Stéllaire UK - Solidarity

The gestures of love from my adorable friends, Belén and Kata, and the sensational team at Mucci’s, on Tallers Street, and « Bon Succès » from Barcelona, who each night give me the slightly burnt pizzas or the broken biscuits they can’t sell to clients. They take care to put them back in the oven, so that they’re still hot when people receive them.

I sometimes make these gestures of love on my own, but also with the help and willingness of many people who want to spread this link of Stéllaire’s Chain of the Heart a little, driven by kindness and fraternity.

I’ve been involved in Stéllaire for 5 years. It’s a training school, «a school of life with a humanitarian goal » as MAAM-MARA calls it.

Some time ago, MAAM-MARA created a chain of sharing and mutual help for people in need. This is how Stéllaire’s « Chain of the Heart » was born.

To have a bad headache or even a fever, raging toothache, to have caught a nasty cold because of sleeping in damp conditions, on a hard floor, on really uncomfortable cardboard boxes. To sleep with one eye open, such is the level of insecurity and promiscuity in the places where the homeless pile up for the night. For your body to feel really sore as you wake up in the morning, as if you had been beaten

To feel abandoned and utterly alone. No-one to open your heart to, when you feel a little sad or nostalgic. Not being able to talk to someone about those little ordinary daily things which make you feel « like everyone else ». To have been able to shave, take a nice hot shower and feel clean that one day, with clean clothes (even if they are 2nd or 4th hand !), to have been able to have your hair cut, played bingo or watched a film (sometimes not a very interesting one) in one of those private social centre that take in the « homeless » on certain nights.

To go into a pub and pick up chips or leftover meals that other people haven’t eaten, so you can make yourself a small meal too. To roam everywhere with your metal trolley, despite the tiredness, while trying to find bits of metal or cardboard in the dustbins, or anywhere, in order to earn a few Euros. Each day the « dustbin looters » go up in number, and the competition increases.

Small Gestures of Love

To become aware of the value and the price of things when you are forced to beg, sitting for hours in the metro or next to a department store, with your plastic cup or your little cardboard box, enduring the haste, the closed expressions and the indifference of passers-by, to earn your meagre « wages », at least momentarily.

Always driven by my deep and persistent desire to hold out a friendly hand to help those who need it most, as I’ve seen Maam-Mara do, step by step, Stéllaire’s Chain of the Heart has come to life in Spain

To spend hours going round « bank foyers », as the one you usually go to is closed, either because the « Barça » (Barcelona’s football team) is playing and there’s a fear of vandalism, or because the manager of the building society or the bank , or even the police, simply felt like closing them.

My Irish friend, Kevin’s gesture of love, who gave me a white bicycle so I can distribute food to the homeless faster and further, thus getting to more people.

To have to pick up cigarette ends to make a new cigarette by putting together all the cigarette ends, as it was during our grandparents’ time, at the time of the black market during the war.

It’s here, in these circumstances, that our small gestures of love warm people’s hearts and brighten up everyone’s life.

People who have not had the experience of being forced to live in the street, and who perhaps never will, can’t imagine how much these small gestures of love are appreciated.

Living in the street is hard ! The hours seem endless ! Not knowing what to do, nor where to go, surrounded by « friends » who spend their time drinking and taking drugs, and who then argue and start fighting.