‘Why did you come here?’ says Arta S, rolling her eyes and smiling. The 37-year-old says that’s the first question people ask her when they find out that she’s from Albania. She arrived in London in 2019 with her husband and two children, now eight and five, and was granted asylum after ‘six hard months’ where she was placed in ‘two houses full of mould’.
Things are better now. Today she’s wearing a sparkly headband and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Today is a Good Day’. She lives in Stratford and works in recruitment. So… why did she leave the small Balkan nation just north of Greece? ‘Albania is an amazing country,’ she says. ‘It has beautiful landscapes and many sunny days… but not everything that glitters is gold.’
