“I moved to Norway because I had a hard time economically in Latvia after I was widowed,” tells Dina Vitolina.

She was born in Russia but moved to Latvia when she was only six months old. There she trained as a hairdresser and worked at a pastry shop and in the management of a bakery.

She came to Norway in 2003 and began work in a mountain hostel in addition to having various cleaning jobs.
“Everything was very different from Latvia, but things went well,” she said. Then she was one of many affected by the Timberland Company bankruptcy. Since then she’s gotten a new job at a pub and began a Norwegian language course to increase her chances to accomplish her highest goal: a permanent job in Norway.

Dina feels that she has it good in Norway and wants to be living in Gudbrandsdal, a long valley in Oppland, in large part because life in Latvia is so difficult. But she also has been happy to be close to nature here and has learned a bit of the Norwegian dialect spoken in the Fron municipality. She misses family and friends in Latvia and tries to take a trip back there at Christmas. She follows both Norwegian and Latvian news and daily reads the Gudbrandsdølen Dagningen , the local paper published in Lillehammer. Now and then there’s a word in the paper she can’t find in the dictionary so Dina’s goal is to teach herself even better Norwegian. She is married again to a Latvian man who also lives in Norway. Now and then they try to speak Norwegian at home together to learn more.
“I don’t know now whether I will travel back to Latvia. I want to live here longer, but now and then it’s stressful because I don’t have a permanent job,” said Dina.