Hi there,
Today I want to talk about one of my best friends, whom I met in September 2014.
During that year, I was in Spain disgusted and sick of looking for work to find the same old crap. I had the opportunity to go to work in Italy for a few months and I did not hesitate. I wanted to go to Bari, which was one of the possibilities, but they sent me to Terni, a place I had never heard of in my life.
When they notified me of the place where I would work, I contacted the person who would be my boss to please go and personally see the accommodations that I had pre-selected online. She told me that she liked only one and I proceeded to make the rental agreement to go directly there.
I would rent a room in an apartment where another girl already lived.
When I got to Terni, I was shocked because that seemed like a horrible town to me. Today I see it more objectively. I got to the apartment, and I remember that my father called me, and I told him almost crying that I wanted to leave.
After the owner left, I greeted Violeta, my roommate. We made a connection right away because right at that moment we were just getting out of horrible situations, and we still had a lot of sadness.
Violeta was super clean, and I felt very lucky to share the apartment with her. Even to this day I still think I couldn’t have been luckier.
One day I told her that we should take advantage of the weekends to go visit the cities that were nearby and one day we took the train to go to Spoleto, but we began to tell each other about our lives, and we passed the station; we ended up in Perugia.
Now I tell you a little about Violeta. When she was 19, her parents arranged a marriage (those so typical in Muslim religions) with a guy who lived and worked in Italy. They got married in Albania and then she went to live in Italy with him.
When I asked her how she felt on her wedding day as she was getting married to a guy she didn’t know, she told me that at the time, she had no idea what was going on.
Once in Italy, they both worked and she had to give her husband her salary; It’s not that he had demanded it, but he pressured her so much, telling her the things that had to be paid for, that in the end she felt obliged to give it to him. To top it off, as happens in many marriages (not just Muslim ones), she had to do absolutely everything around the house.
So, logically, Violeta was not happy. In addition, during the years they had been married they had not had children and as always in this type of religion, it was the woman’s fault.
She decided to divorce, and the husband took absolutely everything from her. She was left on the street without money, without her clothes and without her documentation. Fortunately, the owners of the restaurant where she worked helped her and welcomed her into their home until she could save up to rent a room.
She could have sent the man to jail, but she didn’t want to. All she wanted was to never see him again.
In addition to this horrible separation that she had to live through, her family turned their backs on her because it is not well seen for a Muslim woman to get a divorce. All the Albanian friends she had in Terni also stopped talking to her.
This is how Violeta lived through a time of sadness and loneliness. She continued to have conflicts with the divorce because the ex-husband had kept the car that was in her name and she always received fines, so she continued to manage all that problem with lawyers.
The first day I put the heating in the apartment, the owner just arrived to show a guy the room that was available. When she arrived, she became hysterical because it was very hot and she began to tell me that if her electricity bill was too high, she would make me pay it. At that moment I didn’t respond to her as she deserved, but when she left, I started insulting her with Violeta and we were dying laughing.
Imagine that the guy who had just arrived that day later did not even leave the room out of fear.
From there, Violeta told me how the owner of the apartment really was. They say that the people of Terni are very interested. This woman was the typical “ternana” who, if you owed her an euro, would chase you to the end of the world to collect it. In addition to this, between her and the one from the rental agency they had taken advantage of Violeta and they had taken much more money from her than was due for the management of the rental.
Violeta paid 50 euros less than me for the rent, which was logical because she rented long-term, but the owner asked her “a favor” to always clean the house and the rooms every time there was a check-out. This made me very angry.
After the discussion about the heating, a week later the owner sent her family to go into the apartment with the excuse that they were going to leave some dishes for Violeta. As soon as they entered, they began to touch the heating and I took them out of the apartment making a scandal.
Violeta was red with rage, but she didn’t say anything or complain. She told me to calm down and that she would talk to the owner of the apartment.
I immediately wrote to the agency and the owner telling them that I never wanted to see anyone in the apartment without my permission again, because I would report them to the police. In addition to this, I started paying the monthly payments late to annoy the owner and hit her where it hurt the most.
That same day, the woman called Violeta to speak ill of me according to what her relatives had told her. Violeta told her that I was a wonderful human being, that she was happy to have me as a partner and that she shouldn’t even think of speaking ill of me.
Our inseparable friendship continued during the months I was there.
In the following photo you can see the sign that Violeta put up in the bathroom because the guy always left the whole bathroom wet and never contributed to the housework. Every time I saw it , I died laughing.
We told each other everything and it was super sad when I left Terni. I bought two little bracelets, one for Violeta and one for me, and I told her that they would give us luck and help us get out of the bad streak we had had in recent years.
Nowadays Violeta is still one of my few friends and although we don’t see each other much, she is one of those people that I always have present. We disagree on many things, especially when it comes to having children because she already has three, but we support each other unconditionally.
Violeta reminds me a lot of my mom because she is one of those people who are so good that neither the world nor society deserves them. Although she often says that life sucks, she is always certain that things will work out.
