Make yourself at home

We all know this person who has his own gang of friends, they get together, listen to music, sip alcohol, talk and laugh. Maybe you are of this type yourself. Well, my friend Alice happens to live with such a guy, so the gang’s hangout spot is the living room or kitchen of the shared flat. I actually call this phenomenon “a curse of having a Spanish neighbor”. The guy is called Fernando and he is from Spain. You can hear the party well enough, but you cannot really participate unless you are fluent in Spanish. The sad truth is that not all of Fernando’s friends can speak English well and are not specially willing to try.

Yesterday the party was bigger, so English speakers were also welcome. Alice, me and some other people were sitting in the kitchen, so we could entertain ourselves by watching endless number of new guests in search for the fridge, bottle opener and glasses. There were Fernando’s friends, friends of Fernando’s friends and judging from the number of people all in all, friends of friends of Fernando’s friends. At some point a bad smelling man in his forties entered a room. He shook everyone’s hand and introduced himself as Alfredo, a friend of Alessandro (“Who the hell is Alessandro” thought everyone at the table). The emergence of such a character as Alfredo at a house party was quite jaw-dropping. After a couple of minutes of observing him I, quite perplexed myself, draw a conclusion he was homeless. Here I have to say Alfredo did his best to be a good guest. It was quite obvious he was happy to talk to people (his English was quite good) and he was trying to show us some tricks with the coins. He contentedly took bottles of wine from the fridge (only the open ones) and devoured some crackers from the table hastily (only after asking for permission to eat them). Alfredo left the party with the last guests and seemed to be enjoying the rave much more than my friend Alice.

I am not specially keen on telling you only about the nice side of Lisbon (just search for it on the Internet by yourself, you will manage without me). Portugal’s capital is a city big enough to have certain features which are not considered very attractive, for example people living in the streets. I am actually surprised the homeless survive the ice-cold wind here. After some research with the help of my Portuguese friends I figured out there are houses for reintegration for such people, which are quite full and mostly welcome men. However, people do not get accepted if some kind of addiction is involved (I guess the message here is “don’t do drugs”). There is also such thing as “soup for the poor”, which means you get some food if you are poor. I am not quite sure why the only institution that is normally willing to help people in need is church. What makes us so indifferent to people around us? I wonder what is Alfredo’s story and I regret not asking him about his life. Does he live in a shelter? Does he get soup for the poor? In January I read “A street cat named Bob” by James Bowen, the fuss about the cat left me quite indifferent, I was more impressed about how people with accommodation and income start seeing homeless people as not equal to themselves and try to avoid them. By that I don’t mean you have to invite people from the street to your house party, I think giving them alcohol is making the matters worse than they should be. Something in the system went terribly wrong, and there should be a way to fix it. Any thoughts on this?