There are many more children and women homeless than expected. This has become apparent with a new method of counting that has been applied for the first time in a number of municipalities in Brabant. Nikki Oerlemans from Den Bosch is one of those homeless women. She is now in a crisis home with her daughter Kiki. “I have a good job, an income, no debts, no problems, but I just can’t find a home.”
According to Nikki, the standard image of a homeless person is no longer correct. The image of the bum standing at the supermarket with a can of beer. This is also evident from the new Chance Fund count that has been applied in Northeast Brabant. Nearly a third of the nearly 1,500 homeless people counted are women. It is striking that almost a quarter are underage.
Nikki had a house with a five-year contract, but had to leave that house after nine months. She had no idea that she and her daughter could not simply be thrown out on the street. “I wasn’t concerned with that and agreed. So basically just bad luck,” Nikki says NOS.
“I was convinced that a mother and child would never end up on the street.”
For the first few months she slept on the couch with friends and eventually moved in with her father. “I didn’t really mind knocking on friends’ doors, because I was convinced it would be very temporary. Don’t we have a good welfare state in the Netherlands? Then it is not possible for a mother and child to end up on the street?”
The fact that she still doesn’t have a house for herself and Kiki feels like a failure, Nikki says. “Then you really feel like a failure. Then you are also less likely to sound the alarm.”
“A roof over your head is different from a home.”
She thinks that her daughter has become flexible from all that moving, but she says: “I especially think that for a child’s stable development it is very important to have a permanent home. A roof over your head is different from a At home.”
Nikki did not literally end up on the street with her daughter because she had a social network to fall back on. Otherwise the suffering would have been incalculable. “Then you’re really screwed and I think there are quite a lot of people like that.”