Hanna Jarzabek

PHOTOGRAPHY

Enriqueta lives on a pension and, as she says, her ex-husband cannot give her money to help support and take care of her smallest daughter Lidia.

She lives in a small 40m2 house. In two tiny rooms have to fit a total of 5 people: Enriqueta shares one with her 10-year-old daughter Lidia and the second one is occupied by Enriqueta's son, his wife and their one-year-old baby. The flat they live in is illegal. - “I paid some man about €500 and he was the one who gave me the key here, I didn't force anything to enter here. The flat was abandoned and in a horrible situation, full of bugs, cockroaches etc. We had to clean everything ... ”- Enriqueta explains.

The apartment was abandoned for a long time and people were taking things with them until practically everything was removed, taps and windows included. They had to do a lot of renovations and put things little by little. In winter, to keep the house isolated, they lower the blinds, leaving it dark. They also don't have the heat, just a pile of blankets and coats. Even so, Enriqueta wants to stay there and since she entered, she asks the bank, the owner of the apartment, for social rent. - “We have entered here 5 years ago and since then what I am asking for is a social rent because y pension is only €360 per month. In a room the 5 of us cannot go either…."

During the confinement Lidia, without a computer or stable connection, could not study either. While other children received their homework and progressed online, Lidia waited accumulating delay that she will have to make up for on her own. She had a hard time. She loves to read because books are "like written movies," she explains. But she doesn't have books at home, and during the confinement she couldn't go to the school library, which she loves so much.

In our society it is taken for granted that we all have the Internet and computers or tablets at home. But it is not true and during the confinement many families, especially those who already lived in a precarious economic situation before, had to face problems due to not being able to access education or work online.

In Enriqueta's house, the online school was a dream that Lidia was only able to access at the end of the confinement, and thanks to the generosity of a man who, moved by the family's situation, gave her a second-hand computer. It was a very beautiful day for her. She loves computing. At school, before the confinement, she could sometimes use computers that are in the classrooms for collective use. When she received the computer at home she began to cry. She could not believe it. She has been told that some man was going to give her something, but she thought it was going to be a doll, a computer was not expected art all.