Intercultural Tea and a Shared Meal in the Park

Storytelling for Human Rights by Oana Maroti

The intense November sun made me wrap my scarf twice. Seagulls patrolled the scaffolding, squawking at the workers in the new office skyscrapers that had sprouted up across the city like mushrooms after the rain.

Green spaces were cut down, and many people were evicted from their homes, left to fend for themselves just to build seedy offices and hotels.
I didn't have time to finish my thought because sadness overwhelmed me. A crushing sadness that doesn't allow you to envision any future.

I had just finished a humiliating job, an experience I would have avoided if I could have. I'm fighting like Don Quijote tilting at windmills, facing a terrible wave of hatred for almost a decade, a wave I have no way to fight.

I checked my napkins. I had some with me and started walking, looking for a place to cry, and ended up in a park overlooking the train station, where I often take refuge on my walks. Exhausted, I sat down on a bench in the lotus position and traced my shadow on the asphalt. It was full of tents, just like the entire Poble Nou area I'd walked through.

While I was trying to photograph my shadow, someone approached and joked around. It was an immigrant living in the nearby tent, dressed completely inappropriately for the approaching cold. I swallowed back tears when I saw him. For years, I've been in a situation so devoid of social support that I can't create any stability. I could end up on the street at any moment, and I know it's not easy to survive.

Switching from Spanish to English, I discover that the reason for so many tents in the parks is the survival option for many refugees and asylum seekers, transferred from one part of Spain to another and left in Barcelona waiting for their documents. The same treatment applies to those who have just left the reception centers. Abandoned on the street, hungry, cold, without even the most basic hygiene supplies. In other words, left to their own devices, because I don't know what else to say in the face of such an aberration of social strategy.

The news has been circulating since the beginning of the year, following the case of the young African man expelled from the shelter, left to his own devices, and left to die of exposure in a central park. His friends say he no longer wanted to eat, that he no longer cared. Waking up in the middle of the street, at the start of adulthood, is a devastating blow that leads to guaranteed depression. When conditions of vulnerability are imposed, we are talking about systemic failures and human rights violations, the consequences of which are criminal.

Everything they have is earned with great difficulty, because begging is neither easy nor very profitable, and what they manage to obtain, to have a little peace, they often lose after moving, storms, robberies, and even racist attacks. Barcelona is a tourist city. All kinds of people end up here, some extremely cruel. The level of aggression manifested against homeless people in every possible form is very high. It allows anyone to expose them to horrific situations, so from the outset, the management and inclusion procedures in the area are dysfunctional.

I've been walking around the park for three weeks with food and a thermos of tea. I don't have a big budget, so I'm reinventing my recipe book. In an attempt to find support, since I'd like to have a special food service for homeless people and carry out inclusive education projects, based on my qualifications, I contacted some foundations and associations, but without success.

Things work like this, as if you've spent your whole life preparing for nothing: you want to work, you make proposals, you worry about finding solutions, and yet you have no one to talk to. The social dynamic feels like communicating with a brick wall.

I take a sip of mint tea while people thank me for the fried cauliflower and explain how dehumanizing the whole shower and food situation is. They say it's best not to crowd around the communal tables because all sorts of problems arise there, and they want to work honestly, not get caught up in them.

I went with one of them to see if I could volunteer or help out and help my friend get on the shower and food lists, since he is in a very difficult situation. I thought it would be enough to ask for help, go there, and sign up for food, but I was wrong. Everything is based on age, and young people don't get priority. They suggested I give him money for the shelter and even recommended some to me.

I don't have a job, and I already share my food, and that's because I have incredible training in budget-friendly recipes. Anyway, I went in vain and realized that online advertising and what's actually there are not the same thing, even in the social basic stuff people really need to count on.

I look at my hard-pressed friend. He no longer has the strength to smile. He dreams of a shower. No big deal. From the tents to the nearest toilet, it's a long hike. Absolutely nothing is designed to support the existence of homeless people, and what's more, architecture has become increasingly aporophobic in recent years.

A pacifist existence needs Private Space!

Curiously, for any event lasting a few days, toilets, serious tents, etc., can be installed, but for people trapped in this gloomy bureaucracy, not a finger is lifted. For years, we have been observing them on the streets, in parks, in a long process of dehumanization, and they will even be blamed because they have nowhere else to turn.

The conversation switched from English to French for a moment, with brackets in Arabic, and once again, I am impressed by the linguistic capacity of the African group, polyglots par excellence.

I gave them 2 textbooks in Catalan, and in a few days, they had already recorded expressions and could hold a conversation. They missed school. I think they would like it at the library, but in the situation they are in, without access to basic things, a shower, clean clothes, and avoiding social things, and it is totally understandable, but once again, this is a situation of guidance, support to develop, with pride that such human specimens arrive in your country.

Both Romanians, who are implicitly polyglots, and Africans have a different post-colonial development, with mental processing in many foreign languages ​​and different possibilities of adaptation. In this city, brilliant characters arrive, and they are not given any chance of development; quite the opposite.

We force migrants to work for a plate of food or a shower, we do not know what social support is according to the law, we do business on their backs, knowing that they have no other escape. In other words, it's a system coordinated by stupid and vindictive people; otherwise, no one would die of cold and hunger in the street in 2025, and especially not the kindest and intelligent ones.