HOW COVID-19 AND LOCKDOWN IS IMPACTING POOR PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD

These three stories from Reuters look at how the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown and quarantining measures are affecting people who are poor, homeless and living in poverty. We visit South Africa, France and Colombia.

BY LUIS JAIME ACOSTA, YIMING WOO, TIM COCKS AND WENDELL ROELF

Bogota’s poor, homeless get some help amid quarantine hardship

By Luis Jaime Acosta

Some of the neediest residents of Colombia’s capital Bogotá have started receiving food donations, while dozens living on the street were given a chance to shower and change clothes, as the city rides out a five-week lockdown to contain the coronavirus.

Residents of the Andean city, home to about seven million, had set tires on fire and blocked roads in isolated Thursday protests to demand help during the quarantine.

The government has budgeted 18 trillion pesos (about $4.43 billion) to shore up an inadequate healthcare system and fund welfare payments during the lockdown that runs until at least April 27.

But many families who get by in informal industries like street selling, construction and recycling are now cut off from work and are scrambling to make ends meet. Many say they have received no aid at all.

Others have been luckier.

On Friday, army soldiers in gloves and masks distributed boxes of rice, beans, sugar, salt, canned meat, toilet paper and bottled water to residents of the Egipto neighbourhood, whose steep streets wind up the skirts of the Andes.

“I’m so grateful to the army because they are the only ones who have gone house to house,” said a tearful Luz Maria Piraquive, 61. “This arrived just at the moment when we’re lowest on supplies.”

Major Johan Alzate, operations head for the presidential guard, said: “We are coming to a community with many needs ... joining efforts to try to mitigate some of the emergency that we are living.”

Meanwhile, the mayor’s office offered showers, toiletries, changes of clothes and meals to people living on the street — some of whom have been rendered homeless due to the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’ve been sleeping on the street for seven days,” said 42-year-old Hamilton Mosquera, who lost his job as a club doorman when the government shut down nightlife last month.

The coronavirus has killed nearly 200 people in Colombia and infected over 4,000. Giving people a way to shower and change will prevent them from becoming vectors, city officials said.

“We started these self-care sessions, which is a place where we put in showers, bring clothes, bio-safety supplies like alcohol, antibacterial gel and food,” said Daniel Mora, from the city’s social integration department.

Less money but more attention for the homeless of Paris during lockdown

By Yiming Woo

Homeless people in Paris are increasingly relying on charities for food, clothing and daily necessities as the city’s empty streets during the coronavirus lockdown have meant less alms for those in need.

France has extended its order until May 11 — a virtual lockdown to curb the coronavirus outbreak that has killed over 20,000 people. While most of France’s 67 million people are staying in their homes, the homeless are also trying to respect the rules.

“They (the homeless) are confined to their cardboard boxes, in their corner. They respect, well, the ones we know, they respect the confinement in their own way,” said Celine Mendak at the Goelette charity group.

The French capital has more than 3,600 homeless people.

Since the start of the lockdown a month ago, Goelette’s workers have been collecting food almost daily, loading up trolley bags and then walking through the city centre.

They stop to chat with some of the homeless camping out on the sides of boulevards and offer them necessities.

Erwan, a homeless man who only gave his first name, said that even though the money he received on the streets had halved during the lockdown, he enjoyed the conversations with Parisians.

“I’ve seen people on the street who ignored me and look down their noses, and since the lockdown, they stop to talk to me and so, it’s really nice,” he said.

Mixed blessing for some, as South Africa shelters homeless in schools, stadiums

By Tim Cocks and Wendell Roelf

In South Africa, the coronavirus epidemic is offering an unexpected chance to give those on the streets a roof over their heads.

Thousands are being housed in sports stadiums, schools and other locked-down public spaces, partly to try to stop them contracting or spreading COVID-19, and the government says it wants to ensure they don’t slip back through the cracks once the outbreak ends.

Yet not everyone thinks they will do better in the shelters the state has provided, with some saying what they are being offered is scarcely better than sleeping rough and others concerned the makeshift accommodation could become breeding grounds for infection.

Tsepang Motsepe, however, saw an opportunity to kick the heroin habit that made him homeless a decade ago.

The 31-year-old abandoned his law studies when his sponsor failed to pay the university bill, and then swiftly found that heroin “stabilizes your emotions.”

To feed his addiction, he was breaking into parked cars and sometimes robbing them. For food, “the dustbins were there,” he said outside a set of communal tents at the Lyttelton sports ground on the edge of the capital, Pretoria.

Many of his friends died of overdoses, HIV, or tuberculosis (TB), but Motsepe is now on state-provided methadone, a common heroin substitute. “I see there are aspects of my life I need to change. I want to go back to my studies,” he said.

He is one of around 15,000 people the social development ministry is housing in Gauteng, which covers both Pretoria and Johannesburg. Up to 2,000 others are in shelters in Cape Town.

All had been screened for the coronavirus, authorities said, and Thabiso Hlongwane, ministry spokesman in Gauteng, said the province was rolling out testing. Meanwhile, beds in shelters were being kept one metre (three feet) apart and hundreds of bottles of hand sanitiser had been provided.

Jo Barnes, an epidemiologist Stellenbosch University, warned that, if it took hold, the coronavirus would “spread like wildfire” through any facilities that were not well managed.

‘We want to go home’

Hlongwane said the aim was to keep the homeless off the streets once the epidemic ended.

“Beyond lockdown, the programme will continue. Social workers are on board ... to reunite them with their families,” he said.

Some may leave the programme well before then.

At Strandfontein sports ground in Cape Town, where huge, white tarpaulin marquee tents house around 1,500, some complained last week of cramped conditions and inadequate food.

Police officers broke up a protest as some inside tried to uproot the metal fencing, shouting - somewhat ironically - “We want to go home!”.

“If I have a chance I will run away from this place,” said Marco Brown, 35, one of the people at the camp who used to bivouac under a bridge, adding he had received nothing to eat by 3 p.m.

Cape Town council said that, after some “initial challenges”, services at Strandfontein were improving by the day.

Some homeless in the city want nothing to do with the shelters.

“There are too many people inside. It’s gonna be easy to get sick (there),” said Joseph, sleeping rough in the city park.