Homelessness is a disease.

I never imagined in my life that I would end up homeless, but I did. I was born in Africa and lived there until I was 10 years old. During that time I never lacked a thing, I was a happy child and took what I had for granted. In 2000, my parents sent me on a student visa to England to have a better opportunity at life. Things were going fine, I was living with my guardian I was a boarding student and even though I was bullied I generally enjoyed life. My mother came about a year later to study for herself and she wanted to buy a house so we could have somewhere permanent to stay. I did not realise this but my mother had severe depression and mental issues that have been the root cause of my homelessness. She sought a cure for it in the wrong places and when a person is in a difficult place the allure of hope and blind faith can become dangerous. She found that she could not work any more as illness took over her body.

My father would send money to pay for my fees which had to be paid because the conditions of a student visa is that you are educated privately and not at the cost of the state. But he found even with the benefits of a high paying job he could not afford to pay for my elder brothers university fees and mine, so forfeits had to be made. In 2002, my mother’s condition got worse and she encountered a man who scammed her and convinced her to sell her house and he instead bought it and never gave her the money for it, so we moved to another house in Hertfordshire. Things kept getting worse over the years, bills began to mount up, food was harder to get and all this time debts to my school were not being paid. The car broke down, everything broke down. In 2006 the mortgage company made proceedings against us and were succesful at 10 am on the 18th of May 2007 my house was gone. I don’t know how many times I can say it but I generally am heartbroken and devastated at the way I handled the situation I was in, so many things could have been don differently. I spent so much money on hotels because I was genuinely convinced (deluded) that God was going to give me my house back or get me a new house. I was paralysed by fear and inaction and allowed myself to suffer shame by going to other people’s houses begging them to stay and begging them to not throw us out.

But I was also a victim of my circumstances, I could not work because my mum did not send me back home to get my visa renewed, I was 12 years old and did not know better. However, I tried, I sent out C.V’s I looked for rooms to stay and eventually it paid off when in 2010 after living in a hotel for 7 months and living on 9p noodles we got a room to rent from an old friend and from then I decided enough was enough. I started my education again after being out of school for 4 years and watching my friends speed ahead of me. I taught myself using textbooks and took exams ( A-Levels) in May 2011. I plan to go to university in the next 3 years but it all depends on if I am allowed to stay and become a British citizen which I am in the process of applying for. But even if I don’t get it, there is always hope and always a future for me. I move out of the place I was staying in April 2011, because of difficulties with my mother, conflicts because I no longer believed what I believed and because I simply fell in love with a man that was not good enough. I now live with this man not out of protest or rebellion at my family but because it was the best thing for me to do. And this has caused problems. The changes that have occured in the last year have been phenomenal I thought I would never get out of the misery and the homelessness. I started the blog to talk about me but now I talk about those who don’t have a voice, those we ignore on the street, those we avoid eye contact with, I may have never begged on the streets for money but I know what it means to be desperate, lonely and afraid.
When I started this blog I was anonymous, I was ashamed. I was known as the “homeless girl” today you can call me Nadia.