On any day of the week, money exchange offices in Madrid throng with immigrants sending cash to relatives back home. Their remittances are often the biggest source of income for impoverished families in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. But just as a money transfer has a sender and a recipient, there are also two sides to the story behind the boom in international remittances.

Madrid, together with Catalonia, sends more money abroad than any other region in Spain, which is itself now the country that sends the most remittances in Europe due to the massive influx of migrants in recent years. In 2006, the last year for which figures are available, more than EUR 1.5 billion left the Madrid region as immigrant remittances, most of it going to Ecuador and Colombia. The latter country, 83,000 of whose nationals are living in Madrid, is the biggest recipient of money from immigrants here.

Remittances have changed lives, helping people pay for food, build homes and send their children to school. But the need to keep sending the cash has also exacted a toll on the family members who emigrated to Spain in order to support relatives back home.

"You think about the nice climate, your family and your friends. If I could be there now I would, but I've got to save," says Sandra Milena Zuleta, a 29-year-old Colombian dental assistant, working in Madrid.

Sandra arrived in the Spanish capital together with her aunt, 38-year-old Rocío Zuleta, five years ago from Medellín. They started working as cleaners, with Sandra earning around EUR 500 a month, approximately five times the amount she made selling kitchen appliances in Colombia. But life was not easy, despite what she had heard from migrants who had gone before her.

"In Medellín they say that everything is wonderful in Madrid, that it's easy to find work, but no one tells you about how lonely it is. Initially I became depressed, and I thought I wouldn't be able to go on," Sandra recalls.

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