Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2012; it is a news piece from the height of the economic crisis and the wave of evictions in Spain, and today and currently refer to that moment.
We’ve often seen the usual “sponsor a little Spaniard” jokes on social media walls. It’s no joke, though: sponsoring entire Spanish and Greek families is the new trend in Europe. For now, the country most active in sponsoring Spanish families is Norway.
It all began in November 2011, when the public broadcaster Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) aired a report on the eviction of a Spanish family. Millions of Norwegian viewers watched the police remove a mother and her children from their home and leave them to fend for themselves. The most dramatic part wasn’t the tears, or the neighbours trying to stop the eviction, even confronting the police. It was probably seeing the police themselves leave a few suitcases and the daughter’s toys out in the street.
Millions of Norwegians couldn’t understand how a country’s own government could throw a family with young children out onto the street, or how the police, who are there to defend citizens’ interests, could carry out an unconstitutional order. Later they learned these weren’t isolated cases and that this happens in Spain every day. Some Norwegians said publicly that they never imagined such a situation could happen in a country like Spain after 1936 (the Civil War).
NRK received thousands of calls from Norwegians who were outraged and ready to do something. They wanted names and phone numbers of families going through this, and many said they couldn’t hold back their tears while watching the report. That was the start of a solidarity campaign that didn’t come from any association, but from individuals who wanted to help.
Some Norwegians who owned a holiday home in Spain went as far as offering it temporarily to Spanish families. Other families receive a sum of money every month without fail, which in some cases is more than the government’s own benefits.
The next alarm went off in Greece, where the rate of child abandonment has soared 250% as parents can do nothing to support their children. Every year, Norwegian families take in hundreds of Greek children and look after them as if they were their own, housing them in their homes and paying for their schooling until the family can manage on its own.
Today it’s no longer just private individuals who sponsor families: Spain now also receives help from various Norwegian associations. There are no figures on how many Spaniards are “sponsored” by Norwegian families, but they could number in the thousands, and the aid in the millions.
Situations like this show that sometimes a country with no ties to ours can show more solidarity than the governments of the affected countries themselves. That says very little about those governments, and a great deal about the Norwegians, who deserve our thanks for this act of unconditional solidarity.
And yes… these things are happening in Spain, in case any Spaniard hadn’t noticed.
Featured image: Hans A. Rosbach, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
