Jobs Sold on Garibaldi Square
Vira Malunova who hails from Volyn is well known in her native land, even though she has spent most of her years in Lviv as a local television hostess. Several years ago she was one of the first announcers of the newly formed Volyn Television Company. Her popularity is easily explained: a stunning blonde with large expressive eyes and a soft clear voice.
Then she vanished from the screen and later from Lutsk. No one could recognize Vira when she returned. Everything about her was different except the eyes. She looked even younger, very slim, with a deep tan and jet black hair combed back flat. There had been no time for hair-styling. She had wanted to see the world and learn Italian. Her friend had told her about Italy (she had long ago settled there), so she got herself a foreign travel passport and in several weeks was ready to leave.
East or west, home is best. Now she knows it from her own experience. Vira visited The Day to recount her own Neapolitan version of Santa Barbara. Indeed, seven months spent in Naples hunting for jobs rated a television series. She wanted to tell about how we Ukrainians are treated in Italy, as a warning to other job hunters like her.
SLAVE LABOR
Vira is now convinced that it is useless to make plans even for the next thirty minutes. Seven months in Naples and Rome made her realize that man is but a speck of dust in this world completely in the hands of God. No, she does not consider herself a loser. On the contrary; working as a television announcer in aristocratic Lviv (she had to win a contest with 52 contenders), she had an apartment and eventually she and her husband built a dacha. She would have never returned to Lutsk but for the sudden offer of an announcer’s job at the Volyn Television Company. She accepted, although the family had to stay another year in Lviv. Then there was the red tape transferring the family, which took several months. She lost her job and then she decided to travel to Italy.
She knew what she wanted: working for an intellectual family, speaking Italian, preferably where someone also knew English (Vira knows Polish as well). And no children. Laughingly, she says they scared her. She found such a job eventually, but first, like most Ukrainian women seeking employment in Italy as house help, she had to travel a winding thorny road.
They can tell you in Lutsk, Rivne, or Lviv that they are waiting for you in Italy, that you will be accommodated at a resort hotel, that you will surely get a well-paying job with excellent working conditions. Lies, all lies.
The resort hotel accommodation you are promised at the travel firm turns out to be a cheap single room apartment packed with 20-25 Ukrainian women awaiting employment. The hostess is also a Ukrainian who settled earlier and learned to fit into the slave labor pattern. More often than not she closely cooperates with the Italians. You have to pay her some 300 dollars for a job. Actually, the whole thing is illegal, because you can only get a two-week visa. There are better jobs in the north of Italy, but the risk of deportation is higher.
The Day: Weren’t you scared, humiliated? After all you were brought up differently.
V. M.: You get scared when lost in the woods. There were many others like me around. Regrettably, there still are and will be. The Italian authorities generally turn a blind eye on illegal immigrants; they are interested in having them. Ukrainian women have replaced Romanians and Poles as domestic help. There are Russians, but very few. Most Ukrainians come from the western territories, especially from Lviv oblast (whole villages immigrate), for they have an old tradition of emigration. Our women can do all sorts of jobs: cooking, cleaning, washing, nursing, sewing, or knitting. As for humiliation, remember the Bible: For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. [Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11] The celebrated Ukrainian Canadian millionaire Peter Jacyk started as a dishwasher.
The Day: What kind of job can a Ukrainian woman expect?
V. M.: Taking care of children and the elderly or keeping house. Old parents live with their children only in Ukraine. An Italian family is usually large, six or seven children, but the parents usually live separately after their children grow up. Also, their pensions are good, so they can hire household help, or their children do.
MADONNA AND CINDERELLA
Italian women hire Ukrainian housemaids because they are supposedly independent and career- oriented, meaning the they do not want to be distracted by household chores. Everybody is so religious (you hear Ave Maria at every step), and they have an ancient culture. Considering all this, one would expect a lot of women’s solidarity and sympathy. But Ukrainian immigrants don’t see much of either.
If you are lucky you get a job as a housemaid with a decent family. But often it’s like buying a pig in a poke and you are sent from the “hotel” straight to living hell. Anything can happen. You can find yourself nursing a crippled or mentally retarded child, or a 95 year-old man who has to be looked after like a baby. The Italian woman hiring you might like to carp pathologically. I think that all Italians want their homes sparkling clean. Actually, shining is the word. She can make you get up at around two in the morning to change the curtains, or she can throw everything out of her wardrobe and order you to put all of it back oh-so neatly just to keep you busy. Being ordered to do the same thing several times over is very humiliating and no one seems to appreciate your diligence. Also, the master of the house, his son, or even his father could get horny.
At an early stage in her Italian serfdom, the former television star of Volyn lived on bread she found in the family garbage and wash it down with tap water.
I’m not trying to paint a black or white picture of hired labor in Italy, but I would have never ventured that trip if I’d known even a little about what it was really like.
TEMPTATIONS AND REALITIES
Vira Malunova was fortunate enough to find an intellectual family (the man was a physician and the woman a creative school principal). They found mutually interesting topics to discuss and the family appreciated Vira’s potato dishes so much they called her their potato queen.
They had a five-room apartment with several bathrooms, a spacious sitting room, ancestral furniture, paintings, and a lot of antiques.
“I was surprised to watch Italians let a total stranger in to their home,” says Vira. “A housemaid hired like that could turn out to be a thief, couldn’t she? You find yourself in a rich household, with plenty of valuable things lying around and no one to watch over you; you have your passport and there is nobody home, so you can pick up something and leave, and no one will know where to find you. Life is always full of temptations, and this is especially true of life in Italy. But you also know that all those valuable things do not belong to you; there are too many of them and what little you have is yours by right. I don’t mean it’s part of my Ukrainian character, but I was chagrined to know that Ukrainian women, so hard-working and worthy of a better lot, had to earn their living from all those Italian signori.”
Once she and a friend had even to eat at a canteen run by the Caritas Catholic charity. The Italians are devout Catholics and will not allow a homeless laborer to starve. And so Caritas hands out meals once a day. But first you have to stand in line for an hour and a half to get a ticket. After that you can sit at a table. The meal is preceded and ended by a prayer. That time Vira saw many Slavic faces at the table, people who had gone down the social drain.
The enduring Ukrainian character becomes especially manifest in such ordeals. It does not allow one to succumb to circumstances. Standing in line for a charitable meal, Vira heard an anecdote, maybe based on a fact. A Ukrainian man is writing a letter home: “I’m not going to return as yet. I live at Preno Hotel and dine at the Caritas Restaurant.” Preno Hotel means empty railroad cars and Caritas Restaurant a charitable canteen.
PARADISE ON EARTH, BUT NOT FOR ALL
If she were to paint a picture illustrating the Ukrainian laborers’ status in Italy, she would depict Garibaldi Square in Naples, a huge pile of striped traveling bags and exhausted Ukrainian women sitting by. It is a rail terminal square and parking lot of tourist buses dislodging their virtually slave passengers. The buses also carry letters, money, and parcels. Some received paska Easter bread, but Vira received nothing because she had not wanted to bother her family. She was treated to a local Easter cake by her Italian woman employer. She ate it and cried.
Nostalgia is a vicious nemesis: he will not bother you for the first couple of months when you are packed with new impressions and emotions. And then he lashes out and sinks his teeth deep into your heart. You moan and writhe and there is no relief, except perhaps a Sunday service at an Orthodox church and, of course, letters from home. Also, meeting with compatriots in Garibaldi Square (the Neapolitans call it a dirty place and prohibit their house help to visit it; if they find you out there they will fire you right there and then).
“But we had to find a place to communicate,” says Vira. “and in that square Ukrainians even exchange jobs, I mean you can buy or sell employment.”
Some, after taking a good look around and learning a bit of Italian, manage to find better jobs. Others return home or use their locally acquired experience to look for a job in North America. Italians also are not keen on buying a pig in a poke. They will listen to a departing good housemaid’s reference. This arrangement will cost the replacement around $300, and this is taken as a matter of course. In fact, when Vira tried to make such arrangements free, she would scare off her prot л eg л es who suspected foul play. What does she think now, having had her bellyful of Naples and Rome? To go or not to go: that is the question.
“I’m afraid that this is just the beginning,” says Vira. “Buses with Ukrainian laborers park on Garibaldi Square every day. I have no right to say whether they should go or not. We were there, we still are, and we will continue to be serfs there. There were times when Italy had plenty of jobs for Ukrainians. History now. There are too many of us.”
* * *
After the New Year I realized that an old friend of mine, a former fellow student had not sent a Christmas card for the first time in many years. I called her at the newspaper she worked for in Ternopil oblast, but there was no answer. Finally her home number answered in the afternoon.
“Olha doesn’t live here any more,” a calm male voice informed me.
I recognized it. It was Olha’s husband, of course, and she had no other place to live.
“You’re Natalka, aren’t you?” Volodymyr had also recognized my voice. “Olha left for Italy a long time ago. Doing what? Same as them all.”
I was haunted by memories for several days afterward. Olha had been taught all her subjects in English when in grade school, she had been a straight A student at the university and a good journalist. And now she is probably a farm hand in Italy.
There are villages and regional centers in Volyn where almost all young women left in search of jobs to Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Austria. And the same is true of Galicia and Zakarpattia. They joke that they do the same kind of jobs abroad, except without four-letter words and for real money. Perhaps some of them will settle there and keep their small homes in the Ukrainian style, lest homesickness get the better of them.
Friends say that Vira Malunova is planning another trip to Italy.
INCIDENTALLY...
Ukrainian Ambassador to Italy Borys Hudyma, meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Rome, stated that there are some 120,000 illegal emigrants from Ukraine and that only 8,000 are officially employed. The Ukrainian Embassy is holding consultations to solve the problem of their legalization. The Ukrainian side intends to make a diplomatic arrangement concerning the [Ukrainian] emigration quota in Italy (the official quota for all foreigners is 185,000). To do so, Ukraine must sign an agreement on deporting the [illegal] immigrants, reports Interfax Ukraine. It was pointed out at the meeting that the Italian authorities shows a tolerant attitude toward the illegals, except when they turn up on the wrong side of the law. Deportation follows the second arrest.
