Darya. Histoire d’une badante ukrainienne

Darya.
Histoire d’une badante ukrainienne

Text by : Jane Evelyn Atwood
Publisher : Le Bec en l’air
Release date : 09/2022
ISBN : 978-2-36744-171-9
Size : 19 × 20 cm
Langages : French / English
228 pages
60 black&white photographs

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Emerging in the late 1990s and having exploded in the early 2000s, the Badanti phenomenon remains very present in Italy, where it is currently estimated that more than 1 million auxiliary women left their country in Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine, Moldova and Romania) after the economic collapsed. These women do not generally have a regulated contract and work six days a week, at least 11 hours a day.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, whose interest in people living on the margins is well known, followed one of them for several months in 2007.

Coming from Ukraine on a tourist visa, Darya works in Bolzano, in the home of four elderly and physically diminished sisters. From morning to night, she takes care of them – care, hygiene, washing, meals – but also of the house, shopping and cleaning.

Once a year, sometimes twice, Darya returns to her village in Ukraine, where her husband, Igor, and her two daughters, aged about 20, are waiting for her. The reunions are moving, but each trip reveals a little more the gap between Darya and her family.

The money Darya sends home transforms the house and greatly improves her family’s standard of living as they turn to consumer society, while Darya lives sparsely in Italy and seems to have other values. What will happen when she retires and returns home?

With her characteristic empathy and rigorous approach, Jane Evelyn Atwood has chosen to describe in detail Darya’s unchanging daily routine, following her from morning to night as she performs her household chores and cares for the elderly.

The book deliberately chooses not to hide any of these steps, often tedious, in order to better underline the repetition, the monotony, the heaviness of the routine and the physical difficulty inherent to the life of a badante. Yet Darya never seems to complain and the photographs show how attentive she remains to everything she does.