For Romanian woman, future lies in Spain

BUCHAREST - From a balcony on the 10th floor of a drab building in Bucharest, Elena Ghita sees other blocs of dingy apartments lining narrow alleys. What she does not see is a future.

At 23, she has already had four jobs. She has been a seamstress, a receptionist at a dry cleaners and at a real estate company. Now she is a lab technician. She works nights and earns 860 lei ($310) a month, the national average.

The future, she says, means working as a shop vendor or babysitter in Spain. “Or maybe as a caretaker for an older person,” she says.

Modest dreams but hopes like these have sparked fears in several western European countries that thousands of Romanians could pour out of their ex-communist country when it joins the European Union in 2007 or 2008.

Britain, in particular, is worried that workers like Ghita, who don’t speak foreign languages and have limited resources, will stretch their job market and welfare services -- adding to a wave of migrants that arrived after the EU’s first eastward expansion in 2004.

Almost one in 10 Romanians has sought work abroad, fleeing poverty and disenchantment with slow reforms, since the end of communism in 1989. Many are working abroad illegally.

Now, nearly nine in 10 young people say they would seek jobs abroad, at least temporarily, if that were legal, according to a recent World Bank study.

Romanian officials downplay western fears about an influx, but Ghita says most of her friends have either left or are considering emigrating. She will soon follow them.

“As a young person in Romania, I don’t get a lot of help, salaries are low and the state is not doing anything for me,” said the short, round-cheeked woman with large eyes set off by rectangular glasses.

She is learning Spanish from day-time soap operas and hopes to follow her boyfriend of two years who left for Madrid on a tourist visa and is earning 60 euros ($76) a day -- or Ghita’s weekly salary -- as a menial worker.

All of her friends working abroad are doing so illegally, including the husband of a colleague who was banned from Spain for several months for not having a work permit, but returned immediately after the ban ended.

Ghita says she would never become an illegal migrant as she could not bear the embarrassment of repatriation.

On a shelf in the two-room apartment she shares with her parents and a younger sister, she keeps a folder with the documents required for a work permit abroad. She recently got a passport, but still needs to legalise several documents when she gets paid later this month.

“It will be difficult and I will miss my family. But people have been telling me ’Just shut up and do it’ all my life. Why not tough it out in Spain, where I have a chance of a better life?”    

Reuters

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