Timarit Eflingar

26 TÍMARIT EFLINGAR-STÉTTARFÉLAGS Working in Iceland – A personal story Adrian Mihai Hegedus is from Romania. He came to Iceland via a temp agency in September 2019. Hi Adrian, Would you be willing to share your experience of coming to Iceland to work? Ok, thank you. I saw an advertisement from a construction company in Iceland. And I decided to apply. I received a message from a woman. I called her, just to know if she really existed or not. I asked her how much money I needed to bring for living until my first payment, and she told me that I didn’t need much money because she was going to provide accommodation and pay me in advance for food. I came to Iceland full of hope and thinking that here I will meet honest people and my life will be decent. A girl from the company came to pick me up from the airport. She drove me to my new home – on the 6th floor in an apart- ment building in Breiðholt. This was an apartment with more than 6 rooms... very dirty... They gave me a small room... I was really happy because I didn’t share it with anyone. But my nightmare just started after the first night... THE APARTAMENT HAD BED BUGS and they were eating me alive!!! That is not much! Yes, any time. I will tell you my story here on Messenger if you don’t mind. OMG! What did you do? I went to the emergency room. The doctors told me – you have to move out today! I talked to the woman - the owner of the temp agency. She knew about this problem. So I was asking her to move me to another place. After some time they moved me to a new house in Kópavogur. I got a room with no windows and no ventila- tion, just a bathroom.... I think the house used to be a factory. I was staying there in that house with 15-20 other people shar- ing one shower. It was very bad because everyone came home from work in the same hour and everyone needed to take a shower. And then everyone was cooking dinner at the same time in one tiny kitchen. But I was very happy because I had a bathroom and no insects. But I still had no job and the owner of the company was still on holiday and I did not get any money for food as she had promised me. After a lot of begging, she told me she could pay me maximum 5.000 kr. for food for the week. This must have been quite a different situation than you ever imagined yourself in before you came to Iceland? No. I was buying noodles and macaroni and baked beans in a can. That was it. Most of the guys living in this house in Kópavogur were stealing food from the stores. It is not normal. I went with one guy to the store; it was his birthday and he couldn´t afford a little birthday cake– so he just started to cry, there in the store. It is one of the saddest days of my life.