In the past 14 years, Katia Lopotenco has said goodbye to four grandmas and two grandpas. At least that’s what she called them. These elderly men and women weren’t related to her at all. They were her employers.
Each time one dies, she loses a friend and her job.
She moved from Moldova to Italy in 2002 after eight months without paycheck from the state for her teaching job. She found a job immediately in Italy as a badante, or caretaker.
Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers take care of Italy’s growing elderly population. The badante has become as integral to family life as the grandma herself.
The mutual support between these women and Italy is undermined by the lack of regulations that provide enough of these positions with appropriate benefits and visas. Although it has improved over the years, much of the difficulties these women face — exploitation, lack of contracts and mental health issues — go unseen.
OSPEDALE DI CIRCOLO, VARESE, ITALY — MAY 2016
Katia spent all of May in and out of a hospital in Varese, Italy, taking care of her seventh nonnina, an Italian term of endearment for a grandma. The woman has been sick, and having spent the last eight months in the care of Katia, enjoys having her at the hospital bedside.
For Katia, it’s a difficult yet beautiful moment. She waits to say goodbye, but also savors the increased affection from the woman she devotes every day to.
“I suffer a lot,” Katia said as she combed the fragile gray hair of a woman connected to several small tubes. “Even more when they are sick. I’m not like a doctor, but I come to the hospital anyway because I know she likes for me to feed her.”
Her energy and youthful smile contradict her age and tiring job.
While Katia sits in one hospital, her husband sits thousands of miles away in another in Chișinău, Moldova, the couple’s hometown. Her husband, who permanently lives with Katia in Induno Olona, Italy, had to return home for a surgery while she stayed behind to continue working.
It’s not the first time Katia has had to miss being at home for family in times of need.
The distance between her and her family is just one of the aspects of being a badante that puts strain on her life in Italy.
She remembers the day her daughter gave birth and she couldn’t be there. There were complications that they didn’t tell her about because they knew it would upset her.
“I was angry that I couldn’t be there, but they told me that what happened would have happened even if I would have been there,” she said sitting in an empty hospital waiting room. She paused and then added, “Today is my grandson’s first birthday.”
As the years have passed, so has her dream of returning home, along with other significant family moments.
Family, however, is what has kept her working a job that demands a lot. Katia says she is lucky to have found considerate employers even if some were in difficult mental and physical condition, such as her first employer who was paralyzed. Another put her in the hospital after accidentally hitting her with a car.
Some elderly folks can be extremely challenging, requiring 24/7 care. This combined with the isolated living conditions of foreign caretakers has spurred a incidence of depression.
According to Sergio Pasquinelli, director of the Institute for Social Research, it’s hard to tell just how pervasive this problem is because so many workers live without contracts and are less likely to seek help for such problems.
“The problem is hidden just as the whole badante phenomenon is hidden,” he said.
Soleterre, a humanitarian organization, estimates that around 830,000 people in Italy work as caretakers. Ninety percent of them are foreign and nearly two-thirds work either without a contract or both without a contract and without a living permit. Detecting any trend among such a large and invisible demographic is nearly impossible.
All these problems make integrating into Italian life difficult.
CHIŞINĂU, MOLDOVA — 1991–2002
When Katia moved to Italy, she had 4,000 euros in debt and two daughters in high school back home.
She had worked as a middle school history teacher for the past 18 years. She remembers dreaming about seeing ancient sites in Italy, Greece and Egypt.
“I went to Rome once and spent two days in the Moldovan embassy before returning home,” she said. “When work awaits you, there’s no time to enjoy anything in Rome.”
Moldova is today the poorest country in Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has yet to free itself from an economic chokehold prolonged by corrupt officials, organized crime and a lack of industry.
Between 1999 and 2009, nearly one-fourth of the Moldovan population emigrated abroad. Many chose to go to Italy because the language is easy to learn given its similarity to Moldovan. Because Moldova is not a part of the European Union, citizens must have a visa to enter E.U. countries.
Since 2007, Moldovan citizens can apply for dual-citizenship with Romania, but the process can take years to filter through the bureaucratic backlog. That same year, Romania became a member of the E.U. making the forgery business even more lucrative.
Katia paid 3,000 euros to the local mafia network to be smuggled into Italy after a failed attempt to enter Israel with a forged passport.
INDUNO OLONA, ITALY — JUNE 2002
Three days after arriving in Italy, not knowing anyone, she paid another 600 euros to a smuggler to find her a job. She started immediately as the caretaker for an elderly couple.
“They just catapulted me in there without knowing anything,” she said. “I didn’t even know how to open the front gate.”
But her teaching experience paid off in learning the language. She taught herself Italian in three months using children’s books.
Katia was fortunate to have arrived in Italy nine days before the Sanatoria law passed. The law granted any foreign worker in Italy with employment before September 6, 2002, a residence permit.
This May, Katia received citizenship in Italy.
PIAZZA XX SETTEMBRE, VARESE, ITALY — FEB. 2016
A few months before, she sat in Piazza XX Settembre in Varese with two of her sisters. They moved to Italy to be caretakers as well in the years after Katia arrived. Every Saturday they meet to enjoy their day off.
They are part of the majority of caretakers in Italy that hail from Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the former Soviet Republics of Moldova, Ukraine and Russia.
As more and more immigrants fled the aftermath of the Soviet dissolution in 1991, Italy’s elderly population was growing.
As of 2014, 408,659 people from the former Soviet countries of Russia, Ukraine and Moldova live in Italy. Nearly 75 percent are women. Another 487,203 women come from Romania. Most work as caretakers and most are long-distance mothers like Katia and her sisters.
They sat on a bench with their friend Giulia, also from Moldova. It was Carnival. A parade was thundering by in the background, but the women were engrossed in a conversation about their families and their country. The piazza was a cacophony of languages.
Giulia’s sharp, assertive voice garbled the language, but it’s clear she’s well-educated and witty. She rattled off Soviet history with Katia. Back in Moldova she was a nurse and the mother of two boys. She has been in Italy for almost seven years working to send money home to her family. Giulia recently lost her employer and friend after working with her for five years. With the end of her employment, she’s heading back to Moldova to be with her family.
“Everything we do, it’s for our children,” she said.
OSPEDALE DI CIRCOLO, VARESE, ITALY — MAY 2016
In the absence of family, Katia and the others find companionship in the people they take care of.
While she waits in the hospital, Katia looks for a new job. She would like to go home, but it’s been 14 years. Things have changed, she said, and her knowledge of curriculum is now outdated.
Besides, back home, she is no longer close with people she once knew, having visited only once a year. She is a stranger in her own home.
At least here, for a short time, she has her nonnina.
“When I’m there, she cries,” said Katia. She’s back in the hospital room holding the woman’s pale, wrinkly hand. “I spend all day with her. The more she clings to life, the more she clings to me. I think this is true affection.”
