Invisible Hands, Unseen Hearts: A Migrant Carer in Britain

ISBN-13: 9783565134441 / Angielski / Miękka / 212 str.

David Patterson

Opis

She left her small Eastern European town with a nursing certificate, a borrowed suitcase, and a promise to send money home. In Britain, her job title was simple-"care worker"-but nothing about the work, or the life around it, felt simple at all.In this intimate memoir, an Eastern European caregiver recounts years spent in English care homes and private houses, tending to strangers at the end of their lives. She bathes them, feeds them, changes their dressings, and listens to stories no one else has time to hear. Between medication schedules and night shifts, she discovers fragile, unexpected friendships with the elderly people in her care-relationships that slowly reshape her understanding of family, duty, and love.Yet outside the bedroom door, another story unfolds: agency exploitation, zero-hours contracts, casual racism, and the quiet stigma of being "just a migrant worker." She is trusted with Britain's parents and grandparents, but rarely treated as a full human being herself. Torn between guilt for the family she left behind and attachment to the people she now cares for, she lives in a permanent in between: not fully at home in either country.Told with tenderness, honesty, and dry humour, this memoir gives a voice to those who keep aging societies functioning while remaining almost invisible. It is a story for anyone who has ever cared for someone vulnerable, questioned what "home" really means, or wondered about the inner lives of the workers behind the uniform.

They called me 'the carer,' as if I had no past of my own-until one old woman with fading memory began asking about my story instead of her morning pills.