Many thousands of Latvians come to Ireland to work on mushroom farms. A book by undercover reporter Laima Muktupavela about their lives, working conditions and the land devastated by their departure, has become a bestseller in her native Latvia, and would be an eye-opener for Irish readers. She talks to Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
On Christmas Day that year they were en route before sunrise. From the three-bedroom house that the 12 Latvians shared to the mushroom farm where they worked could have been no more than a few miles, though it felt longer after a day's exertion.
"I can still remember that Christmas Day," says Laima Muktupavela. "We had to start work at five o'clock in the morning. Between 5am and 7am we had to prepare 200 boxes of mushrooms, ready to go to the shops. I asked could we have more money for that work, but the owner said: 'If you ask questions, you can go home.'
"I remember another time when I found myself sweating all over. I had fallen ill, and whatever I had brought out a rash and swelling on my skin. I asked the owner if he could help me with some bandages or medicine. He replied that he couldn't be bothered with it. It wasn't his problem, he said, and walked away. I approached him again and said: 'It is your problem. It's a big problem.'
"What I did was, I lay down and placed cabbage leaves over my skin to try to relieve the pain and bring down the swelling. He was terrified when he saw how bad the damage was. So he looked at me and said [ giving an exasperated wave of the arm]: 'Go away! I don't want to see you again today.' "
Muktupavela laughs at the recollection. Her walk-on role in the drama of Latvian migration was an ambivalent one from the start, she says, conceived not of economic need but of a journalist's hunch. As a newspaper reporter in Latvia at the turn of the century, Muktupavela had increasingly found herself as chronicler of an incipient trend, jotting down the impressions of returning emigrants with greater frequency, if diminishing insight. In all such conversations, she found, one could go so far before invariably hitting the boundary of the emigrant's need to rationalise his lot by painting his experience in primary colours alone. "Yes, I thought they were hiding something. They were holding back. They weren't telling the absolute truth. So I thought, I'll go myself. I'll find out."
Leaving behind her partner and four children, Muktupavela travelled to Ireland in 2001 and joined the group of 11 other Latvians working on a mushroom farm in Co Meath. "We shared one house between 12 of us. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and there was even a small kid in the house. I fought for my own space. Physically! I didn't tell anyone I was a journalist but made a point of talking with everyone, trying to get to know their characters, their attitudes, the way they interacted."
A typical working day began at 6am and finished when they could no longer see the mushrooms through the darkness. For this they each earned about £125, or just under €160, a month. As the only member of the group with any English, Muktupavela became its spokeswoman. "I asked the owner why Irish people were getting better pay than Latvians. And do you know what he said? 'You are different.'
"But at the end of the day he was good enough. He wasn't the worst man. There was a lady among us who was due to give birth, and he would bring her to the hospital; he would look after her. I wrote that in the book: that we were very grateful to him for that."
When she returned home, the impressions Muktupavela had formed in Ireland became the matter for her first book, and the questions raised by The Mushroom Covenant were of such resonance that its first edition was briskly followed by a second, then a third and a fourth. It was awarded the Latvian National Literary Award in its publication year, and its author's voice radiated outwards like a bell; the work has been translated several times, with an English version on the way. To most Latvians, Muktupavela's name is the standard gambit in debates on emigration.
The book drew on the author's experience to broach a broader set of questions, most to do with the social ramifications of the exodus of young Latvians seeking better-paid work in countries such as Ireland, Britain and Sweden. Doing so, it tapped into deeply-held national misgivings that had taken root by the time of its publication.
"When I came back from Ireland," says Muktupavela, "I started to write about the social problems this huge movement of people was having on Latvia - about the break-up of families, marital separation. Just some journalism, at first. What kind of life is it for a woman with children whose husband leaves the country? How would they live? At first, people were angry with me for bringing all of this up. But in general the book was received very well."
She likens it to "a Bible" on the bookshelves of those who have family members working abroad. When she arrived in Dublin last week, an official at the Latvian embassy told her that when he left home for this posting, his family made sure to send him off with a copy of The Mushroom Covenant under his arm.
Muktupavela was born in Rezekne, a town in the poor Latgale region, in eastern Latvia. Built on seven hills close to the border with Russia, it is a place of great lakes, bad roads and long memories. As an old geopolitical pivot - Rezekne is where the Moscow-Riga and St Petersburg-Warsaw railway lines intersect - the family trees of its 40,000 people are multi-ethnic mosaics.
And the economic forces that here drew together Balts and Slavs and Ugro-Finns, Polish landlords and Russian peasants, are today exerting the same circular effects. Unemployment in Latgale is the highest in Latvia, and since the country joined the EU, in May 2004, tens of thousands of the region's young have departed with the certainty of a better wage overseas. Few homes in Latgale have not had a son or daughter emigrate to Ireland, says Muktupavela. Employers in the region now look to Ukraine and Belarus to fill their vacancies, but the social collateral is heavier still: broken families, orphaned children, desolate townships.
"We have very small salaries in Latvia, and these people left Latvia because they need to have a normal life. Thank God that Ireland can help. But people who go to Ireland, many don't come back. We were the first wave of Latvians [ in 2001]. Now I see that Latvians are building the economies of other countries, like Ireland. Only now, after five years, has the Latvian government started to think about this problem. Only now have they started to discuss it. Only now, when 50,000 Latvians have left for Ireland."
Muktupavela speaks English, but I have brought along an interpreter just in case. Though skilled, he is more accustomed to legal translation, with a spare style and an uncanny knack for rendering two minutes of Latvian speech in three words of English. But he has been following the conversation intently, and here he takes up Muktupavela's argument. He has been in Ireland for some time, he says. His mother, who joined him two months ago, has found a job washing dishes in the city. His father stayed at home; he is a foreman on a building site. "Every time I call home, my father tells me how they have to finish a building by such a time, but they can't because they're short of staff. All they have is unqualified workers, because the qualified builders are earning much more money abroad."
Four years and five books have passed since that Christmas morning on the mushroom field. Muktupavela, liberated from daily journalism by the commercial success of The Mushroom Covenant, is now a full-time writer. She has returned to Ireland with a television production team to prepare for a full-length documentary and a 20-programme series based on the experience of Latvians in Ireland. The project, for which she is writing the script, will involve shuttling between the two countries over the next three years. The job is a pleasure; they need do no more than sit in a Dublin cafe to find their subjects, says Muktupavela. The day after we meet, the production team hopes to track down Jekabs Nakums, a Latvian Olympic athlete who announced on television last November that he was leaving to go and wash cars in Ireland.
The project also gives Muktupavela the chance to indulge an abiding passion for the country she is so closely identified with at home. A regular visitor, she spent her last trip hitching around the west with her daughter, and she has taken in much of the rest of the country over the years. "I have thought about buying a house here," she says. "I have dreamed of it. In Co Mayo. Irish people always laugh when I tell them that. Who would have believed five years ago that a Latvian would be talking about buying a house in Ireland? I can't explain my attitude to Ireland. I cannot find words."
She reverts to Latvian, smiles and fluently pours forth, her hands waving, her voice halting once or twice while scouring for the right word, before delicately nudging her head forward and conspiratorially imparting the final clause in a whisper. When she has finished, we turn to the interpreter. He raises his gaze slowly from the table. "Yes, she is happy."