By Susana Vera

Luismi Astorga clasps his hands as he lifts his head up to the sky. He’s waiting to take the stage at a music club in Madrid where his dance group, Fusionarte, is taking part in a charity gala.

Astorga closes his eyes and begins to pray. The click of my camera breaks his concentration and he smiles at me as he proceeds to tell me, “Waiting makes me nervous.”

It’s not the first time Astorga has faced the thrill of performing for a live audience. He has been dancing with Fusionarte since Argentine choreographer and dancer Pau Vazquez formed the group six years ago with the aim of introducing dance to people with special needs.

Around 20 adult men and women with different intellectual disabilities make up the group. They rehearse every Saturday for an hour and occasionally they perform.

“The galas are the highlight for all of them. Many times we perform at places that are not really fit for dancing, but (that) does not matter to them. They feel special on any stage,” Vazquez says.

This show was one of the many Astorga has participated in, but experience never fully beats his anxiety. The waiting room next to the stage was packed with other members of the group as well as other performers in the gala. A man dressed as the Genie from Aladdin walked past us and sat nearby. “You have to ask for a wish,” Astorga told me. “Mine is to become a professional dancer to dance with famous people,” he added.

As I was thinking of my own wish, the squeaking sound of a door opening emanated from the speakers and Jaime Saez, Jose Maria Matamoros and Pablo Ruiz Larrea jumped on the stage. It was “Thriller” time.

Despite some coordination problems, the trio won the audience’s hearts. The smiles they wore throughout the whole performance made up for any mistakes. Michael Jackson would have approved.

Having a good time and showing people what they are capable of doing was the group’s goal – they were not really after perfection. Vazquez is the driving force behind Fusionarte. She put it together to provide its members with an option for leisure and art that they are frequently denied in mainstream society.

Three other instructors help her in this endeavor. They all have learned to cater to the needs of each individual and make do with little, since they get no subsidies. They rent a dance studio weekly for seven euros an hour and pay for the clothes or props when they perform at galas like this one.

Whitney Houston, flamenco, rap, and salsa followed before the group’s grand finale: the Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea” song. The Fusionarte dancers held their noses as if they were underwater and moved their legs and arms like mermaids. The stage was so small that they could barely fit, let alone dance. But the lack of space did not seem to bother them. They gave it all they had.

The sight of the dancers feeling so empowered on the stage made me think of my own 65-year-old uncle, Toni, who also has an intellectual disability. I wonder how different his life might have been had he been exposed to experiences like Fusionarte early on. Would he have been better prepared to articulate feelings and emotions? Probably. Would he have dreamed of being a professional dancer like Astorga? Who knows. But I bet he would have gotten a kick out of wearing a fedora hat like Michael Jackson’s. He loves to dress smart.

With the sound of the last note, all the dancers held hands and bowed their heads. Luismi Astorga took the microphone from the hands of a teary-eyed Lorena Torres, one of the instructors, and started a long list of thank-yous with a special one for Pau Vazquez, who had checked into a hospital that afternoon to give birth to her first child.

When the speech was over, the dancers left the stage accompanied by the cheers of their devoted audience. “How did we do?” Astorga asked me. “You rocked,” I replied. And he gave me a heartfelt hug.

No one felt more special that afternoon than me.

By Susana Vera

I remember the first time I saw Milagros Echevarria. She was in her house slippers, battling with the rubble piled up outside her home, with only a simple broom as a weapon. It was like watching David face Goliath.

The short, sturdy woman was working doggedly. She would only stop to remove rotting garbage from the debris and toss it into a nearby dumpster. “If I don’t do this every day, rats are going to eat us alive”, she told me. In the months that followed, I witnessed the same scene over and over, even when the rubbish threatening to invade her home had become the actual remains of the house itself.

GALLERY: GYPSY COMMUNITY DEMOLISHED

Milagros moved to the Spanish gypsy settlement of Puerta de Hierro in 1974, as a young girl of 12, still wearing pigtails. At the age of 13 she married her cousin Antonio Gabarri and by 14 she was pregnant with their first child, Carolina.

Gabarri’s parents were some of the first settlers in Puerta de Hierro, an area north of Madrid bordered by trees, a busy road and a sewage treatment plant on the banks of the Manzanares river. Like their parents before them, Milagros and Antonio decided to make a house for themselves where their family could be raised. “We had to sleep in our van for months while we were building it. Some of our relatives used wood in their houses, but we built ours out of brick. We wanted it to be permanent”, said Milagros. And so they did. It took them years of hard work and every penny they had to fulfill their dream.

Milagros’ life came full circle on July 17, 2012, when she found herself sleeping next to her husband in their cramped van once again. But this time they were 37 years older and they were not alone; their four children, the children’s spouses and their twelve grand-children were with them. The whole family had become homeless when a bulldozer demolished the only roof they had over their heads.

I had met Milagros and Antonio the previous year, when I went to Puerta de Hierro for the first time after reading in a local newspaper that a handful of members of Spain’s “Indignados” (indignant) movement had moved to a gypsy settlement to try to stop the evictions taking place there. Up until that point I was not even aware of the existence of Puerta de Hierro, even though the village is just a couple of kilometers away from Moncloa Palace, the official residence of the Spanish Prime Minister, where I frequently go to take photographs.

The residents welcomed me into their lives and told me about their predicament. Around 300 people, 70 of them children, had been born and raised in the village since their relatives settled there in the 1960s. They registered with local government and were provided with access to public services such as running water, mail delivery, trash collection and even school transport for their children. For fifty years they went about their lives without a hint of what was to come.

But in July 2010 the first bulldozer entered the village guarded by a squad of riot police in full gear. Madrid’s city council had come up with a plan to “eradicate slums” in the region and Puerta de Hierro was on its list; the days of the settlement were numbered.

I struggled to find the best way to tell the residents’ story. My initial idea was to focus on the plight of a single family and document how they were coping with the uncertainty of not knowing when their home would become a target for demolition. But after a while I realised that the evictions were not only destroying people’s homes, but tearing the whole community apart. Everyone is related by blood in Puerta de Hierro, no outsiders have been allowed to settle there. Life is communal. All villagers live for and by the rules of the community. The more time I spent with them, the more important it became for me to reflect that aspect of their lives, so even though I got pretty close to a couple of individual families, I also tried to explore the effects of the evictions on the villagers as a group.

Little is left of the settlement of Puerta de Hierro as I write this blog. Two houses, the former school and a building that housed the church are all that’s there. Soon, only the debris and the memories of five generations of Spanish gypsies will remain.

“Susana, you think you could make me a print of one of the photos you took of my house before it got torn down?” Milagros asked me the other day. “I don’t want to forget”, she said. Hopefully these photographs serve as a testimony of their existence.

Rafael Guerrero and his wife Luisa Diaz have been playing the lottery every Saturday ever since they got together. Three euros each week, same numbers every time, but no wins in more than fifteen years. This summer, however, Lady Luck finally smiled on them in the most unexpected way, and most importantly, for free.

SLIDESHOW: UNEMPLOYED FAMILY WINS BIG

While watching TV one day this past August, the Guerreros came across news of a contest from the Merchants Association of los Alcazares, a coastal town by the Mar Menor sea in southeastern Spain. The association promised a free week-long vacation at four-star hotels to three Spanish families with under-aged children who could prove that both parents had been unemployed for more than a year. Sadly, or luckily this time, the Guerrero-Diaz family met those requirements.

Rafael, 37, has been unemployed since June 2011, when the pipe coating factory where he had been working for five years closed down. His wife Luisa, 38, a former housekeeper, has been jobless since November 2010. The couple live with their two sons, Adrian, 4, and Rafael, 2, in a two-story home they purchased right before the start of the Spanish housing bubble in Hellin, in the Spanish region of Castilla la Mancha. “Had we waited another year to buy the house we would be far worse these days trying to make the monthly mortgage payments,” says Guerrero as he further explains that as of this month the family will have to get by with only the 800 euros he gets in unemployment benefits because his wife’s ran out in August.

Under those circumstances the thought of a family vacation had not even crossed their minds. The contest from the Los Alcazares Merchants Association sounded too good to be true, but they trusted that it wouldn’t be a hoax. Thus, they decided to try their luck. They gathered the paperwork that proved they had been out of work for over a year and sent it with a letter describing their current situation as well as a photo of the four of them. It was Luisa who got the call saying that they were one of the three chosen families. Rafael was about to enter the supermarket to buy some groceries when his wife phoned with the news. He turned around and went back home to celebrate.

The family was given the chance to go on vacation together for the first time ever, all expenses paid. From September 3rd until September 9th they enjoyed first-class treatment, staying at a four-star hotel suite, dining at some of the best restaurants in town, going for boat rides, getting golf lessons…

As Guerrero says; “It was more than what we could have ever expected. Even if we both were currently employed we would have never been able to afford something like this”.

With Spanish unemployment hitting its highest level this year since the Franco dictatorship ended in the mid-1970s, many Spaniards this summer have not been able to have a vacation, especially from the 1.7 million Spanish households where all members are out of work.

Rafael Guerrero and his family were some of the lucky ones this time. “Who knows. Maybe our luck has finally turned,” Guerrero says as he hopes for better news in the job seeking department.

In the meantime, he and his wife plan to continue playing the lottery every Saturday. Same numbers, same three euros.

There’s one thing I always do upon returning from a work trip. As soon as I leave my camera bag and suitcase on the floor I jump into the shower. I like having the water run down my face for a few minutes. I find it both relaxing and cleansing.

I never think much about how much water I’m using, I just tell myself that I “need” it, that I have a “right” to indulge after a long journey. I play around with the water temperature until I get it to that state where it’s neither too hot, nor too cold. After I finish, I head to the kitchen and make myself some food. That’s the same thing I did two days ago when I returned from Mauritania. But contrary to my habit in theses circumstances, I took a navy shower. I let the water run down my body just long enough to rinse the shampoo and soap off. The whole process took less than two minutes. Ten days in drought-stricken Mauritania photographing people rationing every bit of this precious and scarce resource are responsible for that change of heart.

Finding water and food to feed their families are the two main concerns of the population in Mauritania’s southern Gorgol region. What used to be the breadbasket of the country has, since the 1970′s, been significantly affected by climate change, causing a decrease in agriculture and the intensification of desertification. This has resulted in the exodus of many men from their villages to urban areas or even abroad to find jobs to support their families.

SLIDESHOW: MAURITANIA WAITS FOR RAIN

Women, the elderly and children have been left behind to work their land and care for their livestock. But that’s a very difficult mission when water supplies are running low due to severe rainfall deficit. If it does not rain soon, most crops and animal pasture will be lost and access to food for poorer families will become almost impossible.

I traveled to Mauritania with the Spanish Non-Governmental Organization Accion contra el Hambre, which has been warning about the food crisis since the beginning of the year after poor rainfall in 2011. According to their estimates, a full third of the country’s population, amounting to around a million people, are at risk of suffering from malnutrition if rain doesn’t fall by July.

Most women I encountered said that the situation is getting so bad that they can only feed their children once per day. The water wells in their communities are drying up and their starving animals are dying little by little. Many families are getting by with the emergency food rations given to them by the different NGOs working in their region. Some have already taken their children to nutritional centers to recover from malnutrition. The next few months, those of the rainy season, which lasts from July to September, will be crucial to cope with the current food shortages and future crises.

My short experience in Mauritania has made me put things into perspective. As a photojournalist living and working in Spain I have turned my camera to document the effects of the economic crisis on a country that currently has one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Evictions of home-owners who can’t pay their mortgages, unemployment lines that keep growing every month, closed down businesses, protests on the streets… they are all heart-breaking stories that talk about a people struggling to get their economy back in order. Many families are suffering a great deal, but most of us in Spain believe that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel in the next few years.

It’s very important to remember, though, that there are other places in the world where life is a race for survival, a perpetual crisis, and that they also need help getting back on their feet.