland”.
Like the rest of Europe, Germany has also been subject to runaway inflation since the post-Covid economic recovery and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This trend also affects the prices of accommodation or food for the organization of stays for young French people in Berlin.
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The French center in Berlin (IEC group, Center for international exchange)
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