A mother with four children, about to become homeless: "I don't want my children to live in the open"

GavàShirley Medina will be able to stay one more week in the two rooms in the Gavà hostel that she has occupied with her four minor children since just before Christmas: one 16 years old, two five-year-old twins and one two-year-old. Registered in Hospitalet de Llobregat, the social services of this municipality moved the family to this space to get them out of the storage room that an acquaintance had left them. Initially they were to leave this Thursday, but finally, and in added time, the council has announced at the last minute that it is "extending" their stay until the next visit with the social worker. Still unaware that he had an extension, Medina sits on the bed of his eldest son and explains that he has no other alternative roof and that the only solution he has is the street. "I don't want my children to live in the open, they can't live in the street, children," he says.

The teenager studies on the computer while listening to his mother talk about how she has felt abandoned by the social services of Hospitalet. When questioned by the ARA, the council limits itself to stressing that it is a "complex" case, without going into further intimacies. According to the woman's account, the council gave her 48 hours to pack up everything and find another place to live. "On Tuesday, the social worker called me to tell me that we had to leave on Thursday and that was it," she says.

With more than 256,000 inhabitants, L'Hospitalet is the second most populated city in Catalonia and, according to a recent count, More than 280 people survive in the openDespite this figure, it only has one social shelter for temporary stays, which is highly questioned by users and social entities due to the poor quality of the services. That is why the council transfers residents who have been evicted to this hostel in the centre of Gavà.

The move, although it solves the issue of shelter, poses additional difficulties for the families, who see themselves having to leave their support and social network. In the case of the minors, they have to travel by bus or train for an hour to attend school. It is not easy, says Medina, who also admits that the twins' attendance at school has suffered. The youngest son has not found a public place and the mother explains that this prevents her from continuing to work regularly. "I'll give them a nursery place to leave him and I'll start looking for work and I promise that social services will never hear from me again," she says.

The precariousness of this family has meant that a fifth daughter, who is 12 years old, lives with her father for a good part of the week and joins the family at the weekend. "She gets by as best she can," says this 38-year-old woman, resigned. Today she was still resisting packing her bags, hoping that the presence of the children and the pressure from the L'Hospitalet Housing Union would stop the order to leave the hostel. In fact, in the room where her son studies his first-year high school subjects there were still clothes hanging in the corners, as well as books, packets of milk and nappies between the gaps left by the few pieces of furniture.

In the other room, in a double bed, Medina sleeps with her younger children. They share the shower and the sink with another family of five people (two of them minors), and they do what they can to eat. On the ground floor there is a kitchen where a willing woman does everything she can to collect food, toys and clothes for the twenty or so relocated families.

Medina arrived at the Gavà hostel after spending a few weeks in a storage room that had been lent to him, but the management of the school where the children go alerted social services of the indignity that a family with children would have to live in damp. Previously They had been occupying a flat and then they had lived in a sublet in a room where the five children and the mother were housed. They paid 650 euros, but they had to leave because one of the owners sexually assaulted her. Now, this mother laments, the housing market is forcing them back out onto the street.