Behind every unknown phone number that lights up the screen, dozens a day, a story. One of the last, that of a Filipino girl who lives in a rented room with her four-year-old daughter. A small room with chipped walls that hasn’t been able to pay for two months. He worked in the kitchen of a restaurant without a contract. With the decree of the state of alarm she lost her income and, by working irregularly, cannot access the aid. “The man who rents you the room I intended to kick them out. He has agreed to let them stay until the end of the month because I told him that if he threw them out in full confinement he would report him to the police. But what will happen to them tomorrow? ” Elena Martín, member of the Sindicat d’Habitatge del Raval, one of the gear pieces of the powerful machinery of the neighborhood solidarity of the neighborhood. The crudeness of the case that portrays Elena it is a faithful photograph of the consequences of this crisis in the neighborhood. Live confinement in a rented room with a calf was tough. Losing even that has been what is happening these weeks in Raval, a neighborhood in which the Covid-19 has caused a multi-organic failure.
Iñaki García, one of the people he knows best the bowels of the Raval, define the current situation as the collapse of a myth. The myth of the economically almighty Barcelona which was actually hanging by a thread. “I am scared. All of this is very profound. The confinement has suddenly made everything underneath visible. To the thousands of people who lived in the shadow economy and were left with absolutely nothing. It is shocking to see the filipino couples she worked in cleaning and he in catering, running around asking for help eating. A community always so discreet, that it had never raised its voice, “relates the neighborhood activist, pointing to another crucial issue in his eyes, the voice: “All this catches us, in addition, at a time when you cannot even organize a demonstration”.
“It is very hard to have to pick up the phone and say ‘sorry, we cannot help you, we are overwhelmed'”
Neighbors in Red Ciutat Vella
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Weeks passed, especially before the start of the de-escalation, in which practically the only thing that was seen in the streets of the neighborhood were the huge queues in the soup kitchens, even longer due to social distance. The conversion of the dining rooms into delivery points for take-out food due to the pandemic put its reality in full view of everyone. Some queues, in addition, in which the outbreak of this crisis has made the homeless coincide with the worker who until a few weeks ago helped him whenever he could with some coins when he crossed it.
But crises surface everything, the bad and the good, and the joy for the Raval is the solidarity of its neighbors. “Both the organized ones, who are the ones we see the most, and those who are not, but are helping each other every day on their stairs or streets. The neighborhood has given of itself what we cannot imagine. The woven trust networks in the fight against evictions or for the CAP have paid off and the emergency has activated the collective imagination, but we are at the limit. We released a phone to offer help and in two hours we had received 70 calls. We are covering needs that the State would have to cover, “he reflects. Iñaki.
An example of that imagination activation To give quick responses to the emergency in full confinement is the reopening of the Sant Pau social gym converted into a toilet for the homeless and delivery of cooked menus (replacing the social dining rooms). “The Municipal Institute of Social Services commissioned us to do what we had been doing for some time, offering the shower service. We started with 75 showers and 75 meals, but the situation is so serious that we have raised our meals to 175“, relates Jordi Bordas, president of the gym cooperative, who points out that half of the people who go to Sant Pau to look for food Before the Covid-19 crisis, I had a job.
“The descent from the lower middle class to the lower class is spectacular,” says Jordi, who also works as revitalizer Eix Comercial del Raval. 20 businesses affiliated to the axis have informed him that they lower the blind permanently, which means 50 families affected. And four partners, people until the day before yesterday who owned a small business, have asked if they can go to the gym to look for food.
“The descent from the lower middle class to the lower class is spectacular, there are merchants in the soup kitchen”
Dynamizer of the Eix Comercial del Raval
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If the lower-middle class has become low, the one that was already low has hit rock bottom. From the Sindicat d’Habitatge, Elena remember groups like Whores Outraged Robadors -also organized to collect and distribute food-, the manteros or Metzineres, support space for drug addicted women, these days in an even more extreme situation given the impotence of being in front of an empty city in which not even being able to beg.
Since Neighbors in Red Ciutat Vella, structure created by movements Raval Rebel and Resistim al Gòtic, Anna Moreno points the helplessness of having to pick up the phone and say “sorry, we can’t help you.” They work, only in the Raval neighborhood, with about 100 people and they cannot help more. “We have a very long waiting list, but what we cannot do is help some families one week and others the next. We cannot leave behind the people we already work with and we are overwhelmed,” says the neighborhood activist. who cares more about tomorrow than today. The Confinement will pass, but poverty here will continue.
Collapsed Social Services
Of the 403 families of which the Casal dels Infants del Raval, a benchmark institution in the neighborhood, follows up, 94 have lost their jobs – formal or informal – due to Covid-19 crisis and another 62 have suffered an ERTE. “The most disadvantaged people are those who up to now supported themselves because they do not know the circuits of some district social services that, although we have been very positively surprised by the agility in the response, were already saturated with the users of before the crisis “, he points out Maria José García, territorial director of the Casal.
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