And now we are all in the by Valeri LEKOV
N
atasha Ilieva lives near the recently asphalted Ropotamo Street in Kyustendil’s Iztok Roma neighbourhood. Her house is not at the street though. ·Hers is the one at the back, a bit further down, near the scrap house fence”, some children playing outside help me out with directions. I turn right between the yards and follow a tiny path to a place that used to be a plain field. Now there are about 20 shacks here. Natasha’s house is almost new and has two rooms. As most of the houses around it, it was built in a hurry with whatever was at hand. The bricks were gathered from demolished old buildings, the rafters and beams, roof-tiles, doors, and windows, too, are second-hand. The ceiling on the inside has been made out of an old hardboard piece. The tiny room where Natasha lives has a bed, a corner sofa, a commode, a table, a TV set, and a wood-and-coal stove. Her three children live in the second room. Well, she has other children, too, but they have grown up and have each taken up their own road. Now she lives with Nelly, Emil, and Elvira. She doesn’t have a partner and has never had one for long. Someone comes along, they live together for a while, the next baby comes along, and he ·vanishes”. No marriage, no paternal rights, no alimony payments. And no job either. The family’s sole source of income used to be social assistance payments. ·Come in, I’m cooking some cabbage. I’ll just add some rice to it. I’ll put in what I’ve got - the kids have to eat something”, Natasha, 45, greets me at the door. There is no electricity in the house. In the evenings she ·borrows” some from the neighbours, so that she
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and the children don’t have to sit in the dark. The water comes in buckets from the houses at the street. They built a toilet out of a few pieces of wood behind the house. ·Bathroom? Wherever would we have a bathroom from? If we save a penny, we go to the city bathhouse or carry some mineral water to wash ourselves and our clothes”. All three children go to school. Nelly is in the ninth grade, Emil in the eighth, and the youngest Elvira - in the fifth. And they don’t go to the nearest neighbourhood school, but to the sports school downtown. Until December last year, they had managed to get by thanks to social assistance. Of course, they could not afford a hearty meal every day, but still managed to survive somehow. This is how it used to be. And at school, too, the children would sometimes be given meal coupons. Now, however, things have gone for the worse. Natasha was among the first victims of the amendments to the Social Assistance Act proposed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (MLSP). She used to get temporary three or six-month jobs under the Ministry’s various employment programmes, and she mostly had to do street-sweeping. She also never failed to work the whole five days required to get the monthly social assistance benefits. ·I used to get 178 leva (app. 85 euro) assistance every month. They said they were cutting it and we were to find us some jobs. How this it going to work out, I don’t know. I went to the labour office to ask and they told me - we have no jobs now, come next month to see if there’s anything. What do I do now? Even if I rummage through the garbage, I won’t get to earn a single lev even. I am now only going to receive the children’s allowance, 60 Leva (30 Euro) a month. My children walk all the way to school, and that’s on the other side of town.