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Esta historia no tiene nombre

At home happy, with her daughter Lorena who still doesn't want to “wean herself”. Photos: Alejandro Garcia

When they found out in Ceballos that Yarisnelis would be a mother for the fourth time, they must have judged her more than necessary. The least they must have thought, those who didn't dare to tell her, was that she was crazy! Moreover, even more so in the midst of this situation! The indiscreet women would ruminate for whom two children already completed the family picture.

She had had two boys from a previous marriage and the third daughter had come because of that romantic and real idea that children strengthen love. Yarisnelis and Leonardo consented and Lorena was born three years ago.

The woman had it when she was 26, feeling like a strong woman, and after giving birth at 15 and another at 17. Everything in her life seems premature.

But of all the things that have come early, the story of the house where we are welcomed takes the record for the unexpected and incredible. 11 days between one thing and another. 11 days! from saying to doing. Less than 30 weeks in the eyes of the Health authorities.

That's where it all started; She attended the consultation for the routine recruitment and among the questions was the number of deliveries or cesarean sections and the constructive state of the house. Therefore, he believed that this was what it usually is: the filling of a "medical history" that remains in history.

With three children and such a small house on the outskirts of Ceballos, where not even a crib had room, she joined the list of vulnerable mothers, even though she was a pedagogical assistant in the elementary school and her husband Leonardo, custodian in the northern keys. Between the two, they do not reach 5,000.00 pesos in salary and that narrowness made him think that he could deserve financial help.

It was the only time she went somewhere, "making use" of the fourth child that was growing in her womb. The social workers told him that his case did not proceed. Denied. Resigned to not being able to get together to have a refrigerator one day, to not having how to buy part of the basket, although she inherited something from Lorena, to continue sleeping three in a bed, to continue living as she used to live.

Esta historia no tiene nombre

Here she poses with her “unnamed” daughter, little Lorena and Cristian, 13 years old. Cristopher had gone out with his father and Leonardo was working. That's why the family was incompleted 

Until on December 13, the social workers went to her house, to tell her that she was ready, that "the authorities of the province and the municipality would go to visit her to give her a house." Of course, she did not believe that something like this would happen, and less so 11 days after that announcement.“

They say, they say and they say, and one…”, now apologizes for a reasonable discredit: “Nobody expects to be given a house like this, so good and in such a short time. I still can't believe it; sometimes I think this is a dream."

If he believes it, it is because he had no hope; not even illusions. She would have had to spend more than eight years without touching a kilo of her salary to reach the 300,000.00 pesos that the apartment cost, while with the 2,300.00 that her husband earns each month they would have had to support themselves for six. Impossible.

Luckily that is already a disused calculation that he never did. So that?The vague idea she had was that mothers in her situation sometimes build a house for them or repair the one they have; and that, he knew, doesn't happen overnight. Nor had she gone to insist on anyone, nor to complain to the Government nor to ask for dispatches, send letters or guard officials to become too visible. His case was apparently unknown. I just prayed there, in his medical record.

That is also why she answered without much encouragement everything they asked her and forgot a little about that day, until a week later Graciela Condú, municipal director of Housing Company.

Esta historia no tiene nombre

In the kitchen of his apartment. "Something like this never crossed my mind, I don't even know how to thank you for so much, this has no name," he says, seconds before looking at the camera

On December 23, at 12 noon, and in the midst of a crowd of neighbors, cameras and protocols, Yarisnelis opened the door. He kept repeating to himself that he couldn't get excited, that his blood pressure would rise and he had to take care of himself if he wanted to enjoy it, but when he entered it was all in vain: he was literally speechless. He couldn't speak.

"The nerves, I guess," he laughed on December 28, four days after moving.

How was the delivery arranged?

Graciela Condú speaks for the main municipality, even though she knows that there are similar stories throughout the province, thanks to an agreement by the Council of Ministers that on May 20 would make the powers clear. "The councils of the municipal Administration can buy homes owned by personnel, up to an amount of three hundred and fifty thousand Cuban pesos, through the municipal Housing Directorates, in order to allocate them to mothers, fathers or legal guardians who have under their custody and care three (3) or more children of up to seventeen (17) years”.

With such prerogatives, the road would be expedited, in addition to the fact that “in the main municipality, only three benefited, since Ciego and Morón have been the most difficult; we can only reach up to 350,000.00 pesos and homes in good condition and at that price do not always appear. We have managed to buy them in the Rivas Fraga district, in the Plan Piña and in Ceballos”, he comments.

Ernesto Herrera Pérez, technical deputy director of the Provincial Housing Directorate, reports that a total of 85 families have been favored, between June and December, with the 25 million allocated in the territory for this demographic policy. He knows that such an amount (350,000.00) does not offer the same possibilities in Bolivia as in Ciego de Ávila, and that it has not been, therefore, a quota set by municipalities.

The impact, however, has spread throughout the province, especially if we say that in 2020 only 39 mothers in a similar situation benefited.

In 2021 it would be more than double and the reasons leave evidence of why: allocate resources, acquire them, build the home, finish it... it is a process mediated by so many twists and turns that it is not always possible to undertake it and finish it in the same year.

In addition, it took Yarisnelis 11 days to inhabit a promise, to stop belonging to those more than 500 vulnerable mothers that exist in the territory today, according to Inty Reyes Hernández, coordinator of Construction programs and objectives, in the Municipal Administration Council from Ciego de Avila.

Still, she insists, she can't explain how she could have been so lucky. He says luck to what has happened to him, even though at first many must have doubted that that was precisely what he had.

"I took care of myself, but there was a time when there were no condoms or pills or way to put on a contraceptive and, when I came to see, I was pregnant," she confesses, without regretting bringing into the world the daughter who will be born in February.

It has had to readjust, once again. If she has been able to show anything, it is that, even with the help of her husband and the father of her two children, being in charge of three children aged 13, 12 and 3 has been exhausting, although her work as a mother must alternate with that of "seño" of third and fourth grades. Such responsibility has forced her to overcome herself. "Can you imagine me losing my job?"

The question is rhetorical. When Yarisnelis became pregnant with her first child, she dropped out of school, then she did not resign herself to the ninth grade and reached twelve, then she passed the course and became a pedagogical assistant; now that they told him that he has to get a license to teach, he is already thinking about a degree.

His life is somehow the perfect metaphor for a womb. It stretches, it adapts...

She repeats over and over again that her thing “has no name”, she does not know how to define this event in her life and, in order not to clash, she smiles and clarifies that she does not have a name for the daughter who is about to be born to her either.

“There is still time, girl”, he reassures me; as if time were not the most relative thing in the world.