My life partner János, our 6-year-old daughter Laura and I (Erika) have recently experienced an unexpected housing crisis.

I am Erika Ladamérszki, I am 44 years old. I was six when I was placed in state care. When I was eight years old, in 1988, the parents of a family with eventually seven children began to patronize me, and I still keep in touch with them today. I have two adult daughters from my marriage that has ended. With my partner we have been a couple since 2012, and our daughter was born in 2018.

To my not-so-great joy, I have several chronic illnesses: incurable amblyopia, scoliosis, asthma, and a heart desease. These all severely limit possibilities for me to be able to maintain a regular job, but I still strive to maintain an active, mobile life. To illustrate, one time recently I started working as a kitchen assistant; but while busy at work, my asthma attacked anew, and then, for having hidden my health problems, not only did they lay off immediately, but the company considered suing me.

We have lived in our house, divided into several parts, since 1997, in rather poor conditions. Although my financial means have always been extremely limited, I have tried to improve our conditions little by little. I brought up two daughters from my former marriage; both of them have finished trade school: one in environmental studies and water management, the other in social care. With my partner, who always has a job, I worked constantly to disinfect the originally very polluted yard, to clean up the accumulated rubbish, and to maintain and renovate the house. There was no running water or heating because of the debts accumulated by the co-owners, only electricity.

We lived in an undivided common yard for about 25 years. It used to belong to a single family, so there was no need to think about divided parts. The trouble started when the older residents died, and then the heirs didn't deal with the ownership responsibilities. And I was left in a yard that they didn't want to deal with, where there was no running water (I carried water from a public well), gas (I cooked with a gas bottle or in a large pot in the yard), and even the sewage system wasn't solved. I cleaned up a lot of garbage in the yard that the previous owners had left behind. I asked the other owners who no longer lived there several times for help in tidying up the yard, or at least to hand over their ownership rights that were no longer useful to them in exchange for taking over their huge accumulated debts. But I didn't get it from them. They even stole electricity from me while they were living there, and they made me owe 3 million forints on electricity. I am just at the end of this payment. No one cared that my family and I didn't use anywhere near so much electricity. My part of the house is now closed off and without electricity, so that noone will generate extra bills for me again.

Unfortunately, people have moved into the yard who, disregarding my work so far, are making people's lives impossible and want to keep the neighborhood in fear, which they openly express.

I have helped many people and families so far, now I need help, but it seems like many have turned their backs on me. Even though I know myself that they want to buy a house that needs a lot of renovation. Since I have been disappointed so much in the past many years, I am already somewhat bitter.

This spring, one of the co-owners' debts, who long had ceased to live there, led to the foreclosure of her share of the property, and the buying family, as the new co-owners, won a 5% share of the entire property. They immediately moved in and created virtually unlivable conditions, and it became impossible to live at the same property as them. Because of Hungarian law regarding the peculiarities of the ownership of the property, it is legal for them to move in. I had to temporarily take refuge with my life partner and daughter in one of my adult daughters' small rented apartment.

As a solution, we found a house to renovate in a nearby small town, which could be made habitable with the help and cooperation of my daughters, our relatives and friends, and we could solve the problem of its utilities.

Your help could provide a safe and healthy environment in which to raise our daughter. There would be a sense of security, a calm down; I think there would be space for more attention to each other in the family.