At the Diaspora Days in Iași, Silvia Dumitrache on the lives behind migration: “Romania sees the money that comes home, but doesn’t see enough of the life left behind”
For 12 years, Iași has become, for a few days, a meeting point for Romanians from the diaspora, bringing together people who have built their lives abroad and who maintain, in different forms and intensities, ties to Romania. The Diaspora Days – “Iași is HOME!” represent more than an event dedicated to Romanians everywhere: it is a space for dialogue, exchange of experience and ideas, where discussions cover education, culture, identity, entrepreneurship, and the projects through which the diaspora can contribute to Romania’s development. For Iași, the event is also an opportunity to stay connected to its communities scattered around the world and to turn the bond between “home” and the diaspora into concrete collaboration.
At the Diaspora Days in Iași I met Silvia Dumitrache, one of the active voices of the Romanian community in the diaspora. For more than a decade, she has been bringing into the public sphere the problems faced by Romanian women who left to work in Italy and by the families left behind. Her experience of life in Italy, her work in the social field, and direct contact with Romanians in the community have, over time, transformed her personal experience into a form of civic involvement.
How ADRI was born: “I understood that it’s not enough to say ‘I’m sorry.’ You have to ask: ‘What can I do?’ And ever since, I try to do.”
In May 2011 she founded the Association of Romanian Women in Italy – ADRI, an organization that set out to support migrant women in their professional and family lives, to inform them of their rights, and to maintain the connection between families separated by migration.
The story of her involvement, however, began before the association was founded. Silvia Dumitrache says she understood from her own experience how important it is for a person who has arrived in a foreign country to have information, support, and someone to turn to for help. A moment that marked her deeply came in 2010, when she saw the documentary “Home Alone – A Romanian Tragedy,” about children left in Romania after their parents went abroad to work. That was when she looked at migration beyond wages and money sent home, and understood more clearly its human, emotional, and social cost.
Out of that awareness came one of the initiatives that would become emblematic of her work: “Mother Loves You!”, a project through which parents who had gone to work in Italy could communicate audiovisually with their own children left in Romania, through public libraries. In just six months, 323 children from 28 public libraries in Dolj County used the free videoconferencing service. For Silvia Dumitrache, though, what mattered was not the number itself, but what it represented: 323 children, and 323 bonds kept alive between children and their parents.
From this experience grew an entire body of advocacy work. ADRI became involved in the issues of transnational families, migrant women’s rights, undeclared work and exploitation, the prevention of human trafficking, women’s physical and psychological health, research, civic participation, and institutional dialogue. The organization took part in the Interinstitutional Working Group dedicated to children whose parents have gone abroad to work, coordinated by the Presidential Administration, contributing to the drafting of the report on this issue. The experience accumulated in the field of transnational families and the advocacy work later also fed into the European debate. In 2021, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted Resolution 2366 and Recommendation 2196 on the impact of labor migration on children left behind in their countries of origin.
But, she says, before statistics and institutions come people. There are women who leave Romania insufficiently prepared and insufficiently informed about Italian legislation, employment contracts, social rights, the healthcare system, or retirement conditions. Sometimes they don’t know enough Italian and face difficulties adapting culturally. Vulnerability increases when a woman accepts undeclared or partially declared work — “under the table” or “gray market” — without realizing that the price may be paid years later, through missing contributions, lower pensions, more difficult access to social benefits, and reduced protection in the event of a labor dispute.
Especially in domestic and care work, the line between the job and personal life becomes fragile. A woman who lives in the home of the person she cares for can end up being considered available almost permanently. Real free time may be lacking, along with isolation, physical and emotional exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and the difficulty of having a private life. In some cases there are unpaid overtime hours, tasks beyond the contract, days off not respected, or wages that don’t match the work actually performed. And when the workplace is also the home, dependence on the employer can become so strong that the woman is afraid to report abuse, because she risks losing both her job and her place to live at the same time.
Behind this reality lies another problem that, Silvia Dumitrache says, is talked about far too little: the health of the woman who takes care of someone else’s health. Many of these women postpone their own medical checkups, ignore symptoms, and keep working even when exhausted. Care work involves not only physical effort but also enormous psychological pressure: ongoing responsibility, loneliness, and constant contact with illness, disability, old age, and sometimes death.
A right you don’t know is a right hard to defend
At the same time, women contribute enormously to the functioning of Italian society, especially through care work, but their contribution doesn’t always translate into social recognition, representation, and participation in decisions that concern them. They look after the children, the elderly, and the dependent family members of other families, while their own families may remain hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
That is why Silvia Dumitrache believes responsibility cannot be shifted onto the woman alone, through the simple advice to “get better informed.” What’s needed is preparation before departure, continuous and accessible information, language courses, knowledge of labor and social rights, access to medical and psychological services, controls against exploitation, community support, and more serious cooperation between Romanian and Italian institutions.
A right you don’t know is, in her view, a right that’s hard to defend. Women need to know they have rights set out in their employment contract: correct classification, fair pay, working hours, daily and weekly rest, leave, public holidays, overtime, sick leave, the thirteenth-month payment (tredicesima), and severance pay (TFR). A live-in caregiver (badante convivente) is not obliged to be available 24 hours a day simply because she lives at her workplace. There is a set schedule, and there is a right to rest and free time.
Just as important is the matter of contributions and pensions. Women who have worked both in Romania and in Italy need to check their contribution record ahead of time and understand the European mechanisms for coordinating social security systems. Years of contributions made in different countries should not simply be regarded as lost years. And at the end of an employment relationship, entitlements related to severance pay, unused leave, outstanding amounts, and declared and paid contributions all need to be checked.
For Silvia Dumitrache, however, migrant women’s rights go beyond labor rights. They have the right to health, to protection against violence, harassment, humiliation, and discrimination, but also the right to information, association, civic participation, and representation. Romania is a member state of the European Union, and Romanian women working in Italy need to be aware that they are European citizens, holders of rights — not simply beneficiaries of a work opportunity. Over the years she has followed the evolution of the Romanian community in Italy, Silvia Dumitrache has also witnessed a profound transformation. At first, what she calls “migration of necessity” was more visible: people leaving for their families, for debts, for their children, or simply to build a better life. Today the community is far more stable and diverse. There are families who have lived in Italy for twenty or thirty years, children raised there, young people who studied in Italian schools and universities, professionals, entrepreneurs, doctors, researchers, artists, and people engaged in civil society.
The image of Romanians in Italian society has also changed. Where in the past the community was too often portrayed through crime, poverty, or work considered menial, today the contribution of Romanians to the Italian economy and society is more visible. Prejudices persist, but the community’s image has become more complex and closer to its real diversity. In the case of women, the change is even more evident: more and more of them know their worth, demand that their rights be respected, take courses, change jobs when they are exploited, start businesses, get involved in associations, and want a voice in the community.
Still, the community should not be idealized. There remain women isolated in domestic work, people working under the table or in gray-market conditions, people who don’t know the language or the legislation well enough, people who reach retirement age and discover problems with their contributions, transnational families, and parents who continue to live apart from their children.
One of the biggest changes is that Italy is no longer, for many Romanians, simply a place you go to work for a few years and then leave. Homes, stable jobs, families, and roots have taken hold. For many, “home” is no longer a single place: it can be Romania, Italy, or, in a deeper sense, a bit of both. And if fifteen years ago the question was mainly “How do we manage to integrate into Italy?”, today the question, in her view, is far more complex: “How do we turn integration into rights, social mobility, participation, and representation?”
That also means a new stage for diaspora organizations: turning individual problems into public issues, building connections between people and institutions, and making visible realities that would otherwise remain hidden. For Silvia Dumitrache, the point of advocacy is precisely this shift — from one person’s story to the understanding of a social phenomenon, and ultimately to a public responsibility.
The “Bridges”(Poduri) Project — culture that gives migration a human face
Culture forms a chapter of its own. Her involvement in the “Bridges” (Poduri) project is tied to the same concern for how the diaspora is seen and understood. Silvia Dumitrache believes that literature, theater, photography, and film can say what statistics don’t always manage to: what the person behind the number feels. Behind the millions of Romanians who have left, there are departures and returns, children raised between two countries, families separated and reunited, sacrifices, achievements, loneliness, longing, adaptation, discrimination — but also friendships, loves, and lives rebuilt.
For her, art “gives migration back its human face.” A woman is not just a caregiver or a cleaner. She can be a teacher, a nurse, an engineer, a mother or a grandmother, with a biography, dreams, skills, and an identity of her own. A label can erase that identity, while art can restore her biography and her dignity.
“Bridges” also carries, in this sense, a dimension of memory. Romanian migration is one of the great social transformations of recent history, and the stories of this generation need to be preserved. Otherwise, within a few decades, there is a risk that only the numbers will remain. For Silvia Dumitrache, the migrant’s experience can become a bridge between the country they left and the one they live in, between two languages, two cultures, two societies, and sometimes two identities. She doesn’t necessarily have to choose between Romania and Italy; she can belong, emotionally and culturally, to both. This need to tell the diaspora’s full story also comes up when she talks about the press. Over the years, ADRI has worked with the press in Italy, Romania, and other European countries, offering documentation, information, contacts, and the community’s experience for articles, investigations, reports, and broadcasts. For Silvia Dumitrache, the press plays a fundamental role, because many of the realities of migration take place in spaces society doesn’t see: in the homes where women work, in families split between two countries, in a caregiver’s loneliness, or in the room of a child waiting for their mother. If these realities don’t become visible, they risk remaining only individual dramas.
An important personal dimension also explains how Silvia Dumitrache views access to rights and institutions. She arrived in Italy in the context of her child’s medical treatment. That experience made her understand, very early on, how important access to information and medical services is, and how important it is not to give up when you know a right needs to be recognized. Later, in Romania, she succeeded in getting her child’s illness recognized as a chronic condition and having the necessary medication added to the list of those provided free of charge. For her, the outcome didn’t remain a personal victory — it became proof that one family’s problem can produce a change that’s useful for other people too.
From this, she says, comes one of the fundamental lessons of her own experience: a problem you experience as strictly personal is not always only your problem. If you discover that the same difficulty is shared by many other people, it needs to be carried further, to the institutions, until a solution can be found.
“Italy Syndrome”: when the woman caring for someone else loses her own health
After years of direct contact with Romanian women in Italy, Silvia Dumitrache says there is a story that Romania still doesn’t hear enough. Public discourse in Romania talks a great deal about the money sent home: the renovated house, the paid installment, the child supported through school or university. Less visible is the woman behind that money: the sleepless nights, the loneliness, the longing, the exhaustion, or the years in which a mother didn’t see her children.
For live-in caregivers, this reality can be even harsher. The workplace is also the home. Sometimes the woman barely leaves the house of the person she cares for. The schedule set out in the contract and the actual hours she is called on to work can become two different things. And in some parts of Italy, she says, she has come across cases of exploitation, undeclared work, and isolation, as well as cases of extreme vulnerability, including situations linked to human trafficking and severe forms of exploitation.
But Silvia Dumitrache refuses to speak of Romanian women in the diaspora only as victims. She has met women who rebuilt their lives from scratch at 40 or 50, learned a new language, found their way through an unfamiliar system, supported their children and parents, and held entire families together. Some left violent relationships, others changed careers, took courses, became entrepreneurs, or got involved civically. For her, the real story is the complete story, not just the story of sacrifice. That’s why Romania should be asking different questions about the diaspora. Not just “How much money have Romanians abroad sent home?” but also: How do the people who produce that money live? What have they lost? Which of their rights have been respected? What’s happening to their health? To their children? And what are we, as a state and as a society, doing for them?
At the heart of these questions lies what has come to be called “Italy Syndrome.” Silvia Dumitrache points out that this isn’t a single illness, nor a well-defined official medical diagnosis, but a buildup of psychological and physical strain that can appear after years of demanding work, isolation, lack of rest, stress, ongoing responsibility, and separation from family. It can bring insomnia, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, severe exhaustion, and, in serious cases, psychological disorders that require medical intervention.
To understand the phenomenon, she says, you also have to look at the conditions the woman lives in. A live-in caregiver doesn’t just work in a home — she lives there. She may care for people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, disabilities, or other serious illnesses, and may be called on at night as well. She lives day to day in contact with illness, physical decline, loneliness, and death. Sometimes she has very little time for herself and almost no social life.
The paradox can become stark: the woman who looks after someone else’s health sometimes ends up neglecting or losing her own. She doesn’t go to the doctor because she doesn’t have time. She puts off checkups. She doesn’t tell her family she’s exhausted. Sometimes she doesn’t want to worry the people back home. The family sees the money, the paid bill, the paid installment, the repaired house, or the child kept in school. It doesn’t always see how that money was earned.
And perhaps no one asks the woman who has left the very thing she asks every day about the people back home: “How are you? When did you last go to the doctor? When did you last have a day just for yourself?” In many cases, guilt sets in. The woman left precisely for her family, yet she can end up living with the feeling that she abandoned her children or her parents. The more the family depends on her income, the harder it becomes for her to say, “I can’t anymore. I want to come back.”
After years of work, some women return and discover that reintegrating into their own family isn’t simple. The children have grown up, relationships have changed, and the woman who sacrificed for her family doesn’t necessarily find the place she had before she left. That’s why Silvia Dumitrache says the perspective on sacrifice needs to change. Beyond calling these women “strong” or “heroines,” we need to talk about prevention, fair contracts, rest time, access to medical and psychological services, regular checkups, information, and the real possibility of having free time and a social life.
A phone call brings you closer, but it can’t replace an embrace
Another important idea that emerges from her experience is that of the transnational family — a family whose members live in different countries but try to remain a family despite the distance. The mother may be in Italy, the children in Romania, and between them responsibilities, affection, worries, decisions, and obligations circulate constantly. The mother asks whether the little one has eaten, whether homework is done, what grade they got, whether they’re sick; she sends money and tries to take part in decisions.
Technology can shorten the distance, but it can’t replace physical presence. You can say “goodnight” to a child by phone, but you can’t tuck them in. You can watch them cry on a screen, but you can’t hold them. You can join a birthday by video call, but you’re not there beside them when the candles are blown out. A mother leaves precisely to support and protect her family, yet, paradoxically, that can force her to live far away from it.
Over time, children grow up, relationships shift, and grandparents or other relatives take over part of the parent’s everyday role. That’s why coming home doesn’t automatically mean returning to the family that existed at the moment of leaving. “Mother Loves You!” grew directly out of the need to preserve the bond between a child and a migrant parent. The project couldn’t erase the distance, but it could make it hurt a little less.
For Silvia Dumitrache, the child left at home and the parent who has gone away are not two separate problems. They are two ends of the same story. The child suffers because of the mother’s absence, but the mother also suffers because of the child’s absence. In Romania, people often talk about the child left behind, while in Italy that same mother may live with longing, guilt, loneliness, and the pressure to keep working and sending money.
This is also where the need for transnational policies comes from. Romania cannot assume that once a citizen has left, their problems belong exclusively to the state where they work. Nor can the destination country treat the migrant merely as labor, without taking into account that they have children, parents, and responsibilities in another country. What’s needed is cooperation in social protection, health, education, and workers’ rights, along with services that support families before departure, during the period of separation, and, where relevant, upon their return to Romania.
There’s one more thing Silvia Dumitrache says plainly: we need to replace judgment of mothers who leave with an understanding of the circumstances that forced them to make that decision. It’s easy to say of a woman, “She left her children and went away.” It’s much harder to ask why she had to leave, what alternatives she had, what conditions she works in, and what this separation costs her. Behind many departures lies not a lack of love, but precisely the wish to give one’s family a better life.
After the gathering in Iasi, what remains is an image of the diaspora far more complicated than the money sent home or the migration statistics. It is the image of a community that has matured, of women who have worked, cared for others, made sacrifices, learned, adapted, and, in many cases, begun to demand respect, rights, and representation more firmly.
For Silvia Dumitrache, this seems to be the common thread running through all her work: to support, to make visible, and to change. To start from one person’s story and show that behind it a social phenomenon may exist. To turn individual experience into solidarity, and solidarity into change.
And perhaps the most powerful image that remains is that of the bridge. Between Romania and Italy, between mother and child, between family and institutions, between statistics and story, between a community’s past and its future. Because migration, in Silvia Dumitrache’s view, doesn’t just move labor from one country to another. It moves lives, relationships, responsibilities, and love across borders.
Translation from the video:
To Romanians living far away from the place where they were born, I would like to share a heartfelt message.
Every departure has its own story, and each of us, over time, creates our own meaning of the word “home.” For some, it is the place where they were born; for others, it is the place where they live now; and for many of us, it can mean several places at once.
We leave with roots that sometimes we carry with us, and other times we leave behind because life takes us further. And perhaps roots do not necessarily mean the place we must return to, but rather a part of the story from which we began.
Life in another country changes us and gives us new experiences, encounters, freedoms and perspectives. This experience of living between worlds can be a true richness.
Wherever you have built your life, and however you choose to define your sense of belonging, I wish you to feel respected, fulfilled and at home.
Because, in the end, home is the place where we can truly be ourselves.
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