In crisis: between Greece and Albania

Mirieta was interviewed as part of an ethnographic study for a doctoral thesis on migrants of Albanian origins to Greece moving back to Albania. Mirieta was born in Albania and resettled in Greece with her family at a young age. She attended Greek schools and graduated from a Greek university. For a while, she was able to work in positions relevant to her studies, but in 2013, when this interview was taken, she was unemployed and pregnant with her first child.

At the time, the narrator was 27 and living in Thessaloniki, but was searching for work in a country other than Greece or Albania. Despite wishing her family had never left Albania and viewing living conditions in Greece at the time as harsh, she still believed the situation would be worse for her and her family if she moved back to Albania. Mirieta felt that the social network that would facilitate her return to Albania and her search for work had disintegrated.

In the interview extract provided, Mirieta speaks of the effect migration has had on her life. She describes how she lives in limbo, feeling suspended between two places, Greece and Albania, both of which find themselves in an adverse economic situation. At the time, the Greek economy was forced to adhere to the financial reforms dictated by the International Monetary Fund and unemployment had risen dramatically, especially among younger people. During that same period, especially between 2010 and 2017, migrants of Albanian origins moved back to Albania en masse, due to the rising unemployment and declining wages in Greece.

In her interview, Mirieta describes the circumstance of being a ‘foreigner’ hovering between two countries. She also speaks of what ‘crisis’ means for her; besides financial insecurity, she defines crisis as ‘fear’ and ‘a lack of prospects’.