Five years ago Carola Eijsenring set up her own business 'Indigo'. Indigo bundles intercultural forces and clarifies communication between different worlds. This is done in three different projects: intercultural work with young children, world stories and world women. Indigo has recently started a 'world women' project with TU/e.

The project is intended to familiarize partners of expats more with things in Eindhoven. Eijsenring: "The partners join the expats without having a purpose themselves. In many cases they are highly educated, had good jobs in their country of origin but do not have anything to occupy themselves with in Eindhoven. They do not speak the language and have no clue where to begin to look for a job, for instance. By means of the 'world women' project we want to try and change this. We want to put them in touch with Dutch women, so that the threshold for taking action is lowered a bit."

In the project five international highly educated women are linked to two highly educated Dutch women. In groups they then engage in different activities so that the international women get to know more about the way things work in Eindhoven.

Silke Georgi works as a freelancer for Indigo. She is German and was raised in the US. Eight years ago she and her husband came to Eindhoven because he went to work for Philips. "In the beginning everything is new and not very difficult as a result. However, after a while I found out that I would not be able to find work here at the level that I was used to. I was trained as a lawyer, which is a highly specific branch. The view of the future that I had was no longer right. This is a problem that many highly educated partners run into. It is a good thing that something is being done about this."

In addition, she thinks that the image of Eindhoven as it exists abroad could be enhanced. "Brainport is called the Silicon Valley of Europe. That is simply not true. Eindhoven is a quiet, small town where there is not a great deal to be done for our target group." (HB)