Winter 2002-2003
Imre Kirdly passes the days sorting his plastic bottle collection, digging through garbage for food and watching wax melt from a single candle which lights the small abandoned shack he lives in.
The 65-year-old’s dwelling is littered with bottles, rotten apples and old clothes. Pieces of plastic sheeting serve as a window and door, the floor is cold, black dirt and a constant ticking comes from a clock buried somewhere. Homeless since losing his job as a plumber years ago, the squalor and stench are all he could find.
He lives in a homeless neighbourhood in Miskolc, Hungary’s second-largest city, in the depressed northeast of the country. Here, on the western side of town, atop a small hill near the edge of a residential district, a handful of men, women and children live in a series of stone and wood shacks, due to be torn down by the municipality in the near future.
“This is my home, there is nowhere else for me to go,” Kirdly says, accepting a packet of yellow candles from two Hungarian Red Cross social workers who climb the hill several times a week toting candles, rugs and other supplies for residents.
In Miskolc and surrounding towns, Gabor Kreffly and Apad Csikasz set out each afternoon in search of the homeless — shack dwellers like Kirdly, people inhabiting underground heating ducts, or living in caves dug into the side of embankments and in boxes along the street. They share information with them, advise on where to eat, bathe and find shelter, and lend an ear to a population that has slipped through the cracks of society.
“When we first met Imre he was very dirty and in bad shape, and clearly had a problem,” says Kreffly. “Finally he told us his story and led us here.”
Fending for themselves
Across Hungary and Central Europe, the number of homeless has been rising for more than a decade, fed particularly by the closure of numerous state-run factories and the loss of jobs, and homes, formerly guaranteed under Communism. The transition to free-market economies has brought opportunity but also disruption.
In Budapest alone, authorities estimate that the number of homeless doubles to 30,000 during wintertime, more than in New York City which has a population over four times the size of the Hungarian capital’s. The comparison provides perspective. New York itself has a homeless crisis, numbers higher than ever in its history. A deputy mayor and a task force has been assigned to it. But you need to quadruple New York’s problem to gain the scale of the Budapest one.
Many homeless venture to Budapest from the countryside, to take refuge in metro stations, parks and business entrances offering shelter from the wind, rain and snow. “We have a lot of them coming from eastern Hungary in hopes of finding a job in Budapest, but the situation is no better here,” says Jozsef Erdei, who heads one of two Red Cross shelters in the capital.
The flow is understandable. Northeastern Hungary has rampant poverty and an overall jobless rate around 60 per cent. Miskolc has an estimated 30 per cent. It is an old coal and steel-manufacturing town hit hard during layoffs and closures in the early 1990s. In a matter of months in the early 1990s, at the height of factory closures, 18,000 people lost their jobs, says Kati Molnar, director of the Miskolc Red Cross homeless shelter.
There is little evidence things will look up soon without significant economic development by business and government. There is Not even a motorway linking the city to
Budapest, currently a two-and-a-half hour drive by car.
Forgotten elderly
Istvan Levai and Zoltan Nagy, both 70, have been roommates at the only long-term shelter for the homeless elderly in Hungary since
the Miskolc Red Cross opened it last March. Levai pads around the small and tidy room in slippers, wearing one blue sock and one black one, carrying a notebook to keep track of sports scores. He sometimes places small bets Continues on page 8. on his favourite teams. Nagy shows his penchant for gardening with ten plants he cares for, spread across a red-and-white checked cloth atop a small table at the foot of his bed.
“If he had snored I would have left already … I cannot stand snoring,” Nagy jokes of his roommate. Nagy formerly worked at a steel factory in town but says he was forced to take early retirement in 1990 due to the factory’s closure, brought on by the political changes.
Poverty has engulfed many elderly people in Central Europe’s post-Communist transition. Unable to keep up with inflation, subsisting on pitiful incomes, they face a daily struggle for survival. The average pensioner in Hungary takes home $140 a month. A worrying number end up on the streets.
“We could easily find 100 people to live here daily,” says Molnar, referring to the elderly shelter. It opened in March with a capacity of 17 people, and three new rooms are currently being constructed. Each resident pays 80 per cent of their monthly pension to the Red Cross in exchange for room, full board and health care. All their basic needs are provided.
Though their pensions are not enough to afford an apartment of their own, Nagy and Levai have managed to make a little life for themselves inside the room they share at the shelter. Levai usually brings them coffee in the morning. Nagy likes to take walks or board the tram to somewhere in the afternoons. “We don’t talk much about the past; it’s already over,” Levai says. “And we aren’t old women gossiping, either. But if someone must be next to me then it is Istvan.”
Cold nights
Hungary’s first cold season casualties came early this year, homeless people found dead during late October, all the victims of hypothermia. The number will likely multiply before the end of winter, the busiest time of year for homeless shelters, say authorities.
The Red Cross refuge on Csepel Island, headed by Jozsef Erdei, is one of 14 night shelters for the homeless scattered throughout Budapest. Like others in town, it also provides a warm day centre where free meals are served, and, as in Miskolc, Red Cross social workers visit areas frequented by the homeless. They offer them refuge and help them establish contacts with the local labour office. For those who do land jobs, social workers try to find space in a longer-term Red Cross shelter.
Like Miskolc, Csepel Island is known for its former large, state-run factories, which pumped out smoke and steam around the clock and employed thousands before the closures. Erdei says a first step in reducing homelessness must be job retraining for older, low-skilled workers previously employed by the factories. Job placement must follow, he says, and accommodation put aside for people who cannot afford Budapest rents and utilities.
People in need are entitled to welfare benefits but getting them isn’t always easy. Help doesn’t come to them, no system is in place to check their wellbeing. Out of touch on the fringes of society, some don’t know their entitlements, or how to get them. Others do but fearful or reluctant to navigate government offices and ask for help on their own, they chose to be homeless instead.
Erzsébet, 58, is one such example. Having worked in a Budapest greenhouse for more than 30 years she is entitled to a monthly payment. She prefers not to ask. The Red Cross tries to intervene in such cases and guide them through the system, but when social workers try to help Erzsébet, she disappears, Erdei says.
Homelessness has become a way of life for Erzsébet, one she feels powerless to change. For five years she has slept on staircases, in bank foyers or under the open sky. She walks with a heavy wooden cane and her forehead and nose are caked with dry blood, bruised from when she fell recently, she says.
Erzsébet refuses to go to a night shelter for women, afraid of being robbed of her only possessions or beaten up once doors are shut for the night, a fear Erdei says is common among Budapest’s homeless.
For the past three years she has eaten a daily meal at the Csepel Island shelter, a daily ritual she is grateful for. “I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for the shelters and the free meals,” she says with a shy, toothless smile. “I am in very bad health anyhow. I don’t know how much longer I can go on.”