Sant Joan de Déu is launching its third annual Week Against Undesired Loneliness on Monday in Barcelona, targeting a widespread crisis that affects more than 30 million people across Europe, ara.cat reported.
A Barcelona community event launches the campaign against isolation
The campaign opens on Monday at Plaça Universitat in Barcelona with the installation of the “Square Against Loneliness,” an urban space furnished with tables and chairs where members of the public can sit down for a coffee and conversation. Similar initiatives will roll out throughout the week across various neighborhoods in the Catalan capital, alongside events in Sant Boi, Cornellà, Lleida, Manresa, Palma, Sevilla, and Zaragoza. The schedule also features the premiere of the documentary film La cadira buida on Monday at Cinemes Girona and Tuesday on the 3Cat program Sense Ficció, complemented by reading clubs in nearly one hundred libraries, school activities, and a Sunday closing celebration on the rambla de Sants providing a communal meal for 150 vulnerable residents and neighbors.
Mohammed Fadily reflects on two decades after arriving by pastera
Mohammed Fadily recalls paying for a boat crossing to Europe at age 15, anticipating a wealthy life after watching idealized television broadcasts from Morocco. Instead, he encountered complete isolation, navigating a succession of shelters without language skills or personal support, and later noted that newcomers often pay up to 12,000 euros only to experience a harsh reality. “It is very hard because there is not enough support. There are no psychologists, nobody asks how you feel and you are just a child,” Fadily told ara.cat twenty years after his arrival. Now working in logistics for the Obra Social de Sant Joan de Déu, he lives in Barcelona with his wife and two children, attributing his survival to his determination to learn Catalan and secure employment.
Fàtima Ali Azzuz shares a lifelong journey of medical exile and resilience
Fàtima Ali Azzuz experienced profound isolation beginning at age four, when her parents sent her from the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, to Barcelona as a medical refugee to treat Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, a rare and degenerative condition affecting veins and bones. She spent two years hospitalized at Hospital de l’Esperança without her parents, communicating only through letters and cassette tapes while undergoing experimental radiation treatment that later contributed to skin cancer and permanent disability. Despite facing multiple evictions and being unable to afford frequent travel to visit her family—missing her father’s passing—she lives in a Sant Joan de Déu apartment and prepares to reunite with her mother in March after thirty years apart.
Dani rebuilds stability after months sleeping rough in Spain
Dani, a 26-year-old native of Kenya, arrived in Spain at age 19 for love, but fell into an irregular administrative status and spent six months sleeping rough on the streets after a relationship ended. The prolonged isolation caused severe emotional strain, teaching him the critical importance of asking for help when necessary. Today, he resides in a Sant Joan de Déu housing unit alongside other vulnerable individuals and has secured employment in a cleaning service, describing his turnaround with a gardening metaphor: “You have to cut the tree and then plant another one and let it grow.”
Sant Joan de Déu highlights systemic vulnerabilities among marginalized groups
The campaign organized by Sant Joan de Déu draws attention to how undesired loneliness disproportionately harms vulnerable groups, including migrants and elderly populations, directly impacting their physical and emotional well-being.
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