Romanians working in construction in Belgium

For half a year, from January to June 2024, we followed a team of 60 Romanian construction workers employed in Belgium by Roteam, a waterproof roofing company. We wanted to truly understand their lives, feel the weight of their loneliness as they live far from their families, see how they work, where they live and how they spend their Sundays.
We parked our campervan in an industrial area in Zaventem, near Brussels, by the Roteam headquarters, climbed scaffolding, temporary stairs and fire escapes with them to get on rooftops, slept next to their quarters, woke up at 5 am with them, went with them to parties, football matches, grocery shopping, the Romanian bar and the Doi Boi (Two Oxen) market in the Anderlecht neighbourhood.
We listened to their stories – fathers, sons, husbands, economic migrants working 10-11 hours a day far from their families to build a home in a country where they don’t live, keep their children in school in a country where they don’t live, grow maize in a country where they don’t live.
These are their stories as we have recorded them in texts and photographs.

Part I

Romanians working in construction in Belgium: “I don’t want to get rich, I just want to earn my bread and keep my family fed”

I have met Romania’s recent history on the construction sites in Belgium, at the heart of Europe, where the main language is Romanian. I interviewed the workers in Belgium, but their lives unfold in Romania – the country where their families wait, the country they have never truly left.

It is -8° Celsius in Anvers, Belgium, on the rooftop where Vasea, Ghiță, Marius, Iulică, and Valerian are hard at work, careful not to slip on the black ice. The men’s faces are purple with the cold, their lips are parched. The sun has not yet risen, and the wind feels stronger at the 15th floor, from which we can see the wind turbines and the industrial ships in the Albert Canal. Scheldt River crosses the town on its way to the North Sea, and the humidity in the air makes the cold fiercer. The skin on people’s hands cracks and splits open painfully under protection gloves. Marius warms himself by a torch flame.
The winter of 2024 has been unusually cold in Belgium, where it has been snowing for a few days, preventing work on many construction sites. In Anvers, the snow hasn’t set, so this morning the Romanian workers have climbed 15 storeys on the fire escape ladder and begun glueing thermal insulation tiles onto the roof. On top of them they will stretch a watertight foil – rolls of bitumen membrane, frozen stiff, which Iulică peels at with difficulty. He kneels to attach it, then torches it in place. The toxic fumes fill my nostrils, but I get closer to the flame, hoping to warm up.

“There are good days and bad days, when you get angry and say ‘This does it, I’m going back home any day now.’”

The first break is at 9 am, when workers gather on a corner of the rooftop where there is some meagre sunlight. Marius leaves the torch on, so the gas bottle doesn’t freeze. Iulică posts a video on TikTok, while Valerian scrolls his Facebook feed. Their jaws are clenched against the cold, making their words sound curt and gruff.
Gheorghe “Ghiță” Chiponca is 44 and comes from Albești village, Botoșani County, 16 kilometres from the border with the Republic of Moldova. For 15 years, he worked in Romania, applying waterproofing on roofs, moving from one site to the next, from one town to the next, as is common in construction. In 2019 he left for Belgium, to work for the Roteam company, founded by three brothers from Craiova, a town in the south of Romania, and two years later he brought over his older brother Mihai.
Ghiță’s last salary in Romania was 2,800 lei, or about 560 euros, a month; in Belgium he makes over 3,000 euros net a month. The working hours are tough – he needs to wake up at 4:30 to 5 each morning – but he is pleased with the pay.
However, the harsh conditions of work in construction have damaged his health: during his first year working in Belgium, while out on a site, he was seized by such an intense stomach ache that an ambulance had to be called. He had surgery for ulcer and, for the next three months, followed the doctor’s indications (diet, no alcohol, no smoking), but then returned to his usual lifestyle and now has pains again.
“On site, we eat cold stuff – canned food, sausage, a piece of cheese, no one brings soup to work”, says Ghiță. “There are good days and bad days, when you get angry and say ‘This does it, I’m going back home any day now.’ But then you calm down, it happens to all of us.”

“I don't regret not building a house back home, but I do regret that no one would be waiting for me there”

His brother Mihai Chiponca, 46, remembers how he and Ghiță left home in the early 2000s to escape the poverty in the north-western Romanian region Moldavia. “Our parents owned land and cattle – they had horses, cows, sheep. We made a living out of that, selling milk and cheese. Back then, after the fall of Communism, everyone had got their nationalised land back.”
They couldn’t find any work in Botoșani, the biggest town in the area, so they started to travel the country to work in construction: Bistrița, Galați, Brăila, Constanța, Craiova, București, Pitești, Ploiești, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Reșița, Timișoara, Arad, Oradea, Satu Mare, Baia Mare, Zalău, Sibiu, Brașov, Miercurea Ciuc, Cluj-Napoca. These are just the towns and cities he remembers, but they were on countless construction sites, spending weeks, months, years living in barracks with men from all over the country, without the time to build themselves a life or call a particular place home.
“I don't regret not building a house back home, but I do regret that no one would be waiting for me there,” says Mihai. “I lost two relationships because of this, travelling all over the country, never stopping for long: here one day, gone the next, I’m coming back tomorrow, no, I’m coming back the day after. I was never married and I’m sorry I didn’t take that step; maybe then I’d have been a little more responsible and stopped wandering high and low for money.”
“I never left for fun, I never went to Cluj or Brussels just to have been there. If I had had someone back home, it would have been different. Maybe I’d have changed my way of thinking, having a partner to pull at my sleeve and say ‘Hey, you have to stay with me.’”
“Now I’m 46, time flies. If I find a woman and have a child, people in kindergarten will say ‘That’s his grandfather’, which is not really OK. I could pass away early and leave the child alone. Because if I stay here [in Belgium], I won’t live to see retirement.”
Mihai and Ghiță first left Romania in 2005-2006, when they and a brother-in-law went to Germany to work in agriculture. Despite travelling to so many countries and cities, they never had time to actually visit them.
In Germany, they worked near Cologne, but never walked around the historic centre or the botanic garden, never crossed Hohenzollern Bridge. “Working hours were insane,” remembers Mihai. “We’d pick strawberries and berries, there was so much to do, they wouldn’t even let you sleep. At 5:30 you had to be out in the field, and you kept working for as long as the boss wanted.”
In Brussels, where they have been living and working for five years (Ghiță) and three years (Mihai), they have never been to the Grand-Place, never seen City Hall nor the Maison du Roi, never visited the famous chocolate manufacturers, never allowed themselves to be tourists.
“You know why?” says Mihai. “Look, take this place, for instance, Zaventem [the Romanian workers are lodged in a suburb 12 kilometres from the city centre]. This is Sunday [their one day off]. On Sundays I need to go buy a chicken, onion, bananas, yogurt, a beaker of cream – stuff I need around here.”
Many of their acquaintances and friends in Albești are working abroad; they sometimes cross paths on construction sites in Belgium or at farms in Germany. “I have a neighbour who’s been in Spain for 13 years,” says Mihai. “Another close friend of mine spent about eight years in Portugal, now he’s been in Spain for about five. My brother-in-law’s spent around 12 years in Germany; he came back home for a year, now he’s back in Germany with both children. And that’s just my street. Farther out in the village I know people who have been in Germany for about eight years, also working on roofs. There’s a lot of them – really a lot.”

“Now you’re making me cry”

On Sundays, at the lodgings of the Romanian workers in the Brussels suburb of Zaventem, in Flanders, tables are heaped with bottles of homemade wine, cognac, beer, soda and energy drinks, cheese, fatback and sausage. The crowded buildings are teeming with men coming and leaving on their way to and from betting parlours, flea markets, the billiards hall and Zvon [Rumour], the Romanian bar in the neighbourhood. The corridor leading to the front door is crowded with the carts and shopping bags of those who have just returned from the market.
The two houses behind the Albert Heijn supermarket, where vans with the Roteam logo are always parked, are back-to-back, so the Romanians have removed the fence that used to separate the courtyards, to have more room for grilling. They smoke outside, wearing flip-flops, short trousers and t-shirts, though it’s close to freezing.
Much like Mihai and Ghiță, most Romanian workers here have never taken a walk in the centre of town, though they have been working in Brussels for five or six years. They don’t feel like they belong in this world; they don’t speak Flemish nor French and wouldn’t know how to act in bars on Rue de Flandre, where EU clerks drink Belgian beer and eat moules frites, so on Sundays they prefer the Romanian shops and restaurants in Doi Boi (Two Oxen) market, and in the evening they gather together at their lodgings, over a glass of homemade wine, brandy or cognac.
Marian cooks fresh shrimp he has bought for 9.99 euros a kilo in Doi Boi. He fries it in butter and pours white wine on top, the way he learned in France, where he lived for 12 years. On a plate, Costică slices fatback and sheep’s cheese brought from a cousin in Vaslui, Romania, who is a shepherd, as he was himself before starting work in construction. We eat shrimp with white sheep’s cheese.
The men talk about their wives and children back in Romania, about the loans that pushed them to go work abroad, about their homesickness and loneliness, about life in the villages in Moldavia, about mayors who couldn’t be bothered to bring sewage to the village, about politicians being all the same. As the hours pass and the bottles are emptied, they grow more vulnerable and their voices turn shaky as they stare at screens with photos full of smiling faces from birthdays they missed. When we ask him about his wife and son, Marian covers his eyes, embarrassed: “Now you’re making me cry.”

“In France, we were just surviving”

Marian Copilău, 42, grew up in Giurgeni village, Ialomița County, where the Borcea branch of the Danube rejoins the main river. His father was a tractor driver and his mother was a cleaning worker in the local school. The four-children family grew wheat and maize to make extra money.
Marian learned to fish from his grandfather, who used to take him and his brother along in his boat, then send them to sell the fish by the main road. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, locals made a living by selling fresh-caught fish on the bridge over the Danube. “There used to be lines of cars, so we sold plenty of fish,” remembers Marian. The freeway connecting Bucharest to Constanța hadn’t been built yet, so holidaymakers used to drive to the seaside on the national road crossing their village.
“We used to sell plenty, from Prussian carp to sturgeon [sturgeon fishing was not banned in Romania until 2006]. Each villager had his kilometre of Danube. Seven, eight, maybe 10 boats waited in line to throw their nets. There was so much fish back then.”
Starting in the mid-2000s, small fish businesses started to go down. “They showed things on TV about sellers tricking buyers, about stuffing fish with sand.” For a while, Marian worked in agriculture as a day worker, then, in 2006, went to France with a neighbour to work on a farm. There he looked after animals, stripped plaster off house walls, did renovation work. He got 800 euros a month, meals and lodging. He stayed there for three months, while there was work to be found.
When he returned to Romania, he moved to Hârșova, a nearby town, got a bus driving license and found a job driving minibuses in Constanța County. In 2008, he went back to France with a friend to work in construction and settled near Lyon.
He stayed in France for almost 12 years, later bringing his wife over; their son was born there in 2013. Marian used to earn 1,900 euros a month, and his wife, who only worked on weekends, in cleaning, made 400 to 500 euros a month; their rent was 1,000 euros a month.
“In France, we were just surviving; it was tough. Some made it in France. I have friends who went there alone, stayed single, and made it, managed to save money. I saved up some too, but then I met my wife and we started to eat out, go for a pizza, buy clothes.”
“So making it means staying away from your family and denying yourself small comforts?” I ask Marian.
“Voilà. I used to like to go eat in town, have a good wine. I didn’t mind it much [that I didn’t save up]. As long as I stay healthy.”

“Give me this kind of income back in Romania, and I’ll work like a horse.”

In 2019, after almost 12 years in France, a brother-in-law convinced him to return to Romania and work in the same field – watertight roofing. The family moved into the house of Marian’s mother-in-law in Țăndărei. For a few weeks, he worked in Galați and Constanța, but then the cold season came and he couldn’t find work in roofing. His brother-in-law got him a job at a company installing apartment boilers.
“How the hell was I supposed to live on 3,000 lei (600 euros) a month? I had a fight with my brother-in-law: ‘You got me to come back to the country, now find me work. I don’t want to get rich, I just want to earn my bread and keep my family fed – pay my rent, my utilities, live a decent life.’”
Later that year, Marian left for Germany, where he made 2,000 euros a month installing fiber optics. ‘It was the most miserable work you can think of; we were at it 7 am to 8 pm. We’d lay those cables when it was so cold they were stiff.”
For the winter holidays, he returned to Romania to see his family, and on the 7th of January 2020, one day before returning to Germany, he saw on TV a news piece about Roteam, the company in Belgium.
“It was 7:43 in the evening. The moment I saw those construction sites in Belgium, I told my wife: ‘Love, that’s where I’m going.’ The next morning I was expecting the van that was going to take me to Germany. I sent my CV that evening. Around 10 pm, I got a call: ‘Go to Bucharest tomorrow for a test.’ So I tell them ‘Listen, I’m supposed to leave for Germany tonight. Are you going to hire me or not?’”
After the first two years working in Belgium, Marian bought an apartment in Țăndărei. He now makes over 3,000 euros a month and is satisfied with his income, but would like to bring his wife and son to Belgium. He has a hard time living there without them; he bursts out crying when he starts talking about his son, Robert. “Dad loves you too, just wait for me, I’ll come back home,” he tells him over the phone each evening.
“Give me this kind of income back in Romania, and I’ll work like a horse,” says Marian. “That’s why Roteam is doing great business in Belgium. I have coworkers who have been here for eight, 10, 11 years. We’re hard-workers.”

Part II

Belgium construction sites get built in Romanian

The stories of Romanian workers unfold on Belgian construction sites, but they begin in villages with no railway connection in Vaslui County; in the poverty of Botoșani County; in the fields in Olt County, where villagers grow vegetables to then sell them for close to nothing. They are the mirror of our contemporary history and the political failures that have had a direct impact on the lives of Romanians.

It is dark outside at 5:50 am, when Romanian workers arrive at the headquarters of Roteam in Zaventem and load up the materials and equipment into vans. On a wall inside the warehouse there are two tables: one, with magnets on it, lists the names of the workers and their respective construction sites; the second has the addresses of the construction sites. Cosmin Râță, the Romanian who owns the waterproof roofing company, allocates the teams: Brussels, Zellik, Ghent, Anvers, Mechelen, Oudenaarde, Nieuwpoort, Tournai.
On Mondays, almost all the 60 Romanians working for Roteam are present, even those who will spend the rest of the week on distant construction sites, 200 to 300 kilometres from Brussels. The men have dark bags under their eyes after Sunday night, spent drinking the “beer by the metre” at the Zvon [Rumour] Romanian bar and the extra shot of cognac at their lodgings. There’s a line in front of the coffee machine, which is shrouded in thick clouds of cigarette smoke. Accents from Olt and Ialomița mingle with accents from Moldavia, and curses all sound the same. The men warm up their hands around the paper cups with hot coffee.
It is raining, but then again it rained yesterday too, and the day before, and all of last week – that’s the weather in Belgium. Cosmin Râță has two weather apps on his phone: it won’t rain at all in some towns, so the teams can set out; in others, it will only rain in the afternoon, so they will catch a few good hours of work; and in Brussels there is barely a drizzle, and even that will stop in one hour.
Our campervan is parked side by side with the workers’ vans, so each morning we hear them when they start arriving for work at 5:50, loading up their equipment, the thermal insulation tiles and the rolls of bitumen membrane. At first they do it in the snow and dark, then in the rain, wind and moisture, then the days grow longer and sunrise finds us at the door of the warehouse, behind the Brico store, in the industrial area with a constant traffic of HGVs and vans.

Economic migrants work 10 to 11 hours a day far from their families

If you sign the roster to enter a Belgian construction sign and cast a look up the list, you will see a long row of Romanian names. Romanians pour the concrete for the foundations, set in the windows, apply the mortar, insulate the roofs and do unskilled work. We are so used to talking to everyone in Romanian that we are surprised when a group of workers reply in Polish.
We join Vasea, Mihai, and Vlăduț on the construction site in Zellik, then Ionuț „Angel”, Țuțu, and Pavel in Anderlecht, then Costel and Valică in Ghent, then Nelu and Marius in Oudenaarde, then Gabi and Mihăiță in Zaventem. The official language of Belgian construction sites is Romanian, followed by Polish, Portuguese, Italian, and Ukrainian.
We climb scaffolding and fire escape ladders, go up in industrial lifts with the construction materials, walk up temporary stairs marked with LEDs. We hear manele at the ground floor, Portuguese hip-hop on the fourth floor, Bulgarian folk music on the last floor.
Immense construction sites manned by hundreds of workers have appeared in Belgium, much like they did in Spain and Italy in the early 2000s, when the first Romanians left to work in construction in Europe. For most of them, Belgium is not the first country they emigrate to – Cristi from Suceava worked in Spain, Italy, and Germany before we met him on a site in Belgium.
We record the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, of fathers, sons and husbands turned economic migrants who work 10 to 11 hours a day far from their families to build a home in a country where they don’t live, keep their children in school in a country where they don’t live, grow maize in a country where they don’t live.

“Young people have it really tough”

With the money he earns in Belgium, Marius supports his young family in Romania – his 24-year-old wife and his 2-year-old daughter – as well as his mother, who cultivated fields and raised poultry and cattle her whole life and, as such, now has no steady source of income, and his grandfather, a former railway worker who now has a pension of 1,000 lei, or about 200 euros, a month.
Yesterday, Marius sent his grandfather 400 euros to buy herbicide for the wheat field and maize for planting. Later in April, when it’s time to plant, he’ll send him more money to pay the tractor driver.
Marius Bocai, 27, comes from Rusănești, Olt County, a village 35 kilometres from the nearest town. His parents separated when he was three months old, so he was raised by his mother and grandparents. His family grows lettuce, tomatoes, onions, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers, wheat and maize, which they mostly sell to “wholesale middlemen”, because working in the fields doesn’t leave them time to mind a stall in the market. As a child, Marius used to go out by the main road and sell vegetables out of the family’s horse-drawn wagon.
Work in agriculture is hard and starts in December, with the seedlings. “If you have a field of vegetables, you never get a break, you don’t know about holidays or anything like that: you work winter to winter. The tomatoes – you have to till them, prune them, tie them to the poles, spray them with herbicide, till them again. If you don’t do all that, they don’t ripen in time, and if you’re the last to pick them you get a bad price for them, close to nothing.”
The family only makes money in summer and autumn, from selling their vegetables and grain, then “stretch out” what they earn to last a whole year. They subsist out of what they produce and even bake their own bread, from their milled wheat.
Marius has always enjoyed working in agriculture and living in a small village, looking after the animals, the horse, the cow and the sheep. At the agricultural highschool, his favourite subject was vegetable farming.
When he was 16, he took a two-week trip with his uncle to sell produce in the market in Săliște, Sibiu County, about 200 kilometres away from home, where he slept on a camping bed next to the stall. “Just as we were unloading, a lady came and bought one kilo of tomatoes. So my uncle gives me five lei [about one euro]. ‘What’s this?’ I ask. ‘The money off the first tomatoes you sold.’ I knew it was much, but it felt like too much. Back home, tomatoes sold for a tenth of that, if they sold, that is. At the market there, we made 4,000 lei, or about 800 euro in one week, I couldn’t believe it.”
“Young people have it really tough. I have friends who barely live from day to day, though our area is great for agriculture. To make a living out of agriculture, you need to work like a horse and have someone who spends al their time at the stall in the market, not sell to middlemen like we do. They buy them off us for one leu (0,2 euro) and sell them for five lei (1 euro) in the market.”

“We wanted some minimum comfort, a car”

At 18, after finishing highschool, Marius went to work in Spain, picking tangerines, with a neighbour. Five weeks later, he returned to the country with 300 to 400 euros.
In 2017 he found work at Yazaki, a wiring factory in Caracal, for 1,300 lei (about 260 euros) a month. As soon as he entered the plant, he got a skin rash that made him scratch until he drew blood. He didn’t last more than a few weeks.
Then he found work in his village as a carpenter, for a boss who promised to pay him 1,800 lei (about 360 euros) a month, off the books. He worked for him for four months, but was only paid for two.
His next job was at the general store in the village, where he had a labour contract and made 1,600 lei (about 320 euros) a month. He had already met his partner, Florina, who had moved in with him. “It was hard to make ends meet. Sometimes I’d go into the forest to get wood to sell. That’s how I made do.” His family worked the vegetable fields, and Marius helped after getting off work. One day, he passed out from sheer exhaustion and ended up in hospital.
In 2019, he and Florina moved to the UK to work in cleaning, following an aunt’s advice. “We wanted some minimum comfort, a car,” says Marius. Their old house in Rusănești, with an outhouse and no plumbing, was in need of renovations.
They landed on Luton in December. They were picked up by a Romanian taxi driver, who took them to a house where several Romanian couples lived. They cleaned private homes, moving from one address to the next and getting paid 7.75 pounds an hour. Together, they made about 2,800 pounds a month.
Marius, who had had his driver’s license for a year and had only ever driven the general store van around the village, had to drive in and around London, in left-side traffic. They changed jobs several times, working in a duck meat plant, then a clothing warehouse. Then Florina worked as a nanny and Marius was a driver and shelver for the Romanian grocery store nearby.
After a year and a half, when they learned Florina was pregnant, they returned from the UK without having saved up much. “Whatever we earned we sent home,” says Marius. “I have land back home, I have my grandpa and my mother. I had to send them money so they could work the land, till, plant.”
In 2022, after his daughter Andrada was born, Marius worked in Germany for a while, then was hired at Roteam, in Belgium, where he has been working for two years.
It is his best job to date, and he is pleased with the pay – he earns three to four thousand euros a month, depending on the time worked. Marius spares no effort, because he wants to bring his young family to Belgium, so he puts in 260 to 280 hours a month. Cosmin Râță, the company owner, has promised to help him find a place to rent, sign up his daughter to pre-kindergarten and get his wife Florina registered.
“When I come back from work, I grab a quick bite, take a quick shower and call home for 10 minutes or so, depending on how tired I am,” Marius says. “I get so sleepy my hand drops as I hold the phone. Florina can tell by now and says ‘That’s it, I’ll let you go to sleep.’”

“Dad, can’t you just stay home?”

It is one of the few sunny days in March, and the Romanian workers are smoking in the courtyard. We visit their lodgings on Sundays, their day off, when they have time to sit and chat for longer. Marian is playing music from the ’80s; Costică is in the kitchen, cooking pork leg stew. Ghiță has just returned from the flea market with a bigger cage for the two parrots Marius bought from a Romanian yesterday for 50 euros.
This morning, Marian found their cage outside and brought the frozen parrots into the kitchen, and now he is trying to convince Marius he can’t leave them outside like they’re his chickens back home, particularly since nighttime temperatures in Belgium drop to 4-5° Celsius. We participate in the transfer of the parrots to the bigger cage, resulting in bites and colourful feathers floating around in the livingroom.
Costică invites us to stay for lunch and treats us to the sheep’s cheese from Vaslui which we praised last time. He keeps his supplies from Romania in the cellar – jars with cheese in brine, pickles, pork preserved in lard. Cosmin asks him if he doesn’t happen to have some fatback, but every man in the house has brought provisions from home, so we end up having a sampling of fatback from various Moldavian villages on the table in the shared kitchen.
Costică “was born among sheep” and worked as a shepherd since he was 10 or 11. His girlfriend was 14 and he was 19 when their first child was born – a boy, followed by two girls, each one year apart.
Costel “Costică” Sârghe, 43, comes from Bălțați, a village in Vaslui County with a population of 600, 21 kilometres from Huși, the nearest town. He only went to school for eight years, because there was no time for that at the sheepfold – he had to help the other men in his family, which has been raising sheep for generations. At 12, Costică was milking 200 sheep a day on his own. “My childhood was all work,” he says.
In 2003, when he was 22, Costică broke up with his girlfriend and went to Bucharest to work in construction. The boy stayed with him and the girls stayed with their mother, but he has always kept in touch and supported them with money. “I never forgot about my children,” he says.
He started to work on waterproof roofing 21 years ago. “My parents kept raising sheep and I sometimes worked with them when I went back to visit – I couldn’t get the sheepfold out of my blood. I still miss it. Every time I visit my cousin, I spend a night at the fold. He has every comfort – electricity, a TV. We never had that.”
In Bucharest he met Corina, now his wife; together they have a 16-year-old son who studies at a highschool for car mechanics. They lived in a series of rented flats, with their son and Costică’s son from his first relationship, then took out a loan to buy an apartment in Bucharest.
In 2015, Costică went to work in Belgium building roofs, with two brothers and a brother-in-law; his income in Romania was not steady, because he couldn’t find work in winter. Spending five years away from his family was hard, and the death of his parents left him devastated.
“I lost both my parents while I was abroad. I knew my dad had some issues with his lungs, but I didn’t expect it. I didn’t expect it when mum passed, either. A mate from the village called. It was a shock, I was at work. That same day, in the evening, us brothers packed up the car an started back home. It was during COVID times and I kept thinking they’d seal the coffin and I wouldn’t get to see my dad one last time.”

“By and by, I want to move closer to my family”

In 2020, he returned to Romania to be with his family. He found work in the same field, making 7,000 lei, or about 1,400 euros, regardless of season – a condition he negotiated from the start. But he panicked when the monthly rate for his mortgage went from 1,000 to 1,400 lei, though when he took out the loan the bank assured him it would never go up by more than 10 or 20 lei.
Last year, when he told his son Cristi that he needed to go back to Belgium, the boy was sad. “I told him, ‘Son, I want to work hard now to pay off the loan for the house.’ ‘Dad, can’t I get a job too, so we can manage better?’ I said ‘No. I worked since I was a child, I don’t want you to do the same. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.’”
Even now, a year and a half after his moving to Belgium, his youngest son continues to ask “Dad, can’t you just stay home?”
Costică cries on the livingroom sofa, while the kitchen is filled with the clinking of glasses, music, and his coworkers’ laughter. “By and by, I want to move closer to my family. It’s really tough without them. I can’t take this anymore.”
I don’t know if it would be proper to give him a hug, so I pat his shoulder. The loneliness of economic migrants is crushing – all these men who live far from their families and scroll through their phone galleries to show us photos of their wives, their children, their homes. Homesickness gets soothed with homemade wine and produce from back home. Tomorrow, the workers will be at the warehouse at 5:50 am, hungover and ring-eyed, loading construction materials into the vans.
Back when he lived in Romania, on rainy days when construction work was halted, Costică used to drive his wife to the wholesale store where she worked. On the way, he would ask her “Say, love, what do you want to have for dinner?” “She was always so happy when she came home from work – I was the cook of the family. Some people say ‘Hey, it’s the woman who’s supposed to cook.’ But if I can do it, why shouldn’t I?”
This year, he asked his older son to get her flowers for the 8th of March, when Romanians celebrate Women’s Day. “I said ‘Son, go get her a big bunch of roses for me.’ My wife loves perfumes and, well, you know, I love getting her perfumes.”
The partying crowd in the kitchen turns up the music, interrupting our conversation. It’s late by now, and we must go back to our campervan, because we’re not used to waking up at 5 in the morning. Costică sends us off with some sheep’s cheese from Vaslui.

23rd of March 2024

“I told my wife: sarmale and Russian salad,” says Costică. We are in Zvon [Rumour], the Romanian bar in Zaventem, the neighbourhood where the Romanian workers in Roteam live in four or five separate houses. “Can’t tell you how I feel when I know I’m about to go home. Only a lunatic who doesn’t love his family wouldn’t be happy to go home.”
Costică has taken a week off, and tomorrow he flies to Bucharest to see his family. He is beside himself with joy: “I can’t sleep, I can’t wait to get home to my wife, my children. You can’t just work all the time. My youngest daughter’s boyfriend is coming to pick me up from the airport. My oldest son is at work, he can’t make it.”
Each time he goes to Romania, he is visited by his older children, who also live in Bucharest. He cooks them roast pork and mămăligă with grated white cheese and a side of pickles or crushed raw garlic.
Costică has made a lot of plans for one week: spend time with all his children, go on a trip with his wife and youngest son, and have some tests done, since for a few months he has been having back aches and his left leg keeps going numb.

31st of March 2024

We join Marius for a drive to Charleroi Airport to pick up Costică, who is coming back from his visit to Romania. “The week just flew by, I don’t know when it passed.” He shows us photos from Poiana Țapului, a mountain village he visited with his wife and youngest son. “I was with the family the whole time, we were never apart – she took days off too. If I had something I had to do somewhere, I took her along.”
The hardest thing about holidays in Romania is the parting, Costică says. “I see my son, I can feel his mood change all the time, as the last day gets closer and closer – he’s all over me, cuddling and all that. And he’s a big boy by now, he’s 16 and taller than me – more solidly built, too.”
“My wife never cries; well, maybe she does on the inside. Just like me, you know, my soul cries when I have to go.”

Part III

A Romanian family business în Belgium, from zero to 20 million euros
“You’re at the bottom, on the fringe of society, and you have to choose: which way will you go?”

In 2003, when he first came to Brussels, Cosmin Râță did not have the right to work in Belgium, slept on a piece of cardboard in a house under renovation and did undocumented work by the day in restaurants. In 2024, he has a company with 70 employees and a 20-million-euro turnover.
In the summer of 2003, fresh out of the Economic Sciences Faculty in Craiova, southern Romania, Cosmin Râță fell in love.
He was hiking with a tent in the Western Romanian Carpathians when he met a Belgian of Romanian origin whose parents had fled the country in the 1970s. The young woman could speak a little Romanian; their encounter sparked a love story they both knew had no future. She would soon return to Brussels, where she studied medicine, and Cosmin was preparing to defend his final thesis in autumn. But they spent the summer together, and Cosmin pooled together the child benefit his family got for his underage siblings so he could go to the seaside. “It was a dream summer,” he remembers.
Cosmin was born in a family of modest means in Craiova. His parents worked in the town’s heating plant – his father was a welder, his mother was a plumber. He was one of the generations of children who, from their first year of school, carried the house key on a string around their necks because their parents were always at work when they left for classes and returned home. He also kept the family’s bread ration ticket always in his pocket, because before the fall of Communism queueing for bread was his task. Once he lost the monthly ticket, and the family had to call on friends and relatives to get bread. After the revolution, his father worked in construction and his mother found a job in cleaning.
Cosmin, now 44, is the oldest of three children. His brothers Gabriel, 41, and Radu, 36, live and work with him in Belgium. But their journey to financial security was hard and began with demolition work, a jackhammer and a shovel.

“We were all hungry”

In October 2003, after getting his university degree, Cosmin borrowed 500 euros from an uncle and left for Brussels to visit the young Belgian he was in love with – the two had never stopped writing to each other. On her birthday, he showed up at her doorstep with flowers. Her parents were surprised to see him, but invited him to stay for the weekend. “For two days, everything was romantic,” he remembers.
Then Monday came, the young woman went to university, and Cosmin was left to wander the streets of Brussels alone.
Gabriel, his younger brother, was in Luxemburg – he brought VHS players from recycling centres there and sold them for 25 euros a piece in a flea market in Bucharest. They met in Brussels; Cosmin needed money for food and a place to sleep.
Gabriel knew a man from Moldavia who let them both stay in a house under renovation in the city. During their first month there, they slept on the floor, on pieces of cardboard, in sleeping bags. The house was crowded with Romanians, and Cosmin learned to tell those who had come to steal from those who had come to work. “We were all hungry,” he says.
“I could tell some of the guys were going around thieving, breaking into people’s homes at night or stealing perfumes and clothes from stores to sell them at half-price. I could see the beggars washing windscreens and singing in the metro. I could see the men looking for work. You’re at the bottom, on the fringe of society, and you have to choose: which way will you go?”
“My brother was toeing the line – sometimes he went out with them just to keep watch, but he was afraid. I told him ‘Look, if it’s shady stuff, count me out.’ Just once, when I was hungry, I stuck a stick of salami from a supermarket into my underwear. I was shaking all over when I got out, then I couldn’t sleep for a week.”
Cosmin hit the streets every day, going from restaurant to restaurant in search of work. Sometimes he was allowed in and sent to do the dishes, clean the cellar or tend to the bar during rush hour. There were days when he couldn’t find any work at all and days when he made 20 euros. “Twenty euros, to me, was fabulous. I’d save two euros to call home once a week and tell Mum I was alright, and use the rest to buy whatever food I could afford.”
He still met his girlfriend on weekends, but the gap between them was too wide – the life of a medical student at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the life of an undocumented immigrant who couldn’t speak any French, slept wherever he could and was happy when he earned money for food. It had been three months already, and their relationship was growing cold.
In December 2003, the young woman told him “I don’t think this is going to work. I’m a ULB student, you have no future: you can’t speak French, can’t speak Flemish, you’re here illegally.”
“I’m not going to tell you how that felt,” says Cosmin. “It hit me so hard, I just went home and cried like it was the end of the world, I spent whole days alone. I didn’t even want to see my brother.”

“I’ve had enough of swallowing dust and shovelling rubble”

At the time, Romania was not yet in the EU, so Cosmin could not legally stay in Belgium for more than three months – he was there as a tourist with no right to work. To stay safe in case police ID-ed him on the street, he periodically paid 20 euros to some Romanians who applied fake stamps to his passport to make it look like he had been through the Nickelsdorf and Nădlac border crossings, returning to Romanian through Austria and Hungary every three months.
The breakup with his girlfriend left him devastated, but he felt a burning ambition to prove her wrong. He decided to learn French and began attending free language classes at an association for migrants four times a week. Half a year later, he could speak French well enough to manage Belgian paperwork.
He went to the ULB, his former girlfriend’s university, to get his Economic Sciences diploma recognised. Bureaucratically, it was complicated, because Romania was not yet part of the Bologna system. What Cosmin was requesting was for his four years of university in Craiova to be recognised, so he could then study in Brussels for another year and get his MA. After two rejections and many documents which his mother had to have translated, notarised, and sent from Romania, Cosmin was accepted as a student at the ULB. “I was flying, guys, I felt like I was flying”.
The masters’ fee was 7,000 euros a year for non-EU students, and Cosmin made three to four hundred a month. He applied for a rebate with the social services. When he brought documents proving his parents’ income in Romania – 300 euros between the two of them – the Belgian public servants first thought they were fakes.
They slashed his fee to 600 euros a year, the same as for EU students. Cosmin could afford that much: “Even if I didn’t eat for a whole month, I was still determined to pay.” Now all he needed was his student visa, but for that he had to return to Romania.
He went to the Romanian Embassy in Belgium to declare his passport stolen, as Romanian customs agents would have noticed the fake Nickelsdorf and Nădlac stamps. He re-entered the country with a temporary replacement from the Consulate, got a new passport, then spent hours queueing to get his visa from the Belgian Embassy in Bucharest. With the student visa, he could now get legally employed for 20 hours a week.
With his brother Gabriel and two other Romanians, Cosmin had started to work in demolition, “with jackhammers and shovels”, which paid better than day work in restaurants. Cosmin, who weighed all of 50 kilos – “the jackhammer was heavier than me” – shovelled rubble and pushed wheelbarrows “until my arms stretched to my knees”.
They stayed in front of Le Petit-Château, along the Brussels–Scheldt canal, where now there is a centre for asylum seekers, the biggest in Belgium. You can still see immigrants there looking for work. Men who, just like Gabriel and Cosmin 20 years ago, are picked up in vans and sent to do hard manual labour, sometimes without pay. “They’d come, pick you up for work, then at the end of the day they’d throw you out like a rotten tooth without giving you any money”, says Cosmin.
They began to only take work through recommendations from acquaintances, so they wouldn’t risk being sent home unpaid. Cosmin was “the smart one” who could speak French and could talk to the clients. For two days a week he worked in demolition, where he earned 50 to 70 euros a day, and he went to classes three days a week.
His one-year MA became two years because of his work schedule. In 2007, after graduating, he found work at a bank, at the 26th floor of an office building in the centre of town. He had a labour contract, a 2,000-euro salary, and wore suits and ties. “I’ve had enough of swallowing dust and shovelling rubble”, he told his brother Gabriel, who in the same year opened a building waterproofing company.

“The Belgians are desperate for people eager to work”

The bank where Cosmin worked paid for his Flemish classes, which he attended four times a week, from 6 to 10 pm. At the time, he did not yet know how much speaking Flemish would help him develop his future business.
In 2008 he had trouble with his health – a torn meniscus and an injured back – and, after two surgeries and a protracted medical leave, he returned to work on a position he did not like much. Meanwhile, Gabriel’s business had grown and he needed Cosmin to handle the clients and the bookkeeping.
“So I figured – you know what, I’ll go work with my brother. We had started to make more money with the company than I got at my job. I joined the firm in late 2008, brought Dad [from Romania] who had 20 years of experience in construction, found new people and we ended up being 20 of us in one year, 40 of us in two years.”
One of the new employees was Radu Râță, the youngest brother, who had come to Belgium from Craiova after finishing highschool.
In 2009, in Brussels, Cosmin met Irina, a former university colleague from Craiova, who became his wife and business partner. Irina and Cosmin now have four children.
“The firm started to grow organically, almost each year we doubled our headcount and our volume of work,” says Cosmin. “We made money really quick – Belgians are desperate for people eager to work. They find manual labour tough and won’t do it, that’s why it’s very well paid if you’re reliable, keep deadlines, don’t steal materials and don’t try to pull anything shady.”
In 2012, Gabriel had a burnout and Cosmin took over the business. The firm continued to grow, and in 2015, when he hired a Belgian sales manager, their turnover went through the roof. “No matter how good I get at Flemish, I’ll never speak it like a native. Besides, my name is Cosmin, not Van Something. When we showed up for a job, I went in first, with my five words of Flemish – which was OK – then Vasile, who could speak French but no Flemish, and only then the other workers, who could only speak Romanian.”
The Roteam construction waterproofing company now has a turnover of almost 20 million euros and is the third biggest in its field in Belgium. It has 70 employees, ten of whom in management (half of them Romanian, half Belgian). The remaining 60 are Romanian workers, four of whom are ethnic Ukrainians from Cernăuți. Each year, they insulate 500,000 to 700,000 square metres of roofing all over Belgium.
“I always tell the guys ‘Listen, I won’t breathe down your neck, I won’t crack the whip at you.’ They just come and get the job done. They don’t pull tricks, they don’t call in sick. Sometimes they drink on Saturday nights, but they know that if they overdo it, they’ll go do volunteer work for the church.” (After a party that caused the police to be called, Cosmin sent his employees to volunteer at the Romanian church in the Schaarbeek neighbourhood of Brussels.)
In the last few years, Cosmin has brought from Romania two types of workers: those who already know their craft, and motivated young people whom he trains on the job. “The ones with experience are harder to mould to our way of doing things, because they need to forget how things are done in Romania. Here, by law we have to provide a 10-year warranty, so if a roof starts leaking, we’re dead. You can’t just do shoddy work and go home early. You can’t just say ‘It’s fine, they’re idiots here, no one will notice’, it doesn’t work like that. So either you work on the mentality, or you mix experienced employees with young people you train yourself.”

“So you’re a company boss, great, but don’t treat people like they’re your slaves”

At Roteam, apart from the satisfying salaries, Romanian workers get two other things they did not have in Romania: stability and respect. To Cosmin, earning his employees’ loyalty has always been important, so he has paid attention to their social background and their needs – which is why he has people who have been working for him for twelve or thirteen years.
The workers are provided with free lodging and two return trips to Romania each year. Their monthly salaries are between 2,500 and 4,000 euros, depending on the season and the hours of work. If they want to bring their families to Belgium, the company helps them find an apartment to rent, sign up their children for school and integrate.
Raluca Râță, who is married to Radu, the youngest of the brothers, has been Roteam’s administrative manager since 2016. She helps Romanian workers navigate Belgian bureaucracy, from getting their residence permit to paying their taxes or applying for child benefit. She accompanies them at the hospital if they have health issues, she translates from French for them and handles any unforeseen events.
Last July, when he went to Romania on holiday, Cosmin met a broker who collaborates with several banks offering mortgages for Romanians living abroad. The last years have seen the development of a whole industry of banking services for this segment of the population – a contradiction generated by the social context in Romania, one which banks have understood: Romanians work abroad so they can buy a home in the country.
Roteam has helped many of its employees apply for mortgage and Cosmin lent a few of them money for their down payments. That is why the company continues to grow: its people are satisfied and loyal, so they do a good job, and the bond between the employer and the employee is based on trust.
This summer, brothers Mihai and Ghiță Chiponca decided to return to Romania, where they have found jobs in the same line of work. Cosmin proposed a deal: he would wait one month before cancelling their residence, and if they accommodate back in Romania, he would pay for a return flight in September so they can settle everything they need to in Belgium.
In September, the brothers called to tell him to buy them one-way tickets from Bucharest. “We’ll be back at work on Monday,” they said. This is not the first time Cosmin is facing a situation like this: the workers return to Romania, can’t fit in at their jobs and return to Belgium, and the company needs to start the paperwork all over again to renew their residence permits.
“In Romania they bump against a system that crushes them, with bosses who yell at them and don’t pay them on time,” says Cosmin. “They can’t rely on anything. They’re given the kind of work machines can do: ‘Let that idiot do the heavy lifting.’ I don’t make them carry gas bottles, this isn’t slavery. We have cranes for that.”
“That’s why we give them facilities. Get the stress off a man’s mind, pay him, and let him do his job. That’s what people back home don’t understand. So you’re a company boss, great, but don’t treat people like they’re your slaves – because they’ll stop delivering, they’ll just do the bare minimum. Nowadays, they have options. That’s why they leave Romania – the unpredictability, the smarmy bossism and the back-breaking physical labour machines could do.”

Part IV

La Doi Boi, the Romanian market in Brussels

Romanian shops, restaurants and stalls populate a market of diversity, where Romanian migrants in Belgium have reconstructed the world of their markets back home. This is where they meet friends on weekends, stock up on supplies, eat tripe soup and, for a few hours, feel like Romania has moved to Brussels.

There is no work in construction on Sundays, so Iulică comes pick us up with the van in the morning and we go to Doi Boi (Two Oxen) in Brussels – the Anderlecht neighbourhood market, which features countless Romanian restaurants, stalls and small shops, among others with goods from Africa, Italy, Portugal, Ukraine and Spain. Here you can find any kind of product imaginable – Gucci underwear, African earrings and Moroccan spices, fish from every sea and ocean of the world, fruit whose names you don’t even know, stolen power tools and contraband cigarettes from Ukraine – but most products under the roof of the huge hall are Romanian.
In fact, we hear more Romanian than French around us, since 46,572 Romanians live in and around Brussels, which makes them the second largest immigrant community here, after the French. We have a coffee inside, at Bistro Brussels, between Romanian pastry shop Theodor and the Moroccan pastry shop, also operated by Romanian employees, across from the Portuguese shop.

“All of Romania’s moved here”

On Saturdays and Sundays, a former slaughterhouse dating back from the 19th century in the Anderlecht neighbourhood turns into a huge market whose stalls spill out into the open, in the adjoining parking lot which is closed on weekends.
The market is teeming with people, carts and a multitude of merchandise. As you go down Rue Ropsy Chaudron, nearing the main entrance with its two lifesize bronze bulls (which give the place its Romanian nickname of La Doi Boi, “At the Two Oxen”), you can see the smoke from the grilled mici mincemeat rolls hanging in the air. Just as you go in, before the stalls with clothes, cosmetics and hygiene products, you are greeted by calls of “cig’rets, cig’rets, cig’rets” in a universal language.
We buy buttermilk, kefir, curdled milk, Sibiu canned paté, dried lovage, white sheep’s cheese and a type of matured cheese called Trascău Stinky. While we wait in line at the cheese stall, an elderly man near us tells the attendant: “All of Romania’s moved here. In 1996, when I first got here, you didn’t hear a word of Romanian.”
The man is 81, Greek, and speaks near-perfect Romanian. He studied Architecture in Communist Romania during the Gheorghiu-Dej regime, then emigrated to Belgium, where he forgot Romanian until the early 2000s, when Romanian workers started coming here. The construction sites in the region filled with Romanians, so he learned the language again while working with them. Now he is retired and comes get his Romanian-style sour cream in Doi Boi.
We drink mulled wine with Marian, Iulică, Marius, Mihai, and Ghiță at Tabs, the bar that opens to both the market and the main thoroughfare, Rue Ropsy Chaudron. Romanian beggars ply the tables outside, where workers throw coins in their outstretched cups. In exchange, they get blessed in Romanian. A Moroccan goes from table to table selling brand-name hats and t-shirts, shavers and perfumes. Marian and Cosmin buy Hugo Boss beanies, which they haggle down to five euros – four for Cosmin’s, because the logo is a little faded.
The Romanian workers have bags under their eyes and look tired – last night they drank until the small hours at their lodgings. They still have homemade wine brought from Romania after Christmas, when they returned to work in Belgium. They have a trusted hangover remedy – tripe soup – at one of the Romanian restaurants, the one which they say has the best food. There are so many Romanian restaurants and shops around that each have their own favourite place to eat, to buy sheep’s cheese, ground meat, buttermilk and “country-like” chicken with yellow skin.

Romania’s recent history at the heart of Europe

We enter the small restaurant outside the fish hall, named after its two owners, Ilișca and Dan, who came six years ago from Sighetu Marmației in northern Romania. The couple work in cleaning from Monday to Friday, and on Saturdays and Sundays they cook and serve food at the restaurant in the market, which they opened a year ago. The workers order tripe soup and chicken soup with cream, mici, pies and brandy served in the typical narrow-necked 50-millilitre vial-like glasses. There is a strong smell of cooking oil and garlic, and the traditional violin music of northern Romania spills out from the speakers. Cosmin asks for a song by the Petreuș Brothers, so we get to listen to an endless loop of Măi pretine, eu și tu [You and I, My Friend], because Ilișca has no time to change the tune.
Romanian workers swarm in and out for the soup and pies. We have met many of Iulică’s coworkers earlier this week, on construction sites in Brussels, Zellik, Ghent, Antwerp and Oudenaarde. This is the day when they put on their Sunday clothes and come to the market to shop and socialise.
At Ilișca and Dan’s, we chat with Romanians from Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. Workers from Cernăuți complain that they feel “forgotten”, losing their Romanian identity as they scatter across all of Europe, much like Romanians from Romania, while their families wait for them back home, impoverished by the war.
When we do field work, surrounded by people, each story opens into another story into another story and we keep encountering amazing life histories, of which we can only write down and photograph a small part. We would need another whole lifetime to record them all, to chronicle Romania’s recent history as we see it here, “in Brúxel”, at the heart of Europe.
Petru Marchiș, 37, is from Glod, a village 60 kilometres from Baia Mare, the nearest larger town, where Cosmin took photos 20 years ago. He has the pictures in albums on Facebook, so he asks Petru if he can recognise any of the guests at that traditional wedding party. Petru examines the phone screen. “Why, there’s Hotima’s Felicia, the bride is Mihai’s Ștefan’s Ileana, the violin players are Ion Ivanciul and Ștefan Petreuș, then there’s these guys, they’re all dead – Liucu, Mache, Pop’s Ion, Ureche, Lunga’s Ioana’s Ștefan – that one there’s Nuțu Bărsănește’s Măria, that one’s Filip’s Ioana, this one here is Gyuri’s Măria.”
We examine the faces in the old photographs that get names 20 years later, in a Romanian restaurant in Brussels, the unpaved main street in Glod and the wedding guests’ dusty shoes, the dress whose hem the bride lifts up to keep the dirt off it. The photos were taken by Cosmin in 2004, two years before Petru left for Belgium to work in construction, like many young people his age. Now most of the Glod population is away picking strawberries and asparagus in Belgium and the Netherlands; only the elderly are left in the village. “Our village is going to the dogs,” says Petru.
He has been working since he was 12; back then, he woke up at 4 in the morning to pick mushrooms which he then sold by the side of the road, making 30 to 40 lei a day – a maximum of eight euros. In winter, he took the horse-drawn cart to the fields to scatter dung as fertiliser. His father died when he was 14, and Petru was left to look after his mother, who numbed her broken heart with alcohol until she fell off a bridge and died, three years later.
Pentru never got a chance to spend more than eight years in school.
At 19, he went to Belgium to work in construction. Now he is a team leader and expecting his third child. He built a house in his village, though he doesn’t plan to ever return to live there. On weekends he comes to Doi Boi to eat tripe soup at Ilișca and Dan’s and “buy two or three chick’ns for the wife to make a good pot of soup out of”.

“Love comes first, then we can see about the rest”

Ilișca and Dan emigrated out of love, fleeing Sighetu Marmației so they could be together far from gossiping mouths. Ilișca Vida, 60, and her partner Dan “Dănuț” Mihai, 55, moved to Belgium in 2018.
They had met one year earlier, when Dan was looking for a restaurant where he could have a good bowl of tripe soup. He was divorced and working as a sales agent, and Ilișca had a small restaurant in the Sighet produce market. He became a faithful customer, first for the food, then because he had fallen in love with Ilișca.
Their families did not approve of their relationship; the ones who most opposed it were their children, who already had children of their own. So Ilișca and Dan decided to leave the country without telling anyone. “We figured: love comes first, then we can see about the rest.” Dan resigned from the company where he worked and sold his pigs and goats, and Ilișca closed down her restaurant.
They left with 1,100 euros in a used Renault Scenic they had bought a few days earlier, with nothing but a couple of suitcases with clothing in the boot. Once they were on the way, they called their parents. “At this age, you go and pull the kind of reckless stuff teenagers do at 19?” Dan’s parents commented. “What, you’re just running away in secret? Eloping?” asked Ilișca’s parents.
They first went to Italy, because Dan had lived there between 2004 and 2013 and he spoke Italian. They lived on a farm in Elice, Abruzzo, where Ilișca worked as a badante caring for elderly people, but Dan couldn’t find a job. After a few weeks, a friend of Ilișca’s urged them to come to Belgium, where she could get them work in cleaning at a hotel in Namur.
Gradually, they began working for various companies, cleaning conference halls, private homes and an amusement park. There were days when they drove for 300 kilometres from one address to the other and, commute included, spent 10 to 12 hours working. They each earned 1,200 to 2,000 euros a month.

“If we had stayed in Romania, we would never have afforded a two-week holiday in Egypt”

Now they live in Thorembais-Saint-Trond, 45 kilometres from Brussels, and from Monday to Thursday they work between 6 and 11 am at a centre for people with disabilities. Then, from 1 to 4:30 pm Monday to Thursday and from 1 to 7 pm on Fridays, they work at a senior home. On Saturdays and Sundays, from 6 am to 2 pm, they cook and serve food at the Romanian restaurant in Doi Boi.
“We don’t have a place of our own, just the two of us,” says Dan when I ask why they both work so hard. Their dream is to buy a home in Spain or Romania, where they can retire when they grow older, because Ilișca doesn’t like the cold and humidity in Belgium.
Ilișca has a passion for cooking and always missed her old restaurant in Sighet. Last year they happened to see this space to let in Doi Boi, managed by a Romanian woman from their region and her husband. They decided to open a restaurant there. “So she has more people to fatten up, not just me,” jokes Dan.
They began with a pot for sarmale cabbage rolls, soup, and pies. On their first day, they made less than 100 euros. The pies were bought by the owners of a Romanian store for their employees. Then, as the months passed, the tables started to get crowded. Now, over four weekends, the restaurant earns them as much as they make from cleaning in a whole month.
“We already have our repeat customers,” says Dan. “Guys who work in construction. There’ve been some young guys from the Netherlands too. We tried other Romanian recipes, like the bean and pork knuckle soup or the meatball soup – they were fine, but tripe soup and chicken soup with cream are still the mainstays.”
Ilișca and Dan wake up at 4:30 in the morning from Monday to Friday and at 4 on Saturdays and Sundays. Each day they change sheets on 58 beds at the centre for people with disabilities. The hardest weekday is Monday, when they have to clean up after the weekend, when the centre is serviced by a team of Brazilians they are not at all pleased with.
On Tuesdays they go to Lidl and Cora for the first round of shopping for the restaurant – water, soda, beer and flour for the cheese pastries and muffins. On Wednesdays they do more shopping. On Thursday nights, Ilișca kneads the bread dough. On Friday they buy ground meat for the sarmale from Intermarché and boil the potatoes for the pies; later, Dan grates the potatoes and peels garlic. On Saturdays and Sundays they cook and wait tables in Doi Boi.
Their workload is immense, but they are happy with their lives in Belgium. “If we had stayed in the country, we would never have afforded a two-week holiday in Egypt,” Ilișca says. “We couldn’t even have afforded to go to Greece, and we’ve been to Greece twice so far. We couldn’t have afforded a decent car either, but we’re now at our third car since we moved to Belgium.”

Part V

Romanians working in construction in Belgium: “My hands have never been soft”

The lives of Romanians who work in construction in Belgium unfold from one construction site to the next, from one lodging to the next, far from their families and the village in Vaslui County which they left to escape poverty – until they grow old and their backs give, and the men finally return home.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Zvon [Rumour] Caffe – the Romanian bar in Zaventem, a suburb of Brussels – is full of Romanian workers drinking beer “by the metre”. Among them, a few Belgian clients read the newspaper, drink coffee and eat chips.
This is the gathering place of the Romanian workers at the Rotean waterproof roofing company in Brussels, whom we have been following since the beginning of the year, and Romanians employed in maintenance work and airplane repairs at the Zaventem airport. This is where they celebrate holidays and birthdays, this is where they share news from back home, this is where they watch the matches of the EURO 2024 cup.
This is also where, on the 22nd of June, we watch the Belgium-Romania game with Costică, Marius, Țuțu, Ghiță, Mihai, Dorel and Marian, joined by Belgian fans, among both red-yellow-blue and red-yellow-black flags. People shout in Romanian and Flemish, and a Belgian hands out paper tissues to each Romanian when their national team fails to defend their goal – then comes to take them back when the goal is cancelled. At the end, he shakes hands with the Romanian fans and tells them “Une bonne ambiance” [nice atmosphere].
The bar owner is Valentina, who couldn’t even say Bonjour when she first came to Belgium 12 years ago. After years of working as waiters, she and her husband eventually opened Zvon Caffe, named after the bar on Decebal Boulevard in Bucharest where they met. They have a 4-year-old daughter “born here, raised here, who will stay here”. “This is home for us now,” says Valentina.

“I left home with one sweater, one t-shirt, and one pair of jeans”

Ghiță wins 35 euros on the slot machines. “Angel” wins 40, but then loses them and Ghiță makes fun of him for not knowing when to stop. He explains how the machines work, how they sometimes let you win to get you to put in more and more money, until eventually you lose it all.
Angel is one of the faithful customers of Zvon Caffe, where he spends his Saturday evenings and his whole Sundays. Unlike many of his coworkers, he has no mortgage to pay back, no wife and no children, so he feels no pressure to save up and can afford to be one of the group’s party animals. “If my mother had made the kind of money I have so far, with how she scrimps and saves, she’d be a billionaire by now.”
Ionuț “Angel” Rusu, 39, has been working since he was 6 or 7, when his father had a work-related accident at the sugar factory in Fălciu and lost his right arm from the shoulder. His family had cows, sheep, horses, pigs, poultry and land, and the four sons and one daughter had to handle the household on their own.
“Mum would send me to the sheepfold with a basket heaped with food for the shepherds. When I got there, I had to go to the spring to wash the buckets they used to milk the sheep – rain, wind, it didn’t matter. They’d pour the milk into the canister you brought, then you had to wash the buckets again, leave them clean. I had to sweep all around the fold; when they sat down to milk the sheep, everything had to be spotless.”
He liked going to school, and finished his eight years of school with a general average of 7,30 out of 10 – an achievement he is still proud of. “I was prepared enough, I could have gotten into a highschool in town, in Bârlad,” he says. “But they couldn’t afford to send me to highschool. My dad’s handicap aid was 35 lei a month [about 37 euros a month at the currency’s current value, adjusting for purchasing power], and the shuttle bus to Murgeni [the nearest highschool] would have been 10 lei.”
Angel comes from Fălciu village in Vaslui County, on the right bank of Prut River, which separates Romania from Moldova. The factory in Fălciu, the only sugar producer in the county, closed down in 1998 because of unpaid debts to the state. The local train station closed in 2013, as did many other national railway stations in Vaslui County, though eight million lei, or about 1,5 million euros, were invested into its renovation. People need to go to Bârlad, 55 kilometres away, to take the train. Between the last two censuses (2011 and 2021), the village population has dropped by 50%, to 3,731 inhabitants.
Angel left Fălciu at 18, going to deliver a parcel with food to his older sister in Bucharest. “I left home with one sweater, one t-shirt, and one pair of jeans – good Lord, those jeans were about three years old. Then I got to Bucharest and said ‘You know what, I’m not going back!’ I walked from Voluntari to Colentina [former villages, now peripheral neighbourhoods of Bucharest] looking for work. I couldn’t find any. I was a child, barely 18.”
“Times were tough, everyone was poor [in the early 2000s]. You could get enough to feed yourself, but nothing more. After the fall of Communism, they gave us back our land. Some help that was, damn it! I worked so hard… From early March to late December, my palms were covered in calluses: the spade for the garlic and onion field, the hoe for the vineyard. My hands have never been soft. They’re hard-working hands, now I have this job in construction.”
His sister then found him work as an apprentice with a team who worked in waterproofing roofs. “When they saw me, all pimply, weighing 86 kilos at 1 metre 89, they were all ‘This one’ll make a hard worker! We’ll take him!’” Because he was so young and shy, the other workers started calling him Îngerașu, or Little Angel, and the nickname has travelled with him to every construction site since.

“You can’t mute the alarm. It always has to ring at 10 to 5”

It’s been over 20 years, and Angel continued to work in waterproofing – first in Romania, then in Germany, then in Belgium. His life has unfolded from one construction site to the next, from one lodging to the next, sharing his loneliness and his beer with other men. “On Friday nights, you feel like you just don’t want to step out the door, you just struggle there, physically and emotionally. You’re exhausted. The next day, at 10 to 5, the alarm rings and you get up. To stay perked, you just keep thinking about the day when you’ll go on holiday. You can’t mute the alarm. It always has to ring at 10 to 5.”
Back home in Fălciu, his parents wait for him in the old house, which he’s paid to renovate. His father is 70, his mother is 66. “When I go back to the village, I pay their electricity bills and buy them wood for the winter, so they keep their pension money for food – together they get 1,000 lei [around 200 euros].”
“I love village life, but I can’t afford to move back to Romania because of the money. If I went back there, on the first day I’d have a barbecue outside and sit down with all the friends and family and hug them all.”
Though he’s never seen a 60-year-old worker on construction sites, Angel hopes to be able to keep it up until he retires. “You think I can change now? I’ve been doing this for 21 years. It’s like a career in the military or the police.”

A visit from Italy

Angel has taken his day off; this morning, his coworkers saw him leaving with his hair all styled up and his nicest clothes. He’s recently begun a relationship, and his girlfriend Mihaela has come to Brussels to see him. She has flown from Italy, where for the last four years she has been working as a badante, caregiver for the elderly, in Pescara, Abruzzo.
After a walk in the park in Zaventem and around the Atomium in Brussels, Angel brought her to Zvon Caffe to meet his coworkers. Mihaela, 40, is the sister of one of them – Marcel. They, too, come from a village in Vaslui County, and their parents, like Angel’s, had five children. Mihaela works in Italy, Marcel has his job in Belgium, they have a brother in Spain, and two sisters still in Romania.
Angel tries to hide his emotions, but last week he told us he couldn’t wait to meet her – he hasn’t had a stable relationship in seven or eight years, since the constant moving from one construction site to the next, from one country to the next, forced him to be single.
(…)

“This has been it for me”

In the shared kitchen of the Romanian workers in Zaventem, Irinel offers us slices of the tiramisu he made yesterday and left to rest in the fridge overnight.
Irinel is 51 and this is his last month working in construction in Belgium. He is drained. He can’t stand the pains in his back and legs any more. “Now construction sites are closed to me,” he says.
His two daughters are grown up, now independent. They have office jobs, just like he dreamed they would when they were still small. That was why he came to Belgium – to keep them in university.
Now he can return home.
He plans to open an ostrich farm in his village, because he read on the internet that he can sell their meat, their eggs, and even their feathers. He will start with two females and one male.
Irinel Blăniță is from Rădești village, Vaslui County, and his daughters are 23 and 24. One has a diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the Iași University and has found work as an engineer, while the other has graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry and works in her field in Germany. Irinel has renovated his house with his income from Belgium, expanding the kitchen and building an indoor bathroom with a septic tank, because his village has no plumbing.
His life has been a steeplechase. “After the Revolution, money was really tight. I’m not complaining, I’ve never complained about having work to do. Since I was little, as soon as I started walking on my own, I worked in my parents’ household, that was life back then. I’d bring water from the well a kilometre away, carrying two buckets at a time.”
He and his wife lived off what they could produce. They raised poultry, pigs, and cows, and had sheep in the care of a brother-in-law at a sheepfold. They washed their daughters in the băliuță, a small wooden tub, with water heated on the wood-burning stove. They wrapped them in pelinci, diapers which they boiled and reused. “Modern diapers were expensive and hard to find in stores, we couldn’t afford them. We needed that money to get bananas and powder milk for the girls. I went to get the water from my father-in-law’s well, because milk formula is really sensitive and curdles if the water isn’t right.”
Irinel worked as a tractor driver in his village. “I got paid worse than the day workers. At least they got food and something to drink, half wine – half water. I accepted work with no food, no wine, no nothing. They paid me 50 lei (10 euros) and I worked from 6 in the morning until night fell.”
In the early 2000s, he left to work in Turkey – he needed money for “the doctors”, so his older daughter could get surgery for umbilical hernia. After three months of work, he could afford to pay for the surgery and buy a Russian chainsaw, and a new wardrobe.
Over the next few years he worked in construction in Vaslui, Ploiești, and Bucharest. In Romania he never had a labour contract, so his social contributions were never paid. “In Bucharest they hired me in a team that insulated blocks of flats, you know, the whole thing with the styrofoam boards. On paper, I was hired for two hours a day. Then there was an inspection – the guy was laughing: ‘Seriously, you expect me to believe you came from Moldavia to Bucharest to work two hours a day? I’ve been standing outside for an hour, I’ve seen you all. Tell them to come out for statements or I’m calling the police.’ We didn’t know our contracts said two hours – they were bogus anyway, they didn’t mean a thing, nothing got paid to the state.”
He left to work in Russia, in Sochi, before the Winter Olympics in 2014, then in Moscow, building new blocks of flats. “I had a family to support, that came first for me.”
In Germany he found work laying fiber optics, then, in 2018, he came to Belgium. He doesn’t remember all the years and cities – it was all a long string of construction sites that could have been anywhere, as long as he wasn’t home, with his family. “The girls missed me, but we had no other choice.”
He hasn’t saved up a lot, because he had to keep the girls in university in Iași, buy them laptops and everything else they needed for their education. “I told them: ‘Listen, you’re studying for your own future. This has been it for me. But you two, if you want a nice office job, you’d better study.’”

Part VI

Families in limbo between two countries: “She cried when she was little, she cries now, when she drives us to the airport.”

Brothers, cousins, in-laws and neighbours have gone to work in Belgium while their wives and children stayed in Romania. At first they were only going to be away for a year or two, to save up enough to renovate their home or buy a car, then they got used to commuting between countries: their work is in Belgium, their life is in Romania.

The sun is finally out after several weeks of rain and inclement weather, during which work has fallen behind schedule on construction sites in Belgium; we feel the noontime blaze on the rooftop. The strong wind cools us, but throws debris into our eyes with each gust and brings the metallic taste of construction dust into our mouths. We sweat under the safety helmets, and the steel-toed, steel-soled boots wear bloody sores on our feet and weigh us down. From the rooftop, we can see the blooming magnolias in backyards in Tournai, one of Belgium’s oldest cities.
Brothers Ion and Gheorghe Câmpeanu, Dorel, Cristi, Gheorghiță, and Lucian have been working for a few weeks on the construction site of CHwapi, Wallonia’s biggest hospital, which treats 24,500 patients each year. The investment has cost 306 million euros.
Hundreds of people are at work on the 150,000-square-metre site; Romanian and Polish are the languages we hear around us most often. A man passes pushing a wheelbarrow with construction materials, a portable speaker in his pocket playing Romanian ethnic music.
At noon, Romanian workers have their lunch on the rooftop, leaning against thermal insulation panels. They open their backpacks and take out the water, bread, mustard, coldcuts and cheese, which they share among each other. Gheorghiță has just returned from his native Moldavia region in Romania and treats us to pies made by his wife. Dorel wolfs down a chocolate bar, downs an energy drink, then lights up a cigarette and opens TikTok. Lunch break is only half an hour.

“We can bring them all the gifts in the world, what they want is for us to stay with them”

The team of Romanian workers is employed by the Roteam building waterproofing company in Belgium, and the ones in charge of the project on the CHwapi site are brothers Ion and Gheorghe Câmpeanu from Chircești village, Vaslui County.
“Since I first came to Belgium in 2015, we’ve been building nothing but hospitals, kindergardens, schools, senior homes, social housing,” says Ion. “In Romania, all we built was shopping malls, supermarkets and the occasional villa for some bigshot.”
Ion, 51, and Gheorghe, 50, came to Belgium in 2015, when Roteam brought over a team of building waterproofing experts. They left their village in 1999, when they moved to Bucharest to escape the poverty in Moldavia.
They tested the waters in Italy too, working for a few months in Turin, where their two brothers, with their wives and children, have been living for 15 years. Only their mother still lives in Chircești, waiting for the once-a-year visits of one or another of her four children gone to work abroad.
Only once did all four brothers meet up in Chircești with their families. “Take my youngest brother: his children aren’t even coming to Romania anymore, they’re born there, in Turin,” says Ion. “At first we couldn’t talk, now they’ve learned Romanian.” They keep in touch over Facebook and TikTok, and last summer they all met in Italy, at a nephew’s wedding.
When Ion left Romania to work in Belgium, his oldest daughter, Diana, was 10, and his youngest, Bianca, was 1 year old.
When Gheorghe moved to Belgium for work, his daughter Georgiana was 9, and his son David was 3.
With the money they earned in Belgium, Ion and Gheorghe bought two apartments in the same building in Bucharest – one at the ground floor, the other on the first floor. Their oldest daughters are both students at the Cybernetics Faculty in Bucharest and drive cars bought by their fathers – Hyundai Tucsons, one black, one burgundy.
Neither Ion nor Gheorghe were in Romania for their daughters’ coming-of-age party. “Just come home, Dad,” Gheorghe’s oldest daughter still tells him.
“My wife was the one who always went to the school events,” says Ion. “It’s hard to make up for an absent father. Particularly the little one – when I go home, she jumps into my arms and won’t let me go. The older one is a little more reserved. But the kid, you wouldn’t believe her – if I talk to her on the phone her, she’s all ‘Come home, Dad.’”
“My oldest daughter was 10 [when I left]. I told her I was leaving, but what was she supposed to understand? She cried when she was little, she cries now when she drives us to the airport. I bought her a car; she drives us to the airport and she still cries. What am I supposed to tell her? ‘Bye, love, Dad’s leaving.’”
“We can bring them all the gifts in the world, what they want is for us to stay with them,” says Gheorghe.
“It’s tough, but what can we do? That’s life abroad.”
They plan to “retire” to Romania in a year, but all their coworkers say the same thing as the years go by and they continue to work in Belgium.
“We’ll be saving money until we die and it still won’t be enough,” says Gheorghe.
“We’d leave tomorrow, if we could find work back home,” says Ion.

Whole families work on construction sites in Belgium

“At some point, 60 to 70% of our employees were from Chircești, a village in Vaslui County – about twelve brothers and in-laws,” says Cosmin Râță, the owner of building waterproofing company Roteam.
“I asked them ‘How come you’re all from there?’ And they told me: because in the ’90s one of them went to Bucharest to earn a living. Then he brought his brother, then his cousin, then a third and fourth, and they all ended up in this line of work. We brought them here when they already had experience at a big waterproofing company in Bucharest, then some brought their children over when they grew up.”
“The workers told me something similar happened in a neighbouring village: one guy went to Germany stealing, then he brought them all there. Now most middle-aged men there are either no-good bums, or in prison in Germany, or fugitives in Italy and Spain.”
Because many of the men working for Roteam are related or come from the same village, a wedding or christening party in Romania affects the activity of the building waterproofing company in Belgium. This summer there were two weddings in Vaslui County, one in Chircești, the other in Costești, and 40% of the Roteam employees went to Romania to attend.
When they call Cosmin Râță to ask for work in Belgium, Romanian workers tell him they only plan on staying for a year or two, until they renovate their house or change their old car. But Cosmin knows they’ll stay for at least four or five years, because their children grow up and they want to buy them apartments in the city.
“After four or five years, the wife and children start saying ‘Dad, come back home’ and they’re faced with a dilemma: either they bring their families here, or they go back,” says Cosmin. “If their wife and children only ever lived in that village, it’s very hard. We’ve had children here who were 10 or 12 and had never seen a metro, they were completely confused. My brother went to get them a soda from a vending machine and the children went to look for the person behind it who was throwing the bottles: ‘Whoa, lookit ‘em go!’ It’s hard to get someone to live here when they’ve never been anywhere other than Vaslui or Iași in their life. So the family goes back to Romania, and our employee spends another year or two here, no more.”
Roteam helps Romanian workers who bring their families to Belgium with the integration process – Raluca Râță, Cosmin’s sister-in-law, handles the paperwork, gets their children signed up for school, finds them places to rent. The most important step is helping the women find work – most of them in cleaning, because they don’t yet speak French when they come to live in Belgium.
“If you keep a woman at home and she’s been used to village life and working in the field, here she has no one to talk to, no neighbours, so she’ll feel like she’s going mad,” says Cosmin. “If the children go to school and integrate, the mothers make the sacrifice and stay. But if the children keep crying, they just pack them up and go back home.”
But, in families who stay in Belgium, the children “blossom”, he says. The children of the first Romanian workers settled in Brussels are now in university – “Just think, seeing your child fluent in French when you can barely string a few words together.”

At the lodgings

The workers park the vans outside the house in Bellegem, provided by the company for its employees, near Kortrijk, in Wallonia. The men jokingly say they are “travelling for work while they’re travelling for work” – their luggage stays in Zaventem, near Brussels, where they live from Friday night to Monday morning with their coworkers. On Mondays, they pack a change of clothes, load up tools and construction materials into the vans and leave to work all week on construction sites in Tournai and Harelbeke. They sleep in Bellegem from Monday to Friday, two or three in a room, because the construction sites are too far from Zaventem for them to commute.
In Belgium, a single day can bring wind, sun, rain and humidity on the construction site, so they return from work bone-tired and cold. Some prepare their dinner, others wait in line for the showers, others smoke outside and talk on the phone. They have few hours of rest, so they hurry through it all: cooking, eating, showering, talking to the family back home, then going to sleep, because in the morning they wake up at 4:30. The older ones go to the bathroom first, followed by the younger, who have a harder time getting out of bed.
Cristi sticks a frozen loaf of bread in the oven; Ion cooks sausage and canned beans on the stovetop. Dorel cracks open an energy drink and Lucian rolls cigarettes, because it’s too windy to do it on the rooftop at work. The house has a spacious livingroom with a large window to the street, typical of the Flemish region. Walking on the street, you can see the outlines of Romanian workers, side by side with other houses with large windows and the silhouettes of Belgian families cooking dinner for their children.
Dorel talks on the phone with his 3-year-old daughter, Alesia: “You went splashy-splash in the bath, yes? Yes, love, your shirt is really pretty. Alright, daddy’s angel, we’ll talk again, yeah? Daddy loves you.” “I always hear her say ‘Daddy, I miss you,’ or ‘Daddy, come home’,” says Dorel after he hangs up. “She called me before I left from work and asked what I was doing, so I said ‘Well, love, I’m on my way home.’ Then she was so happy and went to tell her mother and her grandma, thinking I was coming home to Romania.”
He is tanned and his skin is peeling on his shoulders and arms. He has burn marks on his hands, because he is a beginner, not as skilled with the torch as the other workers, who are used to Belgian wind. A few days ago a blob of hot tar fell on his arm and the wound has not yet healed. “When you catch a quiet day, it makes you happy – like yesterday and the day before. Today was so windy… What can you do? It throws everything in your eyes, it blows the flame away from where you’re pointing it.”
Daniel “Dorel” Petronel Moise, 22, comes from Berezeni village, Vaslui County. His girlfriend became pregnant when she was 18 and he was 19. “When that happened, my conscience told me ‘Hey, this does it, now I have a family of my own.’ So, since it happened that way, I really wanted this little girl.”
Dorel is the youngest of three children. His father fixes fences and roofs around the village, and his mother went to Germany as a seasonal worker for a while. “I used to miss her a lot,” he says. “When I couldn’t see her around the house, I just wasn’t well. I still miss her. I can’t be more than two days without talking to my parents back home. Not for hours, I’m happy if I can just hear them say ‘Hey, I’m good.’”

“I don’t want to try long-distance relationships ever again”

As soon as he finished the Electro-Mechanics vocational school and turned 18, Dorel went to work in Sweden with his cousins, planting saplings and logging. They flew to Stockholm, then a Romanian picked them up in his car and drove them 700 kilometres, to a town whose name he forgot. He made 1,000 to 2,000 euros a month, depending on the number of saplings he planted.
He got to Germany because an uncle of his was a carpenter and needed an apprentice. Dorel needed money to buy a car, having just got his driver’s license, so he went with his uncle. He spent a few months in another town whose name he can’t remember – it could have been anywhere, the important thing was to find work.
When he returned to Romania, he went to Bucharest to work as a carpenter. “I worked from 5 in the morning to nightfall and got paid 4,000 lei [about 800 euros]. I was doing more than I’m doing here, and I didn’t have a contract, it was all under the counter. Salaries ain’t enough in Romania; there’s plenty of work to be found, but they don’t pay you, and you get zero benefits.”
He came to Belgium at the advice of his brother-in-law, who had been working in construction for six years. He was happy with the salary – 2,700 to 3,200 euros, depending on the work hours. In 2021, his daughter Alesia had just been born and he needed money to support his young family and build a house in the village, because they still lived with his parents.
But neither him nor his partner were prepared for a long-distance relationship, and he didn’t know how to talk about it. They started to have arguments over the phone at night, when Dorel returned from work. “I come from work dead tired in the evening and maybe I need rest,” he said. “We’d fight over anything, because when you’re far from each other, you get all sorts of ideas.”
“With time, you grow apart: fights today, fights tomorrow. When you’re at home together, you can be angry with each other for an hour or two, but then you see each other around the house and you end up making up. This way, when you’re abroad and have fights over the phone, you can be upset for two or three days. Things grow cold and there’s no point yanking on that rope if it just won’t work.”
“It was the distance that made things go cold between us; that and talking so little. I mean, look at me, I leave at 6 in the morning and get back at 6 in the evening. It’s dark when I leave, it’s dark when I come back. I talk to her for ten minutes over lunch and another ten minutes, maybe half an hour in the evening – then I go to sleep. She’s a woman, she feels the need for affection.”
“She also didn’t set her foot down and say ‘Listen, baby, I can’t go on like this, I feel like I’m moving away from you, or there are things I want that I’m not getting.’ Well, she was a bit of a child, and I was a bit of a child too, so we didn’t think things through that well and it turned out like this. If I had been in the country, we definitely wouldn’t [have broken up].”
Last year, his partner took their daughter Alesia and moved back with her parents. They continue to talk on the phone – Dorel calls Alesia every evening and sends money – but they don’t consider themselves a couple any longer.
The last time he was on vacation in Romania, Dorel went out in town with his partner and their daughter “so the girl could feel affection from both of us at the same time”. “When I go home, I don’t need anything else. Just spending some quiet time with the girl. Being with my parents, enjoying my time with them, because you never know what could happen tomorrow or the day after.”
He wants to continue working in Belgium for another two years, until he finishes building his house, then return to Romania and work as an HGV driver. “Since the breakup, I made up my mind: if I fall for someone again, either I go back to Romania, or I bring her here with me. Because I don’t want to try long-distance relationships ever again.”

Statistics:
128,898 Romanians were living in Belgium on the 1st of January 2024, of whom 73,320 were men and 55,578 were women. Their numbers have doubled compared to ten years ago, in 2014, when 56,688 Romanians were registered in the country. Compared to 2004, when 4,665 Romanians were living in Belgium, their number has grown 27-fold in 20 years.

21,344 people born in Romania had Belgian citizenship on the 1st of January 2024. Neither them nor their descendants are included in the statistics above, because they are only counted as Belgian citizens.

The official numbers issued by Statbel, the Belgium statistics office, also do not include unregistered Romanians. But there are those of them who do undocumented work in agriculture, construction, bars and cafés in Belgium and who are not part of any statistics.