ABSTRACTED from The Guardian - United Kingdom
BY CHRIS DYKE
Nice place, Canterbury, with its cathedral and lots of shops. But would you spend your gap year there? Kasia Cegielka, 24, nicknamed Milka by friends for her chocolate habit, is doing just that. The management and administration student is one of 15,000 students from eastern Europe who have brought in the apple harvest this year. As our own children go off on world tours, it may be forgotten that England is also a favourite gap destination (not always for a full year). It is the place to learn the language, and earn real money. `We forget the amazing differences between wages here and in Eastern Europe,` says David Butterworth from the National Farmers` Union. `I`ve known Ukrainian students earn enough here to buy a house when they go home.` Kasia Cegielka and her friends are working in a Kent orchard on a bright autumn day, with Canterbury cathedral just visible. `I like very much England,` explains Cegielka. `I like language school and want to learn English.` Like several colleagues, she is studying at university in her home town of Olsztyn, in northern Poland. Nikolay Nikolaev comes from Svishtov in Bulgaria. By day he is an IT systems administrator for 10,000 students, and by night an English teacher. But all of this brings in only pounds 100 a month to fund his economics course at university. By picking apples in Kent, he is earning nearly pounds 200 per week. It is easy to think of these students as simply part of a cheap labour pool for English fruit growers, but that is not the case, explains one farmer, John Hinchliff: `We are very reliant on these students. Without them most of the English fruit crop would remain unpicked.` The old idea of East Enders coming out from London for the harvest has long gone. And with it went the local housewives earning seasonal money when their children were at school. The need to keep up with mortgage payments has taken most of them full-time into service industries. Farmers have adapted their whole production programme around the students who, unlike their western equivalents, usually come for only six months. It is vital to have a constant source of fruit for harvest from May through to October. Visas are only issued for bona fide students. The farms even provide language tuition and holidays as part of the package. Many of the students have bikes, some even have cars, but most walk the three miles into town on days off or in the evening. Homesickness is a problem, as with all young people away from home. And British food. `Baked beans, spaghetti really awful,` says Robert Szacherski. `The bread like sponge,` adds Cegielka. We shouldn`t underestimate the impact this stay in England will have on these young people nor the long term links between our nations. One day these students are going to be the elite of their countries as their economies catch up with the west. A couple of years ago I met a former student from Poland who picked fruit as the Berlin Wall came down. He left us with an old Polski Fiat full of computers in 1990, and is now the managing director of Ociem, one of Poland`s biggest breweries.
* The title, changed by the Editorials Staff of Breaking News
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