The foreign student River (21) moves from couch to couch. He cannot find a room or studio in Eindhoven and therefore depends on the hospitality of other students. His search for a place of his own has many bumps in which he was even ripped off. The sofa is now his best friend. “You just have no privacy.”
A week. Or even a few weeks. Then he has to leave again. River Andrews is used to it by now. He laughs like a farmer with a toothache when he says that the benches are almost always too short for his body.
Last September, River came hopeful from the island of Antigua in the Caribbean Sea to Eindhoven, almost seven thousand kilometers away. He found a room, but it wasn’t for students. The rent was too high and so he had to leave.
Another room turned out not to be a room at all. He paid a thousand euros in advance and turned out to be paying for a fake room. Instead of studying, he was busy with a tax return and a lawyer.
“I now go to the woods more often to be alone for a while.”
River is studying at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, a college education in design. “I am happy with the study, but not with how they deal with the housing shortage. They do nothing at all.” The program has 700 students from more than forty nationalities: “If you appeal to such an international audience and invite people from other countries to study, it’s crazy if you don’t have a place to stay.”
“I am happy that in the second year I already have so many people I can turn to, but I also feel restless. It’s not your own place. You have no privacy. I now go to the woods more often to be alone for a while. It’s stressful and insecure because I move so often.”
According to River, many international students in his school have housing problems. “I expect about two hundred. Many students from abroad come here and think there is accommodation for them.”
“It always takes a while to find out how to sleep.”
“Housemates are not registered in the places where I stay. They don’t have any rights themselves and then it’s hard for me to be there.”
He doesn’t like sleeping in a tent like other students in Eindhoven do in the winter. “I can also live in another city. I have already looked in Rotterdam or Belgium, but that will be a bit expensive.”
For now, it’s the bank. He is now an expert at sleeping on someone’s couch. ”It is always a matter of finding out how to sleep. That depends on the bank.”
Also read: Adèle and Noam sleep in a tent because there is no student room to be found
