It's exam day at the Lycée Française Saint-Exupéry in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Very close to the central market, a hub of commerce, bustle, and shouting, stands a wall with double barbed wire and little signage. From the outside, it doesn't look like a high school, but when you walk through the door, neither does it. There's very little activity and a lot of silence. In fact, it's Baccalaureate day. selectivity, an exam such as the selectivity that allows students to continue higher education and that puts an end to the stage of high school (equivalent to high school).

Alba Arjona is 30 years old, she is from l'Ametlla de Mar and she has been a primary school teacher in a public school in Roda de Ter (Osona) since this school year, but until last year she was a Spanish teacher in a college (the equivalent of a public secondary school) in Paris, the city where she settled immediately after finishing her university studies. "I was so keen to start working as a teacher in Catalonia or abroad, but I had the feeling that if I started in Catalonia I would stay there forever. I wanted to see the world," she recalls.

The opportunity to spend a few years in the land of the pharaohs doesn't come along often, so when it presented itself in 2022 to Alba Ruiz, a 34-year-old teacher from Mataró, and her husband, with whom they had just had a child, they decided to take advantage of it. He had been offered the option of temporarily moving to Egypt for work, and she requested a leave of absence from the school where she had been working for eight years, San José in her hometown, so she could travel. "It was now or never," she explains.