Bulgarian geriatric nurses in Italy

Many Bulgarian women are now going abroad to work as private nurses to old people, mainly in Italy and Spain. Diana Iwanowa writes about what they find when they get there: "I am often in the small town of Warschez, where I see parallel worlds: the men stay at home with the children, the women go to Italy. A legitimate arrangement in economic terms. But the women don't realize before they leave what it means to be a geriatric nurse, or 'badante' as they are called in Italian. They know what it is like do to hard physical labour in Cyprus or Greece and they know how wretchedly low wages are in Bulgaria. But they underestimate the psychological burden that nursing an old person entails, the suffering and death they will encounter. Being a 'badante' means caring for a stranger in the last years of his or her life. ... Experiencing this person's suffering has an emotional dimension that no one anticipates."

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