Besmira is a pretty young woman who spends day after day peering at her battered mobile phone hoping for a call from her husband, Arben, miles away in England.
The couple, both 32, are desperate for children together but their dream of becoming parents is still just that, a dream.
It is four years since Besmira, a former state statistician, has seen Arben in the flesh. In 2021, he left Albania to work in the UK, paying £5,000 for an illegal small boat Channel crossing from France.
He then headed to Liverpool to be a jobbing gardener, before settling in Manchester, where he is now a construction-site worker, sleeping in a small, rented room, and toiling 12 hours a day, six days a week to earn enough to send money home to his wife and their relatives.
Besmira is one of hundreds of women in Has, northern Albania, who are victims of an emigration phenomenon. Just as Arben did, their boyfriends or husbands have smuggled themselves into Britain because there is an unemployment crisis at home.
