Hi, my name is Ana Marija, but people sometimes call me just one or the other by the feeling. You can do the same, what feels better to you.

I recently arrived to Portugal with my partner and our 15-month-old daughter upon a promise for a job that we applied for when we were back in Sweden (his birth country). I was also in my 9th month of pregnancy with our second daughter.

We are street musicians and we have lived like this for many years. But since I gave birth to our first daughter we are trying to find a place to settle a little bit until she is bigger or for good.

We came to Portugal 10 days ago so that he can start working a "normal" job and move away from playing music on the street. We applied for it back in Sweden, but when we were there they told him that he needs to be here in person.

sqSo we just decided to do it, because we thought that life in Portugal might be a bit better than in Sweden for our daughters (climate, vicinity of the beaches and the ocean and so on). Since I was too advanced in the night month we could not fly anymore, needless to say,

So we started travelling day by day covering as much of the journey as possible every day. Our plan was to play in each bigger city and thus collect for the ticket for the trains, but that turned out to be a wild dream weirdly enough.

We did not get not enough money not even for food in some places and some places were just simply too big for our small street performance. We just blended in with the crowd and stayed invisible.

But there was no way back because I was about to give birth in about 2 weeks and we needed to cover 3000 kilometres. So we just kept ongoing. We had to jump the trains and use regional local trains rather than the fast ones in case they would catch us so that we can just jump off the next stop.

We traveled more by day then by night and somehow miraculously we made it all the way to Portugal Lisbon covering 3000 kilometres in 7 days without almost a penny and only three fines that we gave ourselves a promise to pay as soon as we settle down. But alas.

Things went upside down once we reached here. The recruter that was in touch with him initially for the job bailed on him and never got in touch again.

The job offer that we had, failed and we did not really have a place to stay and Lisbon turned out to be much bigger and much more expensive than we thought.

We had to play almost the whole day just to have a room that day so that we don't sleep outside. We had to put all our energies in just playing for accommodation and food that we never really got a chance to contact the recruiter again and time passed... so now it was already 14th of July and we still didn't get that job and I was about to give birth now any second.

So what we did is we called upon something that we read online about Portugal, that it is very friendly and welcoming towards newcomers, refugees, immigrants, and tourist who get lost and/or would like to stay there and settle down. The webpage that we found said that even though you are a tourist and need to give birth by surprise they will welcome you, offer support and even accommodation in case you need one... but alas... that turned out to be completely the opposite.

All the organisations whose doors we knocked at (including the church organisations and catholic organisations) told us that they cannot do anything for us whatsoever.

The day we went to the last organisation I started having contractions. They said "we can help you search for the job". We asked: "ok do you have a computer that we can use?" (Because he needed to do the English test for one of the jobs), they said "no"...

So we picked up our things and we went straight to the hospital.

I will skip the hospital part for a second and just skip to the current situation.

We are being faced with child protection services and social service of the hospital. They are all over us and we are being threatened to have the kids taken away from us because we are poor. We are not poor, I don't see us as poor in that sence, because we can still play play music on the street, but in their eyes.

They started asking all sorts of questions including the past, where we have been and what we have been doing, many many uncomfortable questions and now they apparently have the right if they see fit to take our kids away.

They want to know how we will support ourselves, where we are going to stay with the baby, they made us sign some kind of papers we don't even know what they are, but they say it's just consent to visit the room that we rented for after I come out of the hospital...

They want to have access to all our medical records, our account and much more. The problem is that we don't really have a lot of funds on our account and we are afraid that they are gonna check it. And we have around 160 euros left.

So now we are afraid what will happen once I get out. And we cannot really leave the country, because Naari doesn't have a passport and the process of getting one is at least a month.

So we need to prove on Monday that we can support ourselves for a month until we can leave. Which in Lisbon is about 2000 euro.

We don't really know what to do, we have already asked all the friends and family that we had, even the people that we know very little, and mostly were refused (we did get.some 500 euro, but we are paying accommodation 50 euro per day and we also needed to get a crib because that's the EU law to have a baby in hotel/airbnb and the carrier, because that's the law to get her out of the hospital, so that took a toll..

I even posted a video on Tik Tok with our Revolut account but the video reached 700 people and not a cent came in.

So here I am... trying yet another thing that a beautiful soul who doesn't have much but still sent in 20 pounds suggested...

I am kindly asking for help all the people who feel compassionate enough to simpatize with our situation. If 1000 people donated 1 euro we would be in a safe haven. 1000 people is not a lot, we are 8 billion .

Thank you to all those who reached this point, I am endlessly grateful for everything you can donate and help with, even sharing this post will help .

We will use the funds to pay for our accommodation for a month until the passport is ready, food and some basic necessities for the newborn, possible even the ticket and the passport costs.

God bless you all, ❤️