ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how care workers settle into the new environment of work. It presents how live-in care work is built on affective and complex relationships between care recipients, their family members, care agents, care workers, and their family members and friends in their home communities. As Gutierrez Rodriguez argues, with an example of Latin-American migrant domestic workers working in German households, the encounters between employers and domestic workers ‘bear the traces of transculturation, where two worlds meet that are geopolitically, economically and culturally separate’. In addition to adapting to the elderly’s needs and habits in a household, Sarah. Schilliger finds that care workers suppress their own emotions and have to adapt their feelings to different situations. The integration process into a household depends on the relation between not just care workers and care recipients but also all involved parties, such as the family members of the care recipients and co-care workers.
