"I don't want to be alone because I get sad and start crying."

BarcelonaFernanda, 76 years old, is from the generation so as not to disturb. The kind who prefers to keep quiet, swallow, endure. All to avoid disturbing others, although this destroys her inside. She has three children but lives alone because, she says, one son lives in London, one daughter is in Madrid, and the one who lives in Hospitalet de Llobregat is content for her to work and take care of the children and the house, and the only thing missing is having to take care of her. And Fernanda doesn't want anything in the world to be a burden, even if she feels alone.

Andri is 15 years old and also feels lonely, although he is one of the privileged few who have been able to flee the war in Ukraine. Here in Catalonia, he is safe, but all his friends have stayed in Ukraine. For him, loneliness is harder than the war.

Plácido, 60, also has his own internal war. He says he's tired of gambling and being penniless, but when he sees the slot machine at the bar, he can't help but try his luck. But the only thing he wins is being left penniless by the machine. Along the way, he's also lost friends, family, everything. He's left alone.

Lucy, 48, lost everything in Peru: her daughter, her mother, her partner, her company. That's why she came to Spain, in search of a new life. But what she never imagined is that she would end up completely alone, sleeping on the streets.

The San Juan de Dios Social Work is organizing a new edition of the Week Against Unwanted Loneliness, a campaign that includes a wide variety of activities and initiatives to raise awareness and raise awareness that unwanted loneliness has become an epidemic affecting all types of people. Many of us may be close to home without realizing it. And yet, we can all do our part to combat it. Fernanda, Andrii, Plácido, and Lucy are fortunate enough to receive support at San Juan de Dios centers.

The Fernanda

Fernanda Zapata Paz goes every day from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to the Parque Sanitario Sant Joan de Déu cognitive disorders day hospital in Esplugues de Llobregat. She says this helps her maintain a routine, connect with people, and that she's even made a couple of friends, Carmen and Juani. "But on November 30th, it's over. When I leave here, I don't know where I'll go, because nursing homes are very expensive," she laments.

She receives a pension of 700 euros a month and lives in a rented apartment paid for by her children. Indeed, she has children and grandchildren, but they live their lives because Fernanda says she doesn't want to be a burden, nor for her children to suffer because "they've already suffered so much." Her father, she says, gave them a very bad life. And so did she.

"Shut up, you don't know," she remembers her husband always telling her. So she had to keep quiet and endure. And she endured, endured, and endured until she couldn't take it anymore. She divorced 19 years ago after her husband left for Peru with another woman. However, when he returned seriously ill with cancer, she took charge of caring for him in the hospital until his death. "Of course I shouldn't have taken care of him! I did it for my children. He was their father," she explains. She had previously cared for her mother, who fell into a vegetative state and also died of cancer. And when she was 11, she lost her father. "It shocked me to see him at home, shrouded in bed."

Fernanda is from a town in Extremadura called Azuaga and still retains her southern accent. She arrived in Barcelona at the age of 14 with her mother and two brothers. Since then, he says, he's worked his entire life, and his children also had to find work to pay for their studies. His son is a telecommunications engineer, and his two daughters are office workers, he says proudly.

At first glance, Fernanda seems fine. She looks fine, but she suffers from osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and severe depression. "I always have a headache and don't even have the strength to open a bottle," she laments. She uses a walker and sleeps with oxygen. She would love to live in a nursing home with someone else, but she doesn't have the money to pay for it, and her three children "have a mortgage." "They don't offer opportunities to older people. For those who can afford it, yes. But for those who can't, they've forgotten us." If she's alone at home, her head spins.

Andrii

Andri is so tall he's almost two feet taller than his mother, but he's only 15 years old. With blue eyes, very pale skin, and a shifty gaze, you almost have to wring words out of him with a corkscrew. He answers in monosyllables. Sometimes he blurts out two or three words in a row, some in Catalan and others in Spanish. And only when he speaks in English is he able to utter a full sentence with meaning.

He says he communicates with his friends in Ukraine every day via his cell phone. And, in addition to studying for his secondary school at a secondary school in Manresa, he follows the school year in Ukraine remotely: he completes his assignments and exams online. "So he has a plan B," he argues. His plan B is to return to Ukraine one day. But for now, his mother's plan A is to stay in Catalonia.

They returned to Kiev in the summer of 2022, just months after the war began, and his mother was terrified by the constant drone flight and air raid sirens. He, on the other hand, would have stayed there. He left his dad, his grandmas, and his friends there.

Halyna Istomina, Andrii's mother, is a Ukrainian artist: "My son feels alone because he says all his friends are in Ukraine. Why are we here?" the woman asks herself when the boy is not around, and adds: "I understand why he feels this way because, when we arrived in Catalonia, he had no friends and he didn't understand. Furthermore, the young man had to change schools three times in just over two and a half years.

First, they lived for a year in Pineda de Mar with a family friend, until the friend got tired and asked them to leave. Then they spent seven months staying in an old hotel in Figueres that the Red Cross found. Later, they moved to Sant Just Desvern. And for the last year, they've been living in a small but nice rented apartment in Manresa, provided by the Sant Joan de Déu Germà Tomàs Canet Foundation.

"In Pineda, my son tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, but luckily I caught him in time," confesses his mother. "That's why I was happy that in Figueres they gave us a room on the ground floor," she adds with surprising composure. She assures us that she hasn't cried even once despite everything she's suffered since the war began. Now that her son has two friends in Manresa, has received psychological support, and likes the school where he attends, she can't stop the tears from falling over the edge. She dreams that, finally, he won't feel alone, and that she can find a job in Catalonia.

The Placido

He has no friends or partner, and his sisters barely speak to him. He admits, however, that he has earned it. Plácido Acedo Acedo is 60 years old and claims that at thirteen he started drinking alcohol and injecting heroin. It was in the late seventies, in the middle of the Transition, when the party and uncover They were the last straw, and drugs were considered harmless. But for Plácido, they weren't.

At 18, he already spent six months in prison for robbery. And now, as he faces retirement, he has schizophrenia and has suffered psychotic episodes, with hallucinations and delusions. He says his mother always tried to help him, even when he was at his lowest point. But his mother died in 2003 during heart surgery, and his father died two years earlier from gallbladder cancer. Now he lives alone. "It's hard being at my parents' house, with all the photographs and memories. But where else can I go?" he asks.

Plácido claims he managed to get away from alcohol and heroin all on his own. But after his parents' death, he fell into another abyss: gambling. He's banned from casinos and bingo halls, but no one controls who plays the slot machines. And they're everywhere, in every bar.

"I've tried to commit suicide several times and haven't succeeded. I'm tired of gambling and being penniless," he complains. But he can't help it. He feels misunderstood. When he's at the bar, he sees the slot machine just around the corner and thinks, "I'll try and see if I can win something." But all he wins is going broke. In two or three hours, he can burn through a thousand euros—an entire month's salary. He works sweeping and shredding confidential documents at the INtecserveis Sant Joan de Déu special work center in Sant Boi de Llobregat, where he also receives psychosocial support. His psychologist, Jordi Vilà, explains that they now intend to apply for judicial support measures so he doesn't continue squandering his capital.

"I miss my sister Montse, who's older than me but with whom I'm only seventeen months older than I am. I liked having coffee with her and smoking a cigarette," Plácido recalls. But the problem is that now he owes her 2,700 euros. "When I pay her, she might talk to me again."

Lucy

Lucy Yaqueline Trujillo Olivos is 48 years old and arrived in Spain just over a year and a half ago because, she says, she needed "a change of life." She left Peru, her native country, behind.

At 19, she was already a mother to a daughter, whom she raised alone because her partner abandoned her a year after giving birth. She then had a second daughter with another man, who also led her down a bitter path. "My husband had bipolar disorder, and one day he was fine and the next he was bad," she explains. She had to make sure he took his medication, washed, and changed his clothes. She even started a clothing and event planning company so they could work together and ensure he had work.

But everything went downhill when her mother fell ill with Alzheimer's and she had to take care of her. Then he stopped taking his medication, lost control, and the company went bankrupt. But what hurts Lucy the most is that her 12-year-old daughter chose to stay with her father and grandparents, accustomed to living with them after her absence for so many months.

"My daughter doesn't want to be with me, my mother died, I've separated, and I'm out of work," Lucy summarizes the reasons that prompted her to come to Spain, encouraged by other Peruvians who sold her the idea that this was practically paradise. But once here, nothing was as she'd been told. Initially, she stayed with a fellow Peruvian who offered to take her in, but then began to mistreat her. So she had no choice but to sleep on the streets.

"I cried and cried, I didn't know where to go," explains Lucy, who says all she ever did was wander around with her suitcase. A man, also Peruvian, offered her a place to stay in his car, parked on a street in the Nou Barris district of Barcelona, where she lived for two and a half months. Alone, afraid, especially at night. To wash, she went to a fountain. For lunch, she turned to Cáritas. However, he never explained his situation to his family: "I would call Peru and tell them I was fine."

Lucy escaped the streets thanks to the help of Barcelona City Council's social services. She now lives at the La Llavor residential center, having undergone surgery for an arteriovenous disorder in her head three months ago and is still convalescing. Polite, caring, and kind, she is clean and well-dressed. You wouldn't think she's lived on the streets. "I don't want to be alone because I get sad and start crying," she confesses. Her therapy is reading the Bible and helping others who are still homeless, because no one knows as well how hard unwanted loneliness is for her.