BadalonaUnder the C-31 bridge there are more questions than answers. The only certainty this Wednesday on Christmas Eve is that there are still dozens of those evicted from the old B9 high school in Badalona who were not relocated yesterday by the Red Cross and the Department of Social Rights. Basically, they are asking for more information to assess whether it is worth it for them to leave their lives in this corner for a temporary roof, even if it is for two months. “Yesterday everything was rushed for people to get on the buses, but without explaining how or where, without giving any information to these young people,” complains Victoria Columba, from Regularization Ja, for whom the plans “arrived late, poorly and are insufficient” to respond to all those affected.
For Tyrat (he avoids giving his last name), a welder without a contract in a company in Badalona because he does not have “papers”, the official offer does not convince him, precisely because moving away from the population where he has been living for more than four years would mean losing everything from his job to his friendships. “Two months pass immediately, and then what?”, he lets go, and adds that he prefers to stay level. “If it’s cold? I came by shepherd, the sea water was colder. I’m used to suffering,” he says. Nor does Mamadou (who does not give his last name) have any intention of leaving Badalona. He says that he is not afraid of the reaction of a part of the population of Badalona against giving any help to the B9 migrants, because there has never been any confrontation between them, but he also throws a question into the air: “Why don’t they want us? What have we done wrong?”
Another Mamadou, surnamed Cobar, has indeed decided to leave, because he wants “a little warmth to sleep and rest”. The problem is that this morning there is no sign of the Red Cross buses that the previous afternoon were responsible for making the transfers to the accommodations found by the organizations. There are only volunteer staff from Regularization Ja and the small local entity Badalona Acull, with Carles Sagués as a visible face, concerned that the terms of the agreement reached with the Government have been breached. The hours pass, and the tiredness is noticeable among the evicted young people who have been sleeping on the ground for eight days and also among the volunteers who accompany them distributing food or warm clothes. The phones connect the bridge with the Palau de la Generalitat to ask why the device has been half-finished if a relocation was agreed upon in two days. “President Salvador Illa has told us to go ahead, that there are 30 more places available, but that there are no buses”, laments the activist, who is also worried about the days of going from here to there. The Red Cross assures that no one has activated it for today and that, in any case, future people who relocate must be referred from Badalona’s municipal services. When the Social Rights department was asked, they did not give any answer.
Paper and pen
Last night, Cobar didn’t understand what was going on because no one had explained to him in detail how the relocation would work. Not that he has more details now, but he has surely seen that the two months offered in a hostel fit into his plans to be in Badalona around February, just when he has been promised a job. But his face changes when the volunteers tell him he can choose between Girona, Lleida or Tarragona. “Is there a subway?”, asks the young man. The volunteers tell him no, and try to make themselves understood by explaining that they are 100 kilometers away and that there are trains and buses. They don’t get away. “They haven’t even given us a map”, complains one of the activists. Finally, they draw a schematic map of Catalonia with the four points marked to geographically locate the young people from sub-Saharan Africa which are the destinations they can choose. Cobar hesitates and leaves his suitcase ready on the floor. “I don’t know, none of my brothers want to leave”, he excuses himself.
Sasha Nouvikova has returned to the C-31 camp after spending a night in a hotel in Malgrat de Mar. This young Ukrainian got on one of the buses with her partner without knowing exactly where she was going, guided by the idea of not being cold and having a toilet next to the bed. “We’ve been very well, it’s been a long time since we’ve slept or rested so well. We’ve had our Christmas miracle,” she says cheerfully to the volunteers, but at the same time also expresses an insecurity that hurts her. “I have come to confirm if we will be there for two months or if we will have to leave on January 1, because no one knows,” he explains. If the temporary accommodation is finally eight weeks, you will take your bags with you to be able to change clothes. If, on the other hand, he has to return in a week, he will leave his things at the house of friends who do him the favor of keeping them there.
The volunteers write down with paper and pen the names of the people who agree to go to the temporary accommodation. Sagués claims that they have made dozens of lists of the occupants of B9 and that, even months before the eviction, they drew up “sheets with all the personal data”, to the point that the organization managed to identify the most vulnerable people: “We had the names of the sick, of the women with a history of male violence, of the young people who have been taken out of custody, of the asylum seekers…”, he says disappointed, because all the previous work has been of little use. “We had done everything in a very professional way so that each department took care of their collectives, and look what happened.”
Sant Roc, between grief and compassion
The neighborhood opposition against those evicted from the B9 in Badalona has been very concentrated around the Can Bufí Vell municipal hostel, where a dozen sub-Saharan migrants took refuge after the eviction, and in front of the church of Our Lady of Montserrat, which was supposed to accommodate only 15 particularly vulnerable people from the camp. Beyond these two points, which brought together half a thousand people in two days, there has been no community response to the contrary. Nor in Sant Roc, where the C-31 camp is located, the city’s most degraded neighborhood with a structural problem of evictions, occupied housing, power cuts, unemployment and extreme poverty. The neighbors are mostly ethnic Roma and have stayed away from the spread of migrants’ tents, and in some cases there have even been signs of solidarity, such as donating clothes or food. “They are people like us, poor like us, how should we get them out?” exclaims a woman walking with her grandson on the street. In this recognition of class, however, there are those who disagree and feel the discrimination of treatment. In a bar, the patrons drinking vermouth before lunch agree in pointing out that “everyone has rushed to help” the migrants and, conversely, “no one goes to the UN because of the problems of the people here, because of the grandparents who don’t have a flat”. The conversation ends abruptly when the waiter turns up the volume of the Christmas music to end “politics”. “One beer for me and one for my countryman!” shouts one of the customers.
