Women Go West

Although she celebrated her 29th birthday only a week ago, Alina looks as if she is in her forties. Her straggly hair, bitten nails and swollen, constantly blinking eyes do her no favours and give the impression of a haunted person.

"All he needs to do is to make sure the girls are clean, fed and do their homework, but it’s still too much for him," she says of her husband. "It’s easier to whore around, drink and gamble. With my money."

Ignoring the beautiful view from the sunny terrace of a cafe in Deruta, a quiet Italian town near Perugia, Alina lights another cigarette, recounting the phone conversation she had an hour earlier with her teenage daughters in Romania.

When Alina left her hometown of Gaesti in 2006 to work in Italy as a home help for an elderly wheelchair-bound woman, her husband Cosmin, 37, remained at home to mind the children. But four days ago, her daughter had informed her, he disappeared along with all of the family’s money.

Alina is part of a growing phenomenon – women from the Balkans, working in the West, who have become the sole breadwinners for their households. It is a reversal of the traditional pattern in which men emigrated to work abroad, leaving their wives at home. Such a change is placing great strain on many families.

Changing face of migration 

Since 1990, women emigrants have outnumbered men in nine Balkan countries, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UNDESA, which tracks migration patterns. In Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, women make up 54% of migrants, as compared to 49.6% worldwide. In Macedonia and Bulgaria, it is even higher, with women making up 59% of migrants.

This trend is confirmed by a 2008 World Bank estimate, where women make up 4.3 million, or 54.4% of the 7.9 million people who emigrated from the Balkans.

In the past, women from the Balkans stayed home with their children while their husbands worked in the coalmines and steelworks of the West, hoping to join them later under family reunification policies.

However, afer the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, technological advances in the workplace and the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the nineties triggered a feminization in labor migration.  Factory labor gave way to jobs in the service sector that required or preferred female workers. As a result, more women became the main providers for their Balkan households.

Western trend changes the East 

The jobs reserved for immigrant women from the Balkans are generally poorly paid and in less desirable sectors of the economy where there are local shortages – working as cleaning ladies, waitresses, chambermaids and carers for the sick and elderly.

In one 2007 study by the Open Society Institute Romania, a full 88% of the nearly 255,000 Romanian women working temporarily in Italy, had worked at least once – often illegally – as household help.

But while this trend has empowered Balkan women, it has taken them away from their families and created new pressures on families, where a female breadwinner challenges patriarchal Balkan family structures.

"Female migrant breadwinners are the reality for a great proportion of families in the Balkans," Croatian sociologist Ivan Prolic says. "The trend is on the rise, re-configuring traditional families, making changes to patriarchal attitudes and shaking up rural communities." And so recent, that little research has yet been conducted.

It’s tough for the ‘badante’

Alina does a job that not many Italians are prepared to do and does so for what they would consider an offensively low salary. All the same, she manages to send €400 back to her family every month.

In addition to her salary, Alina has another incentive that she hopes will make her sacrifice worthwhile. The handicapped 77-year-old she is looking after promised to leave the house to her helper when she passes away.  "I’m waiting for her to die," Alina admits matter-of-factly, puffing away at yet another cigarette.

Because of this promise, she copes with the fact that she does not much like her employers, whom she believes to be racist. She notes a report from the newspaper Corriere della Sera last summer about an Italian woman who was arrested after abusing and virtually enslaving her Romanian housekeeper for a year. Threatening to report her as an illegal immigrant, she had forced her to live in the basement.

Meanwhile, immigrants like Alina also have to cope with the scorn of local residents. In Italy, as in the rest of Western Europe, anti-immigrant sentiments have increased since the economic downturn of 2008, according to a report by Rome-based NGO Caritas Migrante.   Italy’s rightist government chafes at the EU’s open border policy and the fact that, since January 2008, citizens of the newest EU members, Romania and Bulgaria, can more freely move and work anywhere in the EU.

Still, immigration specialist Antonio Ricci says that Italy should be grateful for its more than 2.5 million registered immigrants and approximately 700,000 illegal immigrants. In an aging society with a very low birth rate, the economy would suffer severely without immigrant labour, especially small and medium sized firms, he says.

Privately-hired careers from Eastern Europe who care for the sick and elderly, cover gaps left by the country’s inefficient welfare policy, experts say. For these reasons, home helpers were excluded from the toughened anti-immigrant measures imposed last year by the Italian Government.

Still, the public’s disdain for both men and women who look "foreign" is readily apparent, detected in the way many Italians pronounce the word ‘badante’, which refers to foreign women working as carers.  Alina is fed up with it.

"Shop assistants in supermarkets always follow me around to see if I’m stealing anything,  and some people won’t return my greeting in the street. It’s humiliating and happens a lot," she says. "My friend from Bulgaria, another badante, says I’ll get used to it, but I never will."

Not just about money

While demand for migrants is created by labor gaps in Western Europe, the poor economies of most Balkan countries provide an almost limitless supply of women. Surveys in 2006 and 2008 by the Gallup Balkan Monitor revealed that deep dissatisfaction with living standards was the main reason for these migration trends.

However, most female migrants interviewed in Italy, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania and Bulgaria believe the benefits of migration go beyond money.

Neda Plesa from Boboljusci, in Bosnia, is a loud, witty woman in her late thirties. With an almost constant smile on her face, it’s hard to imagine her being sad. Still, she says she suffered from serious depression before she found work abroad.

Like a few hundred other women from Bosnia’s northwest, Neda has found a new career in northern Austria. Since 2004, she has worked on a dairy farm outside Linz. "My job is one per cent inspiration and 99% perspiration," she jokes. But she still sees her job as an escape from a life she likens to prison. "My ex-husband thought a woman shouldn’t work and that a man should provide for the family. Typical Bosnian macho stuff. While he worked in a construction company, I stayed at home, bored and lonely, cooking, eating and watching TV and getting fatter.

"When I asked him for money, I had to explain exactly what I needed it for. It is called economic violence, and it eventually destroyed my self-respect." Thanks to her job in Austria, Neda is now reasonably well off and has discovered a passion for backpacking. She is also divorsed.

Mira Bator, 38, from Kiseljak, in central Bosnia, also says that her migration has not just been about money. She, too, feels a new life working abroad has given her self-respect. Bator left Bosnia for Zagreb, Croatia, in 2007 to work in her cousin’s shoe store as a saleswoman. Her unemployed husband and pre-school son, Adam, joined her last year.

"My parents want me to quit my job to take care of Adam and think my husband should provide for the family," she says. "But I don’t have a problem with being the breadwinner. It makes me feel self-confident and proud of myself. Being confined within four walls could never make me feel this way," she adds.

A world without women

If anyone wants to know what a world without women would look like, they should visit Varshets, a remote town in Bulgaria’s Montana district.

Even on hot and sunny summer days, not a single woman is to be seen in the Bor-Cvor snack bar on the main street. The place is packed with men, laughing and chitchatting over simple tables covered with chequered red-and-white linens.

Defying the stereotypes of male-only communities, Varshets looks peaceful, orderly and pleasant. The men hang around in the bar every day, supporting each other while they wait for their wives to come home for vacations.

Peter Dimov, 45, a construction worker with a warm smile, has not seen his wife since last year. He admits he wept when his son recently asked what color his mother’s eyes were, because he couldn’t remember.

Peter’s readiness to talk about his loneliness and longing in the middle of a pub and in front of other men, contradicts another stereotype about men, as do his friends’ compassionate attitudes. They admit to similar experiences.

The men of Varshets have learned to cook and help their daughters get through adolescent crises. Thankfully, their attitude toward this complete reversal of the usual patriarchal family model appears to be healthy.

"I never appreciated what my wife did for the kids and the household until I lost my job and she went to work in Italy," Peter admits. "Now, raising my boys, I realize how hard it is to be a housewife. Construction work is a piece of cake in comparison with this," he jokes, while others nod approvingly.

 

Reported in Zagreb, Rome, Sofia and Bucharest this is part of a longer piece sponsored by the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.