‘Waiting for an opportunity’. Future, transit and higher education among Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia

This article investigates the experience of waiting of Eritrean refugees attending Ethiopian universities and the role they attribute to higher education. Young Eritreans usually experience Ethiopia as a temporary stage within longer migratory trajectories towards their desired destinations. However, due to the current regimes of mobility, they often remain stuck. Drawing from an ethnography conducted in the Northern Ethiopian town of Mekelle, this article scrutinises the circular relation between refugees’ daily life, their feelings of being both stuck and in transit, and their hopes for the future. It intends to demonstrate how people in waiting not only experience boredom and despair and focus on the present, but can also constantly seek ways to move towards their desired future. In the impossibility of making accurate plans, student refugees are constantly looking for any opportunity that might arise, readapting themselves to contingencies. The article also shows how in this tension between present and future defined by their condition of waiting, higher education loses its future-oriented character. For the student refugees, attending university in Ethiopia was primarily a way of filling time in the present and making it meaningful, while ‘waiting for an opportunity’ for reactivating their geographical and existential mobility.