I’m not a wealthy person nor do I come from a wealthy family.I’m a middle-aged Spanish woman who comes from a life of poverty and I worked very hard to dig myself out of that trap, which is very hard to do in this country. I had a job working full-time. I was paying my rent, my bills were up-to-date and everything was going very well. Again I was living moderately (okay definitely) on the poor or middle-class lower-middle-class levels. When covid hit, my job was eliminated, my hours were reduced to less than 10 and I wasn’t aware that there were unemployment benefits available. A friend told me about these benefits about six months later I begin collecting for short amount of time and because of a simple error I made on one of my reports, I was removed from State unemployment benefits and was given no income at all.

Since then I tried to have a meeting about this with unemployment and they refused to grant me further assistance because of an erroR. I don’t speak English very well—my my speech is a little broken and again I’m not very well versed in talking about these things and I was just amazed that they did this to me.

Given my situation, that I didn’t fully understand what I was supposed to be doing they refused my benefits. After that i wasn’t able to pay my rent there was a moratorium in place to prevent an eviction from happening, but yet somehow my landlord was able to evict me anyway. Since then which is been about a month now I’ve been living on the streets in my car. I take a shower at a friend’s house wherever I could find one in every now and again if I’m lucky a friend will let me stay on their couch but for the most part I sleep in my car everyday.

Bow to make matters worse because I parked in a parking lot that didn’t want me there my car was towed and I can’t even sleep in the car now so now I’m on the streets. Prior to all this happening, I was a recovering addict. I hadn’t used any drugs in about 7 years I picked up my first drug about three weeks ago because of all the problems that I’ve been having I couldn’t tolerate the stress anymore and now I feel like my whole life is tumbling out of control even worse than it was before.

I used to be proud of this country thinking it was founded on people like myself trying to strive for a better life but after what this government has done to me during this pandemic I wish I was never born here. I am a citizen. I come from a Spanish parents who were born in Puerto Rico, but I was born here in the mainland here in Connecticut. I shouldn’t be treated this way and I should have all the opportunities that everybody else has. If I didn’t understand something they should have taken the time to explain it to me instead of trying to get me off the benefits are state workers should have been doing everything they could to help me keep the benefits but those employees Ginger get enjoyment out of kicking people off programs they don’t want to help they just want to go home and collect their funding money.

This is my story I’m still on the streets I’ll probably end up dead because of the drugs that are out there but no one seems to care. I have one friend who has helped me through all of this and she’s done all that she can but unfortunately because of my lack of education and everything it’s just not enough. These stories need to be told so our citizens know that they shouldn’t be proud of what’s going on in the back end of things they should be appalled and want to help. Thanks for listening and reading my story.