Description of the integration initiative implemented
According to her account, the interviewee has met no critical issues in her integration process in Italy. Apart from her Italian-language knowledge as an initial barrier, she was lucky to receive help from her husband and colleagues. Willing to reach higher levels in her Italian language proficiency, she attended several Italian courses, offered both for free by associations supporting migrants, and with fee by other institutions.

Personal story
Our interlocutress is a 39-year-old woman who emigrated from Sri Lanka to Italy 7 years ago through family reunification with her husband. After some time, namely 4 years ago, they reunited their daughter who had meanwhile stayed in Sri Lanka with her grandparents. Now 16, their daughter was 12 years old when she arrived in Italy.
It took her 9 months to get a visa for family reasons. Once arrived, the interviewee had no problems as her husband had lived in Italy for a long time, and had Italian citizenship. She does not have Italian citizenship yet as the procedure requires three more years to wait before getting it.
The reasons that led her to move from Sri Lanka were not related to economic needs: in her country, she used to earn good money if compared to the average, and correlated with the parameters of a common Sri Lankan lifestyle. She actually wanted to come to Italy so as to reunite with her husband and keep her family together.
In Sri Lanka, she had been working as an English teacher for 15 years. In Italy, instead, she has difficulties looking for a work in public education being native teachers sought for teaching English in Italian schools.
She was required the TOEFL Certification (Test of English as a Foreign Language) for teaching English in public education, but even after earning the TOEFL, it has not been easy to find a job in a public school. After two years of giving private lessons, she found a job in an association that offers, among other services, English lessons to children, and only later she was offered to work in afterschool programmes.
The protagonist of this story does not feel that her integration process in Italy has been characterised by episodes of discrimination. The only exception is the one regarding working opportunities, hence no small thing though: it is about the set of selection criteria that should be met for teaching English in schools – namely, the problem is that Italian nationals are given priority over foreign workers, i.e. “even if not adequately trained, they take precedence over her who may boast 15 years of experience in teaching English.” That aside, the interviewee states that she has mostly experienced a favourable social climate in Florence, and a certain availability from Italians, especially in the early days when she still was not able to speak a good Italian. Before coming to Italy, her husband had suggested her to attend an Italian course in Sri Lanka: initially, she did not follow it constantly since she would not have imagined leaving her country. But, in the end, it happened. Upon her arrival, she enrolled in free language courses for foreigners through associations, such as the “Centro Giorgio La Pira” in Florence. In her opinion, these courses do not help learn Italian adequately, which is due to the quality of the teachers chosen to teach them: this is why she has opted for taking private paid lessons in order to reach B2 level in Italian.
From her point of view, gender has never been a discriminating factor in her integration process, and she has never been the victim of sexual abuse, violence, nor else forms of mistreatment. The only aspect that she identifies as a veiled form of discrimination is the “obligation” for Muslim women not to wear the veil at the workplace. In fact, she was asked not to wear it, and she experienced this request as an obligation for fear of encountering further difficulties in finding work. Likewise, her daughter was “forced”, i.e. asked not to wear the veil in school.
According to her, Italy offers a positive climate for fulfilment of women, be they Italian or non-Italian. She considers Italian women to be kind, free, and emancipated in comparison to their Sri Lankan counterparts. For instance, most women in her country are educated in conformity with rules of conduct that are actually limiting their social freedom, especially in terms of decision-making.
Despite a controlled female education in Sri Lanka, she has never felt her educational nor professional choices being limited by her family: according to the interviewee, her advantaged condition was due to the fact that she had grown up in the capital, and her lifestyle had been thus less controlled than it may occur in smaller towns or in the countryside.
Another interesting aspect, that she has felt as a “difficulty”, was that she had always been driven by the wish to live like “Western women.” Yet, as she herself observes: “despite my trying, I’ve always been one step behind them.” After some time, she succeeded in reaching her goal of feeling free like “them.” Her freedom, or rather her feeling of freedom has never been limited by her husband: he has been living in Italy since 10 years now, and his cultural mind-set and ideas of women have remarkably changed too. This is another element that has allowed our interlocutress to slowly achieve her goals in emigration.
The interviewee dreams about finding a permanent English teaching post in a public school: in order to make her wish come true, she is supposed to enrol in an Italian university. Accordingly, she is studying for B2 Italian level which is required for attending university and obtaining a university degree that would allow her to get a teaching position in Italy.

Analysis of the initiative and individual story
During the conversation, the protagonist of the story repeatedly stressed that she has never experienced forms of discrimination as an immigrant woman. Yet, what strongly emerges from the interview is a difficulty that she has experienced in reaching a satisfactory working position in Italy: such a condition of hers is due to the Italian policies regulating recognition process of academic qualifications held by non-EU nationals. What’s more, the interview reveals that it was difficult for her to find work even in private schools as local i.e. Italian teachers are given priority over foreign workers. These circumstances actually recall the notion of veiled i.e. indirect discrimination. Another aspect that emerged from her interview concerns a specific form of cultural discrimination, namely the request not to wear the veil: this exhortation to avoid displaying religious or cultural symbols has been perceived by our interlocutress as a slight form of discrimination; the phenomenon was further experienced by her daughter who, though being a believer, had decided not to wear the veil at school so as to prevent occasions that could have interfere in her integration experience with her classmates.
Another important dimension is that the interviewee is experiencing a kind of double identity in emigration. Namely, she proves to be linked to certain cultural values of her society of origin, and to some Islamic canons, such as the importance of wearing the veil which seems not to be the best way to integration, hence she does not wear it. At the same time, the interviewee repeated several times that she had always dreamt about being emancipated, and living like a Western woman: given that Italian society has allowed her to achieve this wish of hers, she added that she finally feels happy in relation to her being a woman.
All told, she has found a balance between Sri Lankan and Italian cultural values. To boot, breaking the stereotype of orthodoxy in Islam has further contributed to reaching this balance in her life.
What keeps being experienced by the interviewee as a problem is her work situation, which makes her feel professionally unsatisfied: in this regard, she is trying to solve her condition by removing the barriers – basically language proficiency and required qualifications – that hinder the progress of her professional fulfilment.

Results and Impact
A positive and pleasant climate that the interviewee found in Florence has allowed her to integrate socially, and to feel as a woman living an emancipated life. Nonetheless, the conditions that would let our interlocutress to think of her migration experience as a satisfactory event are not in place yet. Namely, a controversial aspect commonly faced by many skilled immigrant women re-emerges in her case as well: it is about the impossibility of getting recognised their professional qualifications, and finding, accordingly, a job that would correspond to their education and training experiences. The circumstance implies the need to resume studies in Italy, which is not a simple task for a number of reasons, such as: language issues, age, a family to provide for, among others. Thereby, immigrants, both women and men, are forced to accept underpaid jobs, that do not match their professional qualifications nor wishes. Experiencing a similar situation, our interviewee does not feel professionally fulfilled yet.