As jobless men flee abroad, Albanian women embrace new freedoms

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

The writer is a resident reporter in the Balkans.

Around a wood stove in a shop in Bajram Curri, in northern Albania, a circle of women work, chat and exchange photos of their children and husbands, almost all of them in London. Of the 12,310 Albanian migrants who arrived in the UK last year by boat, an overwhelming majority were men from this mountainous region. They left due to lack of work or a feeling of boredom and hopelessness.

This exodus is transforming the lives of the wives and mothers they left behind. At the Bajram Curri shop, women come together to make food, produce hand-woven clothing and jewelry, and draw hiking maps to sell to locals and visitors. By keeping their homes alight, they have created precisely what their men lacked: a social life, a source of income, and hope.

Despite the recent boom in tourism, AlbaniaThe chronic shortage of jobs continues to scare away men. Economic conditions are not as desperate as they were under communism, but the transition to a prosperous market economy is proving long and difficult. The country has some of the lowest salaries and the highest costs of living in the Balkans. TO proposed The minimum wage will be insufficient to cope with rising inflation: in 2021-22, Albanians spent up to 60 percent of their income on food alone, explained Andi Hoxhaj, a Western Balkans specialist at University College London.

Lured by rumors of easier lifestyles, farmers moved their families to small urban centers like Barjam Curri. The store’s website administrator, Gerta, lived in the country growing vegetables and raising sheep until her father decided to move into a dingy apartment in the city in 2007. When she couldn’t find work, the family nearly died of hunger.

It is common in these cases for women to become breadwinners using “interior skills” such as cleaning or shopping, explains Catherine Bohne, an Italian-American who has lived in these mountains for 15 years and helped set up the shop. Bajram Curry. “Meanwhile, the men sit down to drink rakia and feel emasculated.”

Under communism, women actively participated in the labor market, but in the 1990s patriarchal norms resurfaced, forcing women to return to their homes, especially in the more remote parts of the country. Now the men slip away in silence, many of whom leave just go to town with a t-shirt in a plastic bag and don’t come back. “Often the men don’t pay back the money for a long time because they have debts to human traffickers or they can’t earn enough from manual labor. The women left behind just have to move on,” says Bohne.

This can bring new freedoms to your path. Gerta has learned technology skills by managing the website and will be going to university next year. Lida, the store manager, was confined at home by her husband until she left to find work in Belgium. Her with four children to raise on her own, she made jewelry to sell, gained confidence, and finally stopped texting her husband asking for permission to leave her.

The store’s next project is to create a network of women who make a living growing or gathering things: wild blueberries, blackberries or chestnuts. Previously, these women earned just €10 for three days of work at a exploitative market collection point. The ladies in the shop encouraged them to make jam, which they can sell for €5 a jar.

For every success story, there are still women starving to death, becoming victims of modern slavery, or having to pay off the debts of a child they took on. boat to london. Still, there are some positives for the next generation. Mothers waiting for their sons to leave are now more likely to focus on their daughters’ studies. In 2021, 71% of university enrollments in Albania were women, up from 58% in the previous decade. Meanwhile, male labor force participation has steadily declined over the past 30 years.

Two hours from Bajram Curri, in the village of Shtiqën on the outskirts of Kukës, lives 89-year-old Naze with her daughter and three granddaughters. Since her children and grandchildren are all in London, she focuses her energies on her daughters and “not just finding them a rich husband,” she says proudly. Naze’s nine-year-old granddaughter greets me sheepishly in English. “She studies a lot,” says Naze. “One day, she will be the president of Albania.”