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A 51-year old engineer, Ganna has the wrinkled, stained hands of an elderly woman after years of working as a maid in Spain on a quest, like hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, for a better life abroad.
"I left because I didn't have a job in Ukraine," says Ganna, who earns between 600 and 1,000 euros (718 and 1,197 dollars) a month in Spain.
"The hardest was learning the language and suffering the attitude of the Spaniards, who treated us like trash," Ganna says.
She began to work as home help seven years ago after arriving in Spain with a group of Ukrainian "tourists". In 1999, she legalised her and her husband's status in the country and plans to return soon after a break in her native city of Lviv in western Ukraine.
"My hands, I ruined them doing the cleaning. The Spaniards didn't give me any gloves when I was using chemical cleaning products. I had terrible injuries but I had to take care of myself -- if I went to the hospital, I could have been deported."
Around seven million Ukrainians out of a population of 48 million people work abroad and only 500,000 of them are doing so legally, according to a report published by Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS) last year.
Some 500,000 Ukrainians live in Italy, 400,000 in Poland and Spain, while the highest number -- around three million people -- live and work in Russia, the report said.
Ukrainian observers have expressed concern at the level of emigration from a country with an already low birthrate, where some 30 percent of the population lives on the verge of poverty and the average salary is around 170 dollars (142 euros) a month.
But Ukrainian migrants are also a key resource for their country's economy, bringing in an annual 19 billion dollars (15.9 billion euros) in remittances, according to the NISS report.
Western Ukraine, which contains some of the poorest areas in Ukraine and borders the European Union, has been particularly affected by a flow of emigration that has virtually emptied some villages of the female population.
Regional authorities in Lviv say that 200,000 local inhabitants out of a population of 2.5 million have left to look for work abroad and that up to 70 percent of them are women earning a living and supporting their families back home by working as nannies, cleaners or home helps.
Talking to Ukrainians who have worked abroad, stories of theft, rape and even murder are not hard to find, while fraud and humiliation seem almost a part of daily life.
"They consider us second-class citizens over there," says Antonina, a 55-year-old who has worked as a home nurse in Portugal for the past four years.
Some return and set up their own businesses but many, says Ganna, choose to stay despite the hardships.
"Those who have seen life in Europe don't want to come back to Ukraine where nothing ever gets better."
vt-ant/dt/yad/ns
EU-immigration-Ukraine
AFP 101302 GMT 02 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
