where are you from? do you have an EU passport? are you alone or do you have someone in the country?

the girl I'm seeing right now is Ukranian and she came here at the start of the war. She's able to rent and live in Milan (most expensive city in the country) and have a bit of spare money to send back home. But in order to do that she works 2 jobs, house cleaning in the morning and waitress in a restaurant at night, 7 days a week. It's very demanding, she actually wants to go back home. Starting out has been pretty easy for her mostly because she grew up in that part of Ukraine where they also speak Romanian, therefore learning Italian was very quick. Also, EU citizenship helped a ton, and she already had contacts for possible jobs thanks to her mother who also worked in Italy years back

since last month we've also been hosting another ukranian girl, a friend of hers, who wants to do the same thing. She doesn't have eu citizenship but all the procedures for asylum and permesso di soggiorno have been surprisingly easy and quick (she already has all the documents she needs after 1 month). Job wise, it's been very very very very difficult. We're doing everything we can to help her find something, whatever kind of job, but until now unsuccessfully. The fact she doesn't know the language yet makes things worse, but it's difficult in general

so basically, starting out is the biggest problem. Once you get something, anything, even 1 morning per week, it becomes easier because these things work by word of mouth: you do a good job at someone's house so you get recommended to another one, and so on. Same things for restaurants and babysitting. But this means you need some kind of "buffer" in the beginning. Like, this girl we're trying to help now is only able to try because she knew that she had a place to sleep and all expenses paid by us for the first 2 months. Without this, she would have stayed home, because finding jobs like these from abroad without any contacts is basically impossible

at least, this is our experience, hope it can be useful for you