Francesc Junyent and Pere Banal, residents of Poblenou, are two of the more than 500 people who responded to the Arrels foundation’s call to participate, on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, in the count of men and women who sleep rough in Barcelona. For hours, Francesc and Pere toured the space assigned to them in Poblenou, between the streets Llacuna, Bilbao and de la Jonquera with Llull, and up to the Mar Bella breakwater. Already in the morning, sitting on a bench in the Rambla del Poblenou, they concluded that they had been able to locate at least 20 homeless citizens.
Arrels distributed 189 groups, with two or three members each, in the 73 neighborhoods of Barcelona. Francesc and Pere were called to the side of the Poblenou metro station and, after the last instructions, they set off down Carrer Bilbao in the direction of the sea. They immediately found the first man laying down on the ground. An application designed for this task facilitates the dynamics of the count. First, the point where the homeless person spends the night is geolocated, it is specified whether he rests in a portal, in a cashier, in a tent, in a sack or on a bench and, if it can be determined, ‘indicates the sex. In addition, they also include the observations they consider relevant.
Pere and Francesc took the mission very seriously, they searched thoroughly among the bushes that grow in the Poblenou park, where they found a few people hiding in tents and sacks, on a cold and very windy night.
“I arrived in Poblenou 11 years ago and I get the feeling that now, after the pandemic, there are more people sleeping on the streets; just in the two blocks next to my house, I estimate that about five people live there, twice as many as before”, says Pere, who has been working as a volunteer one afternoon a week in Arrels since March. Francesc, now retired, also helps an organization that serves this group, the Heura de Gràcia Centre.
In the Poblenou park, a particularly wild space at night and at this time of the year, they found all kinds of precarious accommodation. Tents and huts erected with cardboard, wood and plastic. You can also see a kind of tiny shelter half-camouflaged there. After a few minutes, a young couple arrives with suitcases and gets in.
Near the cemetery, two tents could be seen surrounded by bottles of water, bottles of bleach and other cleaning products, buckets, junk and even a parasol.
Pere and Francesc also went into the beach to investigate the Mar Bella breakwater area. Music was coming from inside a tent.
The journey culminated in the Rambla del Poblenou, where, as a building security officer warned, every day a man rests huddled in a sack and on a bench.
Now, Arrels will analyze all the data to report next week on the number of people sleeping rough. At the count of June 15, 2022, there were 1,231 people.
