We’ve made it to the downhill side of August, and the people who keep the tourism economy of Outer Cape Cod afloat are looking wearily at the calendar, dreaming of a day off and a good night’s sleep.
In the last two issues of the Independent, we got a glimpse of the young people who come here every summer to work as servers, cleaners, and barbacks — “the unsung heroes of every place you can order a drink,” as reporter Elias Duncan put it.
The housing crisis on the Outer Cape is also an employment crisis. Businesses are finding it more and more difficult to secure places for summer workers to live. Somehow, they manage. For Katrin Chocheva, at least, living in the back of Savory in Truro with 13 other Bulgarians, four to a room, is “a blast.”
She and 561 other workers are here this year on J-1 visas, a “summer work travel” program that the U.S. State Dept. says is supposed to provide foreign students opportunities “to experience and be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States.”
The stories we heard from these workers show that their experiences here have rewards — mostly financial ones. Most of them are working more than one job. Mario Galubov, a sociology student from Bulgaria who works at Ross’ Grill and the Provincetown House of Pizza, told us that back home he makes $600 a month, which he can sometimes earn here in two days. Kristina Valerieva Tsoneva said she earned the equivalent of her mother’s annual salary in just four months in Provincetown.
The good money they are making comes at a price — the workload can be overwhelming, and the late nights take their toll. Carlos Varella, who works at the Atlantic House, gets four hours of sleep a night. Another barback described “standing up for 14 hours straight and then doing it again the next day.”
“Sometimes I just want to cry,” said barback Brandon Gonçalves.
Adrian Adam, a J-1 student from Romania here for his second summer, said that he enjoys swimming but hadn’t had time to visit the beach. His one day off a week is taken up by laundry and grocery shopping.
Some of the workers we interviewed had only positive things to say about their situations. But others hinted at more troubling stories. At her first job, Tsoneva said she had been assigned an impossible number of hotel rooms to clean. “They know that we Bulgarians are hard-working,” she said. “You’ll always be a foreign person, and they don’t care about you that much.”
We wanted to include more profiles. Several workers told us about unacceptable living and working conditions but then said no to having their stories reported for fear of retaliation or not being invited back next summer. All of the J-1 students depend on being sponsored by local businesses.
We’ll keep trying to tell those stories. In the meantime, we can’t help wondering: if these students were our children, how else would we get involved?
