The situation of Cape Verdean medical evacuees in Portugal has merited a series of reports in the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias.

Sónia arrived three months ago. She's still not quite sure what she has. It's winter in Europe, but Sónia Dias is wearing flip-flops. That's what she wears on his island, São Vicente, in Cape Verde, and it's the only footwear she had to come to Portugal for treatment. She arrived in Lisbon in the early morning hours of December 3, but the transportation provided by the Cape Verdean Embassy was late, and it was 2:00 in the afternoon by the time she checked into the guesthouse. One hour later, someone remembers that she's probably hungry, and offers her milk in a yoghurt carton. Someone else goes to get her some crackers. They try to console her while she waits to occupy a bed in a room she'll have to share with another patient. There is no natural light or bathroom in the room. They tell her there are cockroaches and rats.

She's 31 years old and has sad, brown eyes on a thin face. She doesn't know what her illness is. They told her there was "a mass in her intestine," which is suspected to be a tumor. And her sadness is only heightened by the complaints from the other patients living in the same house, the Pensão 25 de Abril, on São Paulo Street near the Cais do Sodré dock on the Tagus River. The guesthouse is occupied by patients from Portuguese-speaking African countries who have come to Portugal for treatment by way of a protocol between the government in Lisbon and the governments of their countries of origin. Most of those in this particular guesthouse are Cape Verdeans and São Tomeans.

Sónia left three children, aged 12, 10 and 8, with a neighbor on São Vicente. Her husband long ago moved to Sal, another island in Cape Verde where there is more work, albeit not with the regularity he would like. "Life is hard," she constantly repeats. A brother of hers helped her come to Portugal, but he lived in Porto. She herself had never left Cape Verde, like her five other siblings.

The residents at the guesthouse begin chatting with one another. 38-year-old Maria do Rosário, also Cape Verdean but from the island of Santo Antão, is in Portugal for the second time due to a deformation in her backbone. "One of my shoulders is higher than the other." She finds it funny that she has three children, like Sónia, but three is the minimum average of number of children to which the women in the guesthouse are mothers. Most of them remained in their countries of origin and are minors. Rosário left her children in the care of her mother. She's single, managed to get herself a cleaning job and wants to stay in Portugal.

46-year-old José Andrade, from Cape Verde, left six children behind. He is undergoing dialysis and is waiting for a kidney transplant. He worked in construction and came to Portugal seven months ago, and would like to remain here after finishing his treatment. Sónia did not finish high school and has never had a job. "I work when work comes up," she explains. She also has no savings, a problem the others are all too familiar with. And they express their dissatisfaction with the fact that the Cape Verdean Embassy gives them just 67 euros a month, after transportation passes and medication expenditures are discounted. It comes out to just over two euros a day, and the money does not come at the same time every month. The patients from Guinea Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe don't even receive this tiny quantity.

The Cape Verdean government paid for Sónia's airline ticket and gave her 185 euros to get through the first few days. She used the money to get by until she received the monthly stipend on December 28. But she still had to buy shoes and warm clothing. She received another 129 euros and sent 50 back home to her children. "They need it, they need clothes and food, and I split it with them," she explains. She never imagined she'd end up going two months without receiving anything. The bags of food from the Father Alves Correia Center proved to be invaluable - pasta, rice, sugar, coffee, bread and other foodstuff that the patients living along Lisbon's riverfront are given every 15 days.

"Things are going to get better," promises Eduardo Jorge Silva, the social counselor at the Embassy of Cape Verde. And he justifies that "We support 300 patients, and we've signed a protocol with our country's social security system to help the public employees, which are nearly half of those here. We're trying for the same solution for the needy." He admits to delays in payments, adding that the Embassy was going to pay the next day following the interview with the Diário de Notícias, a Thursday. Sónia received another 71 euros, and will have to buy her pass. No, this time she didn't send any money to her children. "Things are difficult," she explains.

Sónia felt "a pain behind the uterus about a year and a half ago." Doctors on her island detected "a growing tumor." She waited a year between her first consultation and her arrival in Portugal. She arrived on a Wednesday and was seen by a gynecologist at Santa Maria Hospital on Thursday. She was very anxious about her illness, but they told her she would have to wait for analyses and exams. Three months have gone by and Sónia still doesn't know what's wrong with her.

Christmas and New Year's went by without any news, and she spent almost all of her time inside the guest house. She had lunch on December 25th at the home of a cousin, but her most precious memory was when she got dressed up for the Christmas dinner given by Grace Beatriz, a Cape Verdean residing in the Netherlands who created the Danny Foundation, named in homage of a Cape Verdean boy who died of leukemia, to help medical evacuees from her home country. Sónia put on new clothes and even make-up, but the expression on her face didn't change - always one of sadness.

She lives on the fourth floor of the guest house, the one the owners try to hide from the gaze of "visitors." Each guest pays 150 euros for a bed. What little clothing Sónia brought was hard to store, given the tiny space in the closet she was allotted. They have a small television and their meals are cooked in a common kitchen. The smell of the food blends with that of the humidity. The sound of African music wafts through the air.

Sónia has shared her room with various different women. The one before last, 27-year-old Ivonilda Neves, also from São Vicente, "has a heart murmur" and wanted to be operated. She didn't stay at the guest house for very long, and ended up going to live with a brother. And she returned to Cape Verde because the doctors decided she wasn't ready to be operated on yet. She's a seamstress at a factory and had a seven-year-old son waiting for her.

Orlandina Almeida is her most recent roommate, from Santa Catarina, in Cape Verde, where a tumor was discovered in her uterus.