UM

I went out with the UM the night of the Saturday 7th August between 10.30-01.30. This part of the Red Cross work involves going out into the centre of Almeria during the night and giving out food. There are two units, one that covers the city centre and one that goes into areas where there are more severe drug problems. The Red Cross team I went with had really built up long and trusting relationship with the homeless- they really cared about these people and the voluntary work gave them a lot of satisfaction.

I went with Minton and his team into the centre of Almeria, and Cait went with the other team. The main purpose was to give homeless people food, drink and hand out sanitation bags. Minton and his team knew who and where people were homeless in the centre. The people we met had the typical problems we associate with homelessness, alcohol abuse, addiction issues and social issues. Homelessness like any sub group in society is made up of different people from different places. On that night we met Spanish, Moroccan, French and German people.

We started by going into strips of waste land with flash lights and searching under clumps of trees and behind half derelict walls. Calling ‘hola, roja cruz’ . People often lived on old mattresses laying on cardboard and had old, dirty, well used sleeping bags. The team were well known, and everyone we met was happy to chat for a while and take coffee, magdalenas (little cakes), sandwiches with ham or cheese, juice and a sanitary bag (containing tissues, shower gel, shampoo, sanitary towels).
We then went to supermarket car parks, the back of the police station (some people lived there for safety) old abandoned cars and abandoned houses. In one of the abandoned cars the seats in the back had been folded down and at first glance it looked like a huge dust bin, however it was a collection of thing that might be useful old tin cans, clothes, cardboard, spare magdalena cakes, almost all items old and dirty.

The team was made up from a group of people with such a strong social conscious, both Minton and Esperanza had both come to live in Spain from Ecuador in South America. Minton had only been living in Spain for two years with his family and didn’t yet have his papers. Ramon was Spanish and I had been told (the description isn’t politically correct- due to translation difficulties) his brain was like a computer. All of them gave up three nights a week (and always Saturday) to do the UM.
There had been a mistake with the sandwiches (probably because Cait and I had helped and hadn’t ordered them in the right way for the UM) and we hadn’t brought enough cheese sandwiches many of the people we gave food to were Muslim and so didn’t eat meat unless it was halal meat. So they had to choose to go without. Minton was really cross about this, he really felt he was letting down people. He would also go back to pieces of waste land a couple of hours later to try to catch people we hadn’t seen before. There was also two vegetarians both very thin and with the problems of the street (alcoholic and drug dependency) but still very principled in their belief about not eating meat- it was difficult to comprehend.

At one thirty we finished and exhausted though I was it really was a very special learning experience.

Sarah.