10 April 2006

ONE WOMAN'S EXPERIENCE

I had a long talk last night with a Russian woman and her Ukrainian husband in their house in Calitri. I met her a few weeks ago through another Ukrainian woman, and have been hanging out with her more and more.

They both had much to say; here are a few highlights:

“You don’t have to talk to anyone else,” she told me. “All our stories are the same.” She’s been in Italy 11 years, the first two in Naples, the last nine in Calitri. She came alone, and her husband and their young daughter followed later. In the Ukraine she worked as a speech therapist.

Now they own a house in Calitiri, and they both have steady jobs (she takes care of old people or children, he works in one of the aforementioned battery factories). Their 16-year-old-daughter attends high school and hopes to move to Naples or Rome to attend university in a few years.

When asked about how living in a small town compares to Naples, she said that the people of this area, with their simple lives and peasant (“contadini”) backgrounds, are very nice. “Le persone di citta’ sono piu dure, non capiscono le nostre difficolta” (“City people are tougher, they don’t understand our hardships”).

I asked her if she would like to one day work as a speech therapist again, and she said that it would be too hard to have her degree transfer here. Plus, she said, in an Italian more colloquial than mine, that her Italian isn’t good enough to work as a speech therapist. She also reminded me that there’s not work for Italians with degrees, and so she’d have a hard time finding that kind of work even if she was qualified. She went on to tell me that when her daughter complains about having to study, the teenager says, “Tu ti sei laureata e’ adesso lavi il sedere di qualche vecchietta” (“You have a university degree and now you clean some old lady’s butt”). She ended by trying to explain: “I’m not ashamed of my work, it’s not right that I have to leave my country and my family just to have enough money to live. It’s not right that I can be here and that my husband and child do not lack for anything, but back home, in the Ukraine, we would starve. There I would work all month to buy a pair of boots for my child, I would scrimp and save every cent for those boots. That’s all I could buy that month. Here, it’s not like that, we have everything we could need or want.”

This week I spent some time at an Italian class for foreigners, taught at a high school in Calitri, but meant for foreigners from the entire region. It’s the second year such a class has been offered. There are mainly Ukrainians, but also a few Albanians, Poles, and one man from Burma (who claims to be one of 30 Burmese in all of Italy—including nuns and priests, he said…).

And the elections? I’m writing this at 10pm Sunday night, Italian time. The polls just closed for the day and will be open tomorrow until 3pm. No exit poll news nationally, but there’s a lot of energy here in town, especially where we are. The polling station is about 100 yards from our house, set up in an old school house, and there have been carabinieri stationed in and outside since last night. We’ve been told we can go watch the first count at 3pm tomorrow, before the ballots get sent to Avellino.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home