We live more in the lives of the people we write about and photograph than in our own lives. We've been doing this for the past six and a half years, ever since we've been traveling around Europe with a camper to document the stories of Romanians in the diaspora - the 5.7 million Romanians living and working in Europe.
One of them is Cristian Rădulescu, a truck driver in Derby, UK. It's 4.50 in the morning when he leaves for work. He slept less than four hours because he wanted to spend the evening with his girlfriend, Andreea - shawarma, a couple of Corona beers and their two dogs, who are alone all day and have brought their favorite toys to their owners' feet. They stayed up until almost midnight.
Feelings of guilt overwhelm Cristian when he's alone in the cab, where he sometimes spends up to 15 hours a day. He is absent from the lives of his aging parents in Romania and his twin brother who stayed behind. He didn't attend the christening of his nephew, who bears his name and is now three years old. He didn't go to the funeral of his godmother, nor to the funeral of the aunt he loved very much.
The truck cab is where he spends most of his life alone, amid the crumbs, footprints and breaths of other drivers. Sometimes his thoughts overwhelm him, other times he goes on autopilot and thinks of nothing, just follows the line on the highway.
I wrote down these lines in my notebook on the days I lived in Cristian's life, in September 2021: we parked the camper in front of his house, ate lunch with him and Andreea, his girlfriend, got up at 4am and accompanied him to his truck cab.
Cristian's story is not just a reportage. It is part of Romania's history, because migration is one of the most important chapters in our contemporary history. Romanian migrants have left villages empty and children alone at home, generated changes in mentality and economic growth, influenced Romanian politics and triggered social unrest.
For six and a half years, we have been living in a six-meter-long van in the midst of Romanian diaspora communities: in the strawberry fields of Spain and on farms in Germany, next to construction sites in Belgium and fish factories in Denmark, in front of old people's homes in Italy where Romanians work, and hospitals in Europe full of Romanian doctors.
The kind of journalism we do is rarely supported financially, so we have chosen to live in a camper to do our jobs.
Life as nomadic journalists has helped us integrate more easily into Romanian communities and tell the extraordinary stories of ordinary people.
Among them Eugenia, who fled to Italy after her husband put a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her with an axe. She borrowed €100 from a friend, packed some summer clothes in a suitcase and took a bus to Lecce in southern Italy, where she had heard from someone that work was available. All she had was a packet of biscuits and some pretzels, her food for the two and a half days she traveled.
She arrived in one of Lecce’s parks at 12 midnight and waited for Lică until 2am. She didn't know him, but a friend had put her in touch with the Romanian, who promised to find her a job. Eugenia gave him a long Marlboro cartridge, as her friend had told her to do, and asked him not to mock her.
In the 11 years she has worked as a caregiver in Italy, Eugenia has never had a work contract. She has been sexually harassed, forced to serve her "masters" standing "like servants" at the table, and woken up at night with a cane beating on the headboard of her bed; locked in her house for days with the elderly woman with senile dementia she was caring for, with no right to days off and rest.
”Badante” in Italy, „Betreuerinnen” in Austria, the Romanians who have cared for Europe's elderly are an invisible generation of women who have saved their families from poverty and sent their children to university - 131,000 Romanian caregivers are currently registered in Italy alone, but no one knows the real number, because many work illegally, like Eugenia.
In our mobile newsroom, the boundary between personal life and work has blurred, giving us the privilege of an intimacy we never had when working in a newsroom. Homes and courtyards open to welcome us in, and people share their most intimate moments with us.
When Oana left to work on cucumber plantations in Germany, she was still breastfeeding Lucia, who was one year and eight months old. She got up early in the morning, kissed her baby girl, loaded her luggage in the car and left with her husband Stelian for a farm in Nuremberg.
When Lucia woke up, she searched the house for her parents. She couldn't stop crying for the first week. She couldn't speak, but cried, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy." Her grandmother, who stayed at home with her and her older brother, didn't know what to do: the little girl didn't want milk from the bottle or soup. At night, to put her to sleep, the grandmother put her to her chest and the little girl sucked, even though her grandmother's breasts had no milk.
In Germany, Oana was picking cucumbers with a fever and swollen breasts, cooled with a wet towel under her T-shirt. She returned home 10 months later, when Lucia began to talk and walk in her absence.
These are the stories we don't know when we talk about the Romanian diaspora vote.
While some Romanians emigrated because they wanted to explore other cultures or sought new career opportunities, as there are many stories we have documented, a category of Romanians were forced to leave because of poverty - those living on the margins, in rural communities in Romania, without access to quality education and health care.
We have failed to talk about the important issues which have led to the mass migration of Romanian citizens - school dropouts, underage mothers, violence, poverty, unemployment, corruption - and have preferred to talk about the guilt of those who have left and the kitsch of the houses they build, ignoring the fact that it was poverty which emptied the villages and small towns of Romania and left children without parents.
These are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who are part of our contemporary history, and if we want to understand who we are, we have to listen to them. This is why we live in a car, far away from our family and friends: to get to know Cristian, Eugenia, Oana and all the other Romanians that neither politicians nor a significant part of society listened to.
The 2024 and 2025 elections have left us more divided than ever. The fury, noise and hatred that has poured over us in recent months has reconfirmed for me that we don't know each other's stories and that only stories can still make us a community.
Stories are the bridges we need now: between those who left and those who stayed; between those who vote differently; between those who had no choice and those who wanted to leave.
In a country where the rift between rural and urban, between the poor and the privileged, between those 'here' and those 'there' seems ever wider, we need these stories to reconcile us with the past, with our transgenerational traumas, with our mistakes, but also with each other.
Only then can we fill the space between us with empathy and truth.
