Home, Sweet Home
Yesterday afternoon a 63 year-old woman named Josefa had to leave the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries to go to prison on the island of Lanzarote. She couldn't because, after three days of being on a hunger strike protesting her prison sentence, she fell down in a dead faint before being led onto the ferry and was sent to the hospital. So what? Well, she was being sent to prison for six months because she hadn't demolished the house where she and her two children and three grandchildren live. Yes, only in Spain. Her story began almost twenty years ago when she found herself divorced with two children and nowhere to go. So she built a small shack on a piece of property she had inherited from her parents. Over time her daughter added three children to the family. They lived off sporadic jobs they could find, and at the moment the grandmother, Josefa, is receiving an unemployment check of 320 euros a month until September, and her daughter 400. Her son isn't receivin...