when Ukrainian refugees are recruited in the palaces of the Côte d’Azur

With his uniform and his vacuum cleaner on his back, Alla, 56, walks the small steep streets of the village of Eze (Alpes-Maritimes), located about fifteen kilometers from Nice. “This place gives me strength“, she slips. On the steep slopes lined with laurels, the view of the sea is breathtaking.

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In Ukraine, Alla was a fashion designer. She and her daughter fled kyiv at the start of the war. She traded her life before in May for a maid’s uniform at the Château de la Chèvre d’Or, a five-star establishment. “It is very physical work. You see the mess. After, you will see a nice room. Now I’m a pro for this job“, she said, smiling.

Here, nine Ukrainian women were recruited. Another hotel in Eze, “Le Château Eza”, did the same. They take care of the rooms or are in the kitchen. All very quickly integrated despite the war, which is still present.

“I can’t be happy because my country is at war. Our life is on hold”

Alla, maid at La Chèvre d’Or, in Eze.

franceinfo

A little further on, Tetiana is vacuuming the bar. Before, she worked in the gas industry. She left all her family in Ukraine. Now, with her new job, at 26, she wants to start a new chapter in her life in France, aware of having “lost his life before“.”I’m happy because it changes my mind, I have to build my new life little by little“, she explains. One regret for Tetiana, that of not “not yet have a relationship with customers”. She hopes for this to learn French and sees herself staying in this palace “next season“.

A dynamism much appreciated by the general housekeeper of the hotel, Maïté Montesinos, who had to train them. “The language barrier, we do not necessarily see it. The fastest had a week of training in pairs. They work very well, even better than people who have worked in the hotel industry for years. These are nice surprises“, notes the general housekeeper.

But it hasn’t always been easy for refugees who have ventured into the hospitality industry. “We organized recruitment fairs, we saw it as an opportunity to find people but also to show that we were present, but it was very complicated“says Fred Ghintran, owner of two restaurants in Nice, and president of the catering branch of the UMIH in the Alpes-Maritimes.

He recruited a Ukrainian refugee in the kitchen after his arrival. As in many other establishments, he quickly gave up. “Everyone was confronted with the same concern, we were too quick. The language barrier is very complicated to manage, I think it takes a period of adaptation of two or three months to get to the temperature of the country before being able to work“he adds.

Alla and Tetiana, they were recruited thanks to Ludovic Hubler, a common interlocutor from Eze. Having gone to pick up several Ukrainian women and their children in Poland, this humanitarian put them in touch with the director of the establishment, Thierry Naidu, who was unable to find staff. He missed him”30 to 40 people at the start of the seasonhe said, and suddenly, it’s true that with the Ukrainians, we found a real desire“.

However, it was necessary to make some sprains to the rules of procedure of the establishment, “for example the right to have their cell phone to have relations with their loved ones because they don’t know when they can call them. As a result, today, they are happy with what we are doing“, he explains.

The Alpes-Maritimes department is the second largest host country for Ukrainian refugees in France after the Paris region. More than 20,000 of them have been welcomed there.