In Iasi it is very hard to organize any serious direct actions because of the bureaucracy, so one of the solutions for us as activists, or anarchists in particular, has been to get involved in some ngo’s and try to be as active as possible, and even try to get in contact with some open minded people to create alternatives and basically a network in our city, and why not, to promote our values and a different point of view to the people from those ngo’s.

One of our bigger problems is homelessness, but even though this is a very serious and real issue, the state doesn’t allow anyone to help them unconditionally. There are many laws you have to respect if you want to organize something, so we got in contact with a woman who is the president of the C.I.S.P.A. IASI NGO. We find her very sincere and a hard worker even though she has a lot to do, sometimes ignoring her private life just to do something for the homeless people. C.I.S.P.A. stands for Center for Social Integration and Politics Against Discrimination.
The major program in which this ngo is involved is the shelter for homeless people in the city of Iasi. The first time I met this woman I was really concerned about this problem and at the same time I was happy that the shelter existed and that such an ngo existed dedicated exclusively to helping homeless people.
They are trying to change lives by helping the people from the shelter, starting programs on social integration, inclusion in the job market and they also have plans and a lot of projects about the shelter so they have started a fundraising campaign to further develop the old building in which the people live. Some other objectives are to create a volunteer-team (university or high school students) and to promote international volunteering and create a local community and social-network. But the main idea of this ngo is to monitor the situations of severe social exclusion (because this is the start of the process of becoming poor and homeless) and promoting social inclusion.

The situation of the shelter isn’t very good. The main problem is that it is overpopulated and, as I said, it is an old building, which isn’t large enough to house all the homeless people from Iasi. During the winter it is particularly tragic because people can’t survive outside in –20 Celsius weather and at the same time there wasn’t enough space in the shelter for everyone.
Most of the time there are about 110 people who stay at the shelter. Of them, there are about 5 families, 60% of them are teenagers coming from orphanages, and there are also around 10 elderly people and 21 children. Almost all of them have either no income or a very low one, and don’t have decent conditions to live in the shelter. A few of them have physical and mental health problems and they are confronting strong discrimination from potential employers and society in general.

This was what we found out at the first meeting with the president of the ngo, and 3 of us decided that we should get involved. After some time we saw the real situation, there were no volunteers. The only active people running the shelter was the woman who is also the president and another 2 people who have jobs and little free time and therefore can’t be very active. We asked what was happening so we found out a lot of disturbing information.
For example, it is quite shameful for the government that a city of more than 300.000 people has no homeless shelter, and, as we are used to here in Romania, some things are done just to get a photograph to send to Brussels in order to let them know that the homeless are being taken care of, and everything is ok. The mayor therefore offered this space to the homeless and soon the ngo got involved, but they received no help from the city government. The “present” to the homeless was a building with no heating system and 2 people in charge (a guard and a doctor who play chess all day long and don’t really care about the problems that the people living in the shelter are facing).
The situation got more serious as winter approached and there was no heating installation, but the good news was that the ngo was able to raise some money and buy a central heating system, and a gas connection. This was all done with money raised by the ngo with no help from the local government. But the ngo faced the same prejudices and discrimination as the poor and homeless do. The next-door neighbor of the shelter didn’t allow us to connect to his gas pipe even though we would’ve paid half of the pipe cost along with the monthly costs. He said that he doesn’t want to warm the homeless.
This is just one of the problems, as we, also, have a hard time working with the homeless. We have no money to pay a doctor specialized in psychological problems so we try to talk with everybody and to give advice. Some of them still have traumas, men from their time in prison, women with a history of family violence, and everything related. Their life is just “today” so they don’t know how to and sometimes don’t want to save money, don’t want to get a normal life and a lot of other problems and habits that come from these physical harassments and histories. It’s very hard to change things down there.
Maybe some of you believe that direct action is everything, that sometimes we don’t need help from the institutions, that we could change some things by ourselves but in this case it's very difficult to change something that has been going on for 10 or 20 years ago. The people in the shelter have faced fear, danger, starvation, homelessness, so they are ok now with the shelter. There was a period when we wanted to stop because we don’t have the power to influence them to change their lives, and we couldn’t educate them to be responsible and to fight for their lives. Some of us were sad and disappointed with their resignation towards their situations.
The first “mission” for the volunteers was to create some kind of mechanism so that people from the shelter could integrate into a “normal life” and to get free space for the homeless who have bigger problems. We found that impossible without some special assistance. Now our future plans are to make some upgrades to the building and to improve the life of the kids from the shelter because it is easier for us, with our skills, to work with them, to try and teach them to be stronger, and to make their childhood a little more stable and happy even if they live in a shelter which is very far from being the perfect, warm and safe place of fairytales.
We still hope that one day more people will join us and we will be able to do what we want to do, to be able get some people on their own feet, even if it will be very hard for them to start from zero and to walk on this the ice which this discrimination and failed system support.