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| | Voices - Nathan's Diary
A unique view of Alvaston from one of its newest arrivals, 18-year-old Nathan Buckley. | | | | | | |
It's Monday, my name is Nathan Buckley and I'm a resident at the YMCA here in Alvaston. Let me tell you how I came to be here.
I was living in Littleover in a nicely bedroomed house and my mother had another opportunity to remarry after splitting up with my father and she moved to Saudi Arabia.
 | | Nathan poses |
My father died of cancer leaving me with no family in England and the only place I could go was the YMCA.
The days are quite empty because a lot of people are quite young so they're at courses. At night, you get a lot of sociable activites going on downstairs, playing games, snooker and watching videos.
You can get the odd bad point, for instance there are some residents at the YMCA it's best to stay away from. The police arrive often and wake us up in the early hours of the morning just to get one person who's usually not there!
Often the fire alarms go off because of some drunken person. It's hard to get a good hour's sleep going without being disturbed!
 Listen to Nathan tell us more about his life at the YMCA
I've got a lot of stuff in my room that's valuable to me and sometimes I feel it's not very safe. At the weekend I had my room broken into so I had to pay £10 for a new lock which really did upset me.
It's a horrible experience but you learn but you learn a lot of things and most people mature quicker but there is the odd one who will still be very immature. You'll get people coming down from time to time calling us 'Scuts' and saying 'get a job'.
We've had a member of staff held up at knife-point before - it's quite upsetting when people end up like that.
It's now Friday and I'm in my room imagining that I've got my computer back. - and there's a story to why I don't have my computer anymore.
Housing Options put me in a B&B in a difficult street. I shared a room with a man who had just come out of jail and I never slept for two weeks because I was very frightened of him.
Then by chance I ran downstairs to see my friend who had come to see me. When I went back upstairs, my computer, my laptop and cash out of my wallet had been stolen leaving me with absolutely nothing.
Since my ambitions are in computing, it's left me quite rusty because I haven't been able to work on my computer and do my own thing and I don't have the money to build a new one.
Now I have first-hand experience of what it's like to be homeless and unemployed and it really is quite difficult to get out of a situation like this.
Nathan Buckley
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