The survivorsThe lives of homeless peopleHomeless people and organizations denounce the obstacles to leaving homelessness"On the street you don't know what to do, or where to go."It can be read in just two days. Probably, the speed of its reading is due, to a large extent, to the fact that it Almost grabs the reader from the very beginning.
Journalist Jorge Bustos writes a chronicle of helplessness, as he himself subtitles this work, not from the economic or socio-descriptive perspective of the politician, nor as one of those moralizing preachings of the new lay priests into which many of us communicators have mutated.
Almost is a first-hand chronicle, written from the dining room of the reception center, from the shared bus and the confidential chats of the short walks of an excursion.
Almost
Almost is born from a recognizing look, not from a quick glance, to those thousands of "homeless" that populate our first world streets. Those that are so close to us that we do not even see them, that we have "assimilated" them to the whole landscape, but that are the most resounding failure of a society that, as Bustos himself points out, collectivizes them in order to "to dilute the responsibility, which always belongs to specific decisions of specific people".
Almost is made up of snippets of unfinished stories, because they are still being lived as you read these lines: the life of the homeless, their lights and shadows, the thankless and at the same time wonderful task of those who take care of them; the work of the Sisters of Charity who are, besides being sisters, father and mother to hundreds of people whom nobody wants to call family.
With the stylistic acuity that characterizes him, Bustos takes the step from journalist-counter to journalist-listener, embodying a narrator who reflects, analyzes, remembers... and disappears when necessary. He shares with the real protagonists -those invisible ones- food and conversation. Also with those who take care of them, at the San Isidro Shelter Center in Madrid (Almost), in other centers such as La Rosa or Juan Luis Vives.
Through these pages parade drug addicts born with abstinence syndrome, women abused again and again, professors whose alcohol has brought them down from the classroom to the nights on a cold street bench and immigrants marked by labels of one sign or another. Its members do not appear as trampled poor people (although more than one bears the mark of a sole on his face), but with the dignity of those who, as a woman or a man, have a heart and a story between their ribs.
In the information age low cost (and fast), of the talk show host and the journalist. ChatGPTFor one of our own to agree to go down to the street for more than two hours for a report is a more than praiseworthy demonstration of particular devotion to the profession and respect for the reader.
If, as in this case, he has dedicated days and nights to it and even his own birthday celebration, we move on to something more than an informative or "whistleblower" report.
Jorge Bustos materializes in these pages the only raison d'être of the journalist, that profession that speaks of everything that does not live: to tell the stories that deserve to be heard. To be the voice of those who cannot tell it, have no voice or are not even aware that it is their lives that really materialize the pulse of a society.
Almost is a book that you don't finish reading when you turn page 189. It's even funny to think that you "almost" finished it, but you're not. Because, if you have heart, guts and eyes... Better said, if you have eyes in your heart, you will keep reading pages of Almostevery day, in the streets of your city.
