From the city to the shantytown: a story of an Argentine Jewish family

She hates the mud, a symbol of her new poverty. She hates it with the same intensity with which she misses urban life, her small apartment with all the amenities one takes for granted. For Alicia, age 52, and her two daughters, unemployment meant leaving behind the reality they knew.

Alicia is a proud woman, slight and fragile as a bird and fierce in her will. She is a professional nurse with many years of high-stress work at a prestigious hospital’s intensive care unit. A widow since her youngest was a toddler, she always supported her family "with dignity: there was always a roof over our heads, food on the table and everything else the children needed."

Late last year everything changed suddenly. Argentina’s crisis caught up with the nurse and her daughters. Her contract was up and the hospital dismissed her. "They were downsizing," says Alicia. "After years of service, I was fired. I can’t really complain because they found a way to allow me to qualify for a small pension and gave me a lump sum as severance."

Unfortunately, the money was not enough to continue renting in the city, and Alicia moved to a friend’s house in Escobar, a small city an hour north of Buenos Aires. The house was derelict and 20 dusty blocks outside the town proper. Alicia soon started investing in repairs and improvements, installing a water pump and electricity.

Then in December the economy collapsed. Alicia’s saving evaporated and, after devaluation and inflation, her pension amounted to a net sum of $33 a month.

The ensuing months sunk Alicia and her daughters, Cynthia and Andrea, deeper into the catastrophe of poverty. After getting sick, they discovered that their well was contaminated; someone stole their telephone’s wires - copper, an imported commodity, was suddenly valuable enough to steal - leaving them isolated for weeks on end. They realized after the first storm that their road was impassable with mud, and deliveries stopped. They learned to recognize precisely how much butane came in a bottle and became experts in balancing needs: either taking warm showers or cooking.

What broke Alicia’s will was health, hers and Cynthia’s. Mother and daughter are both diabetic and by March they couldn’t afford her imported medication, disposable syringes and reactives. Alicia sunk into a depression. "Every morning I groped for a reason to stir from bed," she says. "My girls were not attending school, I couldn’t get a job and support them anymore."

What saved Alicia was a memory of a kind gesture a man had shown her many years ago. She used to live in another city when her husband was alive and the kids were very young. She was working for a book printer and one day, quite by chance, the owner discovered she was Jewish. "Do your kids attend Jewish school?" the man asked. Alicia explained that she couldn’t afford one. The following morning the man went to her with filled-in and stamped forms: they were full scholarships for her girls in the city’s best Jewish school. He wouldn’t even take her thanks. "We are all Jews, we have to look after each other," he said. All he asked for was the "privilege" of taking the girls to synagogue every Friday night.

Isolated by the mud, Alicia remembered the man.

A few months ago, she went to the main building of the Argentine Mutual Aid Association in downtown Buenos Aires, wearing her best clothes, "feeling harsh and humiliated." They sent her to the Social Services Center at the Ajdut Israel community that Rabbi Oppenheimer runs in the city. "There I found people who listened to me," says Alicia. "Not just helped me financially, but really listened. I was a person again."

Alicia and her daughters were promptly given medicine and joined the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s food vouchers program. They were given appointments with doctors, and some building materials were delivered on a dry day. "If it weren’t for these people helping me, I would have lost a foot by now," says Alicia. "That’s what happens when you don’t take your insulin."

The family is making ends meet on $25 a week, plus medicines. "But what really makes an enormous difference is feeling part of a community," says Alicia. "I have someone to talk to, I look forward to coming to the city and meeting with these fine volunteers. I feel alive.

"And there is a silly little thing. When my phone works, it never rings. When you are unemployed and poor, nobody calls you. Well, now they do, they call to see how we are doing. That’s priceless."