Dying of cold in the street

Humans embed themselves in the city's landscape and become part of it, often as a splendid ornament in the form of mesmerized lead soldiers, but also through those larvae that warn us of a tragedy. For decades, at the crossroads between Bisbe street and Garriga i Bachs square, a Gypsy beggar has rested, crying out for charity, sitting as if with her back she could hold up the entire stone mass of the Santa Creu, always barefoot. My memories of this beautiful street, also of the heroic adjoining space presided over by the sculptures of our great Josep Llimona, are inseparable from this mendicant, who if she goes unnoticed by sight ---due to the appalling accumulation of tourists in the place--- immediately imposes herself on you with a tremendously particular musical cadence (you will have heard it a thousand times passing through the place) recited through an incomprehensible cry, except for some foreign words like comer (to eat) and por favor (please).

If I were a corny columnist, I would write that we have grown accustomed to denying a glance to the homeless as if they were just another abandoned piece of street furniture; perhaps I would be right, because sometimes there are things that can only be written with a certain dose of sentimentalism. But this is especially relevant due to the most immediate Barcelona news, which has revealed the death of a fifty-seven-year-old homeless man named Eusebio (according to the Arrels Foundation, coinciding with Tuesday night, the coldest in recent years in Barcelona). Once the fact is known, the reaction can only be angry, because it is utterly outrageous to live in a city where someone freezes to death without any help. We often use the expression "I'm dying of cold" when the heating still hasn't quite warmed up our living room or when we go out and choose excessively spring-like clothing. Imagine, then, what it must be like to agonize like that, literally, while your organs freeze and your blood chills mercilessly.

Once the bad blood is digested, certain things must be put into context because, however much the preceding news hurts us, it would be unfair to paint our city as an epidemic den for the homeless. In most studies on homelessness, the State where we are forced to live presents notoriously lower figures for street dwellers than civilizations like the United Kingdom, France, or the USA, and, as far as our city is concerned, the two thousand people living rough in Barcelona are incomparable to those in Paris, which double our figure, or those in New York, which exceed one hundred and forty thousand. In turn, it must be said that the City Council tries to do its part; it activated the operació fred (darn the naming department...) last Tuesday, anticipating the nights where the temperature looked most freezing, thus mobilizing special detachments of professionals from the Social Emergency and Urgency Center (CUESB), the Social Care Service for Homelessness in Public Spaces (SASSEP), all with the holy help of the Red Cross.

The operació fred enables workers who approach people sleeping rough ---six teams of fourteen people--- to offer them one of the two hundred shelter places that will allow them to sleep warm (the administration has also reported additional places in the Emergency Reception Center). The theory is more than good, but, as Catalunya Ràdio journalist Andreu Merino exemplarily reported by talking to many affected people, there are still numerous homeless people in the city whom the administration fails to contact due to lack of personnel.

In turn, many beggars in the city still distrust municipal agents, because they often leave the place where they sleep (at the risk of losing the stall they have set up there on the street) to take refuge for a single night, at the risk of arriving at the centers and finding no beds. In this sense and in short, it must be said that the administration is not negligent, but that greater coordination and an increase in personnel on the street might have helped prevent Eusebio from dying with frozen skin. 

Poverty will always be part of a city like Barcelona and, let's face it, its inhabitants will get used to integrating it, as if the beggars on Bisbe Street were cheap imitations of Nonell. But we should try to broaden the scope of the operació fred (it's not necessary to reach zero degrees to run out and fish for defenseless people) and ensure that the figure of two thousand, as much as possible, approaches zero. Dying of cold on the street should never happen to anyone.