Homeless Cancer Patient Finds Refuge in Barcelona Church Amid Treatment

Arrived in Spain from Tetouan, Morocco nine months ago, Yassine lives on the street and is following his chemotherapy for colon cancer. "I came here because a friend told me that at Santa Anna, they could help me and give me something to eat," he explains to El Diario. Teresa, the woman who received him upon his arrival at this homeless shelter, was very shocked to learn that, like her, he was treating colon cancer. "Me at home and him, on the street. It seemed very hard to me," she says.

The young man lives in difficult conditions. He says he spends his nights under the stairs, a kind of storeroom, in a building located in the "Poble-sec" neighborhood, where there is neither electricity nor running water, which a Muslim woman allows him to squat. "I’m not doing well, especially when I come out of chemo, my hands hurt. I also have a very sore throat when I drink something cold, I’m weak and I sleep all day..." he confides.

Colon cancer was diagnosed in November 2021, but he started feeling unwell shortly after arriving in Barcelona. "My intention was to come and work to earn a living. And I first found a job in a restaurant in Castelldefels," says Yassine, who was staying with a sister. But for reasons he did not want to discuss, the sister asked him to leave. Shortly after, he began to feel stomach pains, to the point of undergoing an operation.

Since then, he permanently wears a small plastic bag at abdomen level in which he relieves himself. "The bag is something complicated even if you are at home. Because you have to clean it and pay a lot of attention to it... I don’t want to imagine the situation of someone living on the street," laments Teresa. Yassine, for his part, only asks for one thing: "a clean place to sleep warm." For three months, he has been waiting for a call from a homeless shelter, after approaching the municipal authorities who asked him to contact the Red Cross.