Hi. My name is Renat, and I am 16. I am writing this while looking at palm trees in Uruguay. Not long before, the view outside our window was Switzerland's postcard-perfect meadows.
Friends and subscribers often ask why we left a rich, stable country for South America. From the outside, it sounds strange. Our family had serious reasons, and I will explain them in order.
How it started for our family
We are from Mariupol. Before 2022, we had a normal life, our own home and plans. Then February 2022 happened. I will not describe the horror here. We lost our city and home and had to leave.
We eventually reached Switzerland, which was receiving refugees, and obtained temporary protection under Status S. At first, a very kind volunteer hosted us while we recovered and helped around the property. After about a year, we moved into an apartment. Altogether, we lived in Switzerland for roughly two years. I attended a local school, learned French and made friends. It may sound like the obvious place to stay, but the longer we lived there, the less permanent our future felt.
Our shorter account of receiving protection is here: /en/shveytsariya/vremennaya-zashchita/.
The counter we felt was always running
We understood that some public support received while living as refugees could later affect a person's finances if they became independent or acquired major assets. In our minds, every payment for support and housing felt like a counter continuing to run. That feeling made it difficult to imagine building a stable future.
This is how our family understood and experienced the system, not legal advice or an official explanation of Swiss law. Rules can depend on the canton and individual case. Verify current information with official Swiss sources or a qualified adviser.
We did not feel free to build something of our own
Our family wanted to start a small business. Under our temporary-protection and social-support situation, we could not simply begin without approval. We asked the social service and were refused because they decided it was not necessary. We also tried to become fully self-supporting and move toward something more stable, but that attempt was refused as well. We felt caught inside a system that was harder to leave than it first appeared.
The image of high Swiss salaries did not match our route
Switzerland's high salaries are an attractive image, but the labour market looked different from our position. In practice, we felt that Swiss applicants came first, then EU citizens, with people under our status and other migrants considered later. The work we saw most often involved elderly care, cleaning or heavy farm jobs with horses and cows, and even those positions were competitive.
Our experience with pay was frustrating. A person could work almost every day in a physically demanding job while much of the income was accounted for through social services. We understood the result as the standard allowance of about CHF 350 plus roughly CHF 100 as an incentive. Some people had better outcomes, but we rarely saw them. This is what the system looked like around us, not a claim about every job or canton.
We wanted to be farther from another conflict
Leaving a country known for neutrality may sound strange. But the atmosphere in Europe felt increasingly tense to us. We followed the news and worried that the region was becoming less predictable. After losing everything once because of war, our family did not want to take the same risk again. We wanted another continent, farther away from the conflict lines we knew.
Our dog and a rule we learned about in practice
We have a black pug. We were told that while receiving temporary support we were not allowed to spend support money on veterinary treatment. The issue became real when our dog developed an eye infection. A clinic treated her, but the bill was very high. We also heard worrying stories about what could happen when refugees brought animals needing urgent treatment. I cannot verify that as a universal rule; I am describing what we were told and the reality we felt around us.
We had no relatives or close Ukrainian friends in Switzerland who could help us navigate around the situation. The Swiss people we knew generally followed official rules closely. Our pug is now with us in Uruguay. How we transported her: /en/pereezd/mops/.
How we chose Uruguay and left
We compared Argentina and Uruguay. How we reached Uruguay and why we did not remain in Argentina: /en/pereezd/pochemu-urugvay-a-ne-argentina/.
Packing was fast and sad. We took one suitcase per person and gave our neighbours the furniture, clothes and possessions we had accumulated over two years. Online discussions made us worry that one-way tickets might cause problems at check-in, so we bought both outward and return tickets as a precaution. The full cost of our move: /en/pereezd/tsena-pereezda-v-urugvay/.
We are now on the Atlantic coast. Everything is different and we have started from zero again, but we feel a kind of freedom that our family missed in Switzerland.
Switzerland saved our lives and gave us two years to recover, and we are grateful for that. But we did not want to remain a temporary project with a counter always running in our minds. For us, Uruguay became a place to start living again rather than only waiting.