segunda-feira, maio 21, 2018

Squalor


squalor

[skwol-er, skwaw-ler]

noun

  1. the condition of being squalid; filth and misery.


Origin of squalor

1615–25; < Latin squālor dirtiness, equivalent to squāl(ēre) to be dirty, encrusted + -or -or1

Synonyms

wretchedness


Antonyms

splendor.

The problem of Rent:
Rent has three characteristics differentiating it from other forms of expenditure:
(i) Rent varies markedly from one part of the country to another,
(ii) Rent varies markedly as between different families of the same size in the same part of the country,
(iii) Expenditure on rent cannot be reduced during a temporary interruption of earning as that on clothing, fuel or light can.

Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance 
and Allied Services Report



Excerto de The New Poverty, de Stephen Armstrong. Verso
Chapter 6: Squalor, pp. 127-132

"That afternoon I visited the city’s wet centre: a day hostel that allows homeless people to walk in drunk or on drugs. As I arrived, staff were struggling to help a man suffering from the violent hallucinations and sweeping emotional changes brought on by the synthetic cannabinoid Black Mamba. He was howling, his body shaking and his eyes blank. ‘It’s cheap and it’s strong,’ Hiley explains. ‘It’s sweeping through prisons and the homeless and the effects are brutal. People are using it to find oblivion.’ Back in the main building – a walk-in and advice centre in a spruced up old school – I met Jas Singh, one of Inclusion’s regulars and a local lad. He’s fresh-faced and handsome – he looks a little like Stone Roses singer Ian Brown, right down to his jagged mop-top hair – but he totters into the room on crutches with his foot strapped up in a large webbing-and-plastic sandal. Singh studied art at St Martins and graduated in 2012, moving to Kingston upon Thames where a friend secured him a protection-by-occupation residency in a large empty house. He was on the verge of the next stage in his life – interning with an art dealer on Pimlico Road. ‘It was unpaid but I’d get fed and into all the art exhibitions for free, and some champagne parties,’ he grins. ‘I started to meet a few people – like Terry O’Neill, the photographer, and I was starting to put my own work together … mainly sound installations.’ And then, running up the stairs at the art dealer’s house in 2014, Jas slipped and whacked his leg on the corner of a stair and damaged his peroneal nerve, which provides feeling to the front and side of the legs and the top of the feet. A damaged peroneal nerve causes a condition known as foot drop, where the muscles that hold the foot in place stop working and the patient’s foot effectively dangles uselessly at the end of their leg. He couldn’t walk without crutches and couldn’t keep working with the art dealer. When the house he was legally squatting finally got sold, he was out – just as his dad phoned to tell him his mum was ill, asking him to come back to Leicester to help out. ‘So I came back for a while,’ he explains. ‘I was here for about six months when, ironically, I was giving a homeless person a few bits of change and got mugged, whacked on the back of my head – I was knocked out, unconscious for a while. I’m still not clear on everything that happened after that. Apparently I discharged myself and went back to my family with my head still bleeding. We had a huge row – I can’t remember what about … I was drinking at that time though I’m sober now. But the atmosphere was tense.’ Mood swings, anger and tears are textbook behaviours after a head injury – although Singh blames long-running family tension for the rows that simmered at home. After two weeks, he slipped on the stairs again and fractured the same foot. An ambulance took him to hospital and his last words to his dad were – ‘I’ll call you as soon as I’m done.’ After his foot was treated, he stood outside Leicester General Hospital waiting for his dad when he got a tap on his shoulder. ‘It’s two police and it’s like – are you Mr Singh?’ he recalls, shaking his head. ‘I’m thinking – why are the police asking if I’m Mr Singh?’ He pauses for a moment and looks away, then back. ‘And I get arrested by the police – they say they’ve a restraining order because of my aggression at my dad’s house … and I’m kind of baffled because I just had a conversation with my dad and I thought he was coming to pick me up … but it turns out suddenly I’m homeless.’ After a night at Euston Police Station, a squad car dropped him off at the Dawn Centre, Leicester’s last remaining homeless hostel – the council has closed three other hostels in the past few years, offering supported accommodation instead but effectively reducing the number of beds available to rough sleepers. Still a little dazed – and with a few belongings in a plastic bag – he was hoping to get to a bed early to rest and recover a little. But the Dawn Centre was full and the hotels he could walk to only had rooms for £70 a night, so he went to an off-licence, bought a few cans of Kronenberg and slipped into a hotel car park where he lay down behind a parked van – ‘and drank and drank and tried to sleep,’ he shivers. ‘It was February and I was freezing so I thought I’d knock myself out with alcohol. But when you try and sleep outside, you think you’ve slept and then you look at your phone and it’s been three minutes.’He was so exhausted and dirty he thought he couldn’t do another night like that so he booked in to the hotel using his bank card to guarantee the room. He had a shower and got his head down for a couple of hours. When he woke, his phone battery was running low, he had no money and everything he owned was at his parents’ house. He walked on his crutches over to Leicester City Council housing office, where they said he wasn’t eligible for help as his parents’ house, his last address, stands just outside the city limits in Leicestershire. He managed to get an appointment with Oadby and Wigston Borough Council on the same day, got to the bus stop and realised he just had a few coppers and a little bit of change. He showed the bus driver all he had, and told him where he was going. The driver just took a few of the coppers and let him on, which still brings tears to his eyes when he tells the story. At Oadby and Wigston, a housing officer called Heidi hunted out a bed at the Action Homeless hostel, run by a local charityin the city centre. She lent him £3 to get the bus, he made it to Victoria Park and was given a bed on the first floor of a brick townhouse. He made friends sharing tobacco and Rizla – ‘it was like school or a prison’, he says. ‘I hadn’t got my own cup so they wouldn’t give me tea. People were kicking off over dinner and I almost wished I was outside again, instead of having to climb the stairs to get to my room with the noise of someone kicking off every half an hour.’They moved him around a couple of times. First into shared accommodation and finally into a single room in a quieter house. The bureaucracy of the homeless system proved endlessly baffling. One advisor told him he wasn’t entitled to housing in Leicester because his family lived outside, but if he filled out a form saying he was estranged from his family that would see him clear. So he did that and got a letter back saying he wasn’t eligible because he had no local connections. He’d have to wait in limbo for two years before he became a resident of Leicester.‘It’s crazy,’ he explains. ‘There’s housing I can get for £385 per month, and the council is paying my hostel over £780 for a single room with a shared kitchen. On top of that, I pay the hostel £104 a month, so they’re clearing £900 per month. Every now and then, someone says they may force me back to London, because I have connections there. But how am I going to get on a waiting list in Kingston upon Thames of all places?’He was sleeping badly, and hugely sensitive to noise and light, which eventually drove him to Inclusion looking for something to help. There he met a Dr Maxwell, who talked to him for half an hour and was shocked that he’d not been treated for his head injury. She helped sort out some medication, got the in-house physiotherapist to look at his leg and wrote a few letters to Action Homeless explaining his illness and asking that he be moved to a less noisy building. She also connected him with Headway, a charity dealing with people with head injuries, who secured him an assessment for the Employment and Support Allowance – the benefit paid to disabled people. Initially the interview was scheduled in Nottingham. ‘I told them I had problems with my leg and I suffer from anxiety,’ he shrugs. ‘Does it make sense to send me to Nottingham? And because I’m band four – as in, I’m not drinking or doing drugs – I’m a long way down the list for any better accommodation. So if I get myself an "addiction I’d get housed. I’d be better off if I started taking drugs.’The days pass slowly, he says – he’s got a scrapbook and tries doodling and sketching in it. He’s got a few ideas but they don’t quite come out right. And he’s started to help out at a homeless charity Open Hands.‘They’re all charities aren’t they? It’s funny that. The thing is – it can happen to anyone. I see people buying all these lottery tickets and it’s like – you’ve got more chance of being homeless than winning the lottery you know? I was working towards an okay life before – interning and organising exhibitions in Pimlico and Chelsea. Now everything’s stripped away. Some people do help out – but most people think I don’t look homeless enough.’





Sem comentários: