You might have heard about people getting stuck in airports due to visa issues or other
matters relating to bureaucracy, but what about someone who just lives there, like,
chooses to live there?
The man we’re going to talk about today it seems has made an airport his home, but
that isn’t because he can’t leave.
His name is Denis Luiz de Souza.
He’s Brazilian and his address is somewhere in Terminal Two, Sao Paulo-Guarulhos International
Airport, Brazil.
He moved there in the year 2000 and from what we can see he’s still there now.
But how can this happen?
How does he get by?
How come he’s allowed to stay?
Let’s have a look.
Denis is now in his mid-thirties and from interviews he’s given, it seems he arrived
at the airport as a young man who was having problems at home.
We’re assuming he intended for it to be a short term solution and had no idea that
he would end up making the airport his home for two whole decades.
Denis’s main living space is terminal two.
It’s there that he beds down for the night after the last international flight has taken
off and the terminal is quiet.
His bed is three seats in a waiting area, though he does at least have a blanket and
a pillow.
You might think that he’d be thrown out the moment staff realized that he’s not
there because of a delayed flight or a ticket mixup.
Quite to the contrary, he actually receives help from the airport staff.
They give him food, wash his clothes, and allow him to leave what few belongings he
has in certain places.
One waitress who works in the airport regularly gives him lunch boxes.
She said he’s a nice guy, funny, and he’s always honest.
When he wakes up in the morning, he might get some rice and beans and one article said
he even gets a free latte from McDonalds.
Well done Ronald and crew.
But why show such kindness to this airplane terminal resident?
Well beside the fact that he is a human being deserving of dignity just like every person
is, some reports we found said Denis may have some issues with his mental well being.
But these issues don’t stop him from getting along with the airport staff.
Brazilian news media wrote that Denis knows just about everyone there, from the baggage
handlers to the security.
An article in the Brazilian version of the Spanish newspaper El Pais, which we translated
to English stated that: “It's hard to understand what's going on
in Denis's mind.
His sentences are short, incomplete; he does not distinguish the difference between a month
and a week and does not know how to tell the time if not on a digital clock.”
The article went on to say that Denis can’t read, but he likes to walk with a newspaper
tucked under his arm.
It added that while he lives in the airport, he can’t talk about international destinations.
So, he may have some difficulties with learning or memory, and sadly it seems he has no other
place to go.
A person who works in the airport had this to say about him, “Denis needs psychological
or psychiatric treatment, he lives in his world, but needs a diagnosis, and someone
to take care of him.”
The person said Denis has no idea that he has lived in the airport for almost twenty
years, and that he has completely lost track of time.
One of the major struggles for Denis, and for anyone who has had to spend an extended
time in an airport, is personal hygiene.
He might get a few hygiene products from the pharmacy that have been bought for him by
the kind airport employees, but apparently he only manages to get a really good clean
on Saturdays.
But kindness knows no bounds.
Listen to what another airport staff member said about Denis and his only friends, “Every
Christmas, a commander pays a hotel to have him sleep in a bed and take a proper shower.”
Apparently, Denis doesn’t mind leaving the airport then, and will come back after his
night in a hotel and talk about all the great food he got through room service.
Some of the airport staff are reluctant to try and persuade Denis to try and move out
because they fear he has nowhere to go.
The streets will eat him up.
He might have fallen through the cracks, but the airport has served as a kind of safety
net.
Denis knows the rules: Don’t annoy people and never ask for anything, and those rules
he follows.
Another article about Denis stated that someone at the airport said there were actually five
people in total who lived there without any intention of ever boarding a plane.
It was somewhere they could be almost comfortably homeless.
In 2019, it was reported that people in the homeless population of San Francisco had taken
to going to San Francisco International Airport in large numbers, seeing it as a safe place
to rest and get out of the elements, and that it has only been increasing as the homelessness
crisis in California has gotten worse.
Though in San Francisco It seems officials have been trying to find ways to get these
people to shelters and we doubt anyone would be able to make the airport their home for
years on end, like Denis.
It’s happened in other airports in the U.S. too over the years, but authorities have taken
a hardline against what it calls “violators.”
One homeless person in the U.S. was quoted in The Guardian saying, “Sleeping at the
airport was peaceful, quiet and heartwarming.
You didn’t have to worry about people stealing your stuff or robbing you.”
You might have heard about another famous case of a person living a long time in an
airport, almost as long as Denis has been staying at his terminal.
A man named Mehran Karimi Nasseri was the inspiration for the movie, “The Terminal”
and lived in terminal one of Charles de Gaulle Airport in France from 1988 to 2006.
There’s a bit of controversy surrounding his case though.
It was first reported that he was expelled from Iran but subsequent reports state that
this might have not been the case.
We know he was on his way to the UK, but it’s said he lost his briefcase and his papers
on the way, so he got stuck in France.
He did get to British immigration, but since he had no passport he got sent back.
He was stuck.
So, what did he do?
Well, like Denis he made the best out of a bad situation.
The French police actually arrested him, but the thing was, he hadn’t really done anything
illegal.
It was legal for him to have entered the airport.
He just had no way out of there.
Mehran certainly had a lot of downtime and he read a lot during his years at the airport.
Like Denis, airport staff did their best to look after him and one manager of a bar at
the airport had this to say about him: “He’s like a part of the airport.
Everyone knows him.”
Another airport employee said, “He’s one of us.
We even get letters for him.”
He followed a routine, which meant getting up at 5.30 every morning.
He would shave in the restroom and wash, and then get out his books and read all day.
At night when the stores were closed he would wash again and brush his teeth, which he did
with the help of complementary airline kits.
He’d also wash his clothes at night and then let them dry.
He actually had a fair amount of clothes since he had been travelling when he began his airport
life, and so unlike Denis he didn’t need to rely on as many handouts.
Someone once offered him some new clothes but he turned them down saying he was not
a beggar.
He did accept food, though, because he had no choice.
Eventually he became ill and was forced to leave the airport.
He ended up at a shelter in Paris and from there wrote a book called, “The Terminal
Man.”
Then there’s the strange case of a Japanese man named Hiroshi Nohara.
His story is different from the others, because he wasn’t homeless or mentally ill and he
had all his documents in order.
One day, he simply chose not to leave the airport and gave no reason why he made that
choice.
Hiroshi arrived at Mexico City's Benito Juarez International Airport in 2008 and he would
end up living there for almost four months, despite having a return ticket home to Japan.
Like the others, he managed to survive in part thanks to a lot of help.
Fast food chains helped him out by giving him free food, but some of them started branding
shirts, caps, and mugs with Hiroshi’s face on them because he had become a bit of a celeb,
so it seems they may have viewed it more as a marketing opportunity than a charitable
one..
Hiroshi looked a bit disheveled with his scraggly beard, but that only added to his mystique.
Journalists visited him and he always refused to say why he wouldn’t go home or leave
the airport.
One day a woman named Oyuki turned up at the airport and he left with her.
Staff said that he didn’t even say goodbye, he just vanished, and we may never know why
Hiroshi did what he did.
In China, a man named Wei Jianguo has been in Beijing Capital International Airport for
over a decade.
He said he was sick of his home life and the rules he faced there.
In one interview he said his wife didn’t allow him to drink, and at the airport he
can drink as much as he wants and eat what he wants.
He actually said, “I can go back anytime I want.
But I won’t be allowed to drink.”
The China Daily newspaper describing his day said that he wakes up and has breakfast, then
with his lunch he starts on a Chinese white spirit called “baijiu”.
He proceeds to drink with abandon and does this routine daily.
The cops sometimes throw him out, but he always manages to get back in.
“My family told me if I wanted to stay, I had to quit smoking and drinking.
If I couldn't do that, I had to give them all my monthly government allowance of 1,000
yuan (about $150).
But then how would I buy my cigarettes and alcohol?”
Indeed Wei, what was she thinking.
A Chinese worker at the airport said there were others who had made the place their home,
and much like the people who are homeless in other countries, many have mental health
issues.
The China Daily actually found one of the airport dwellers and he told them he had no
recollection of his life before he started living in the airport.
Security workers said as long as they don’t cause any trouble and keep their heads down
then they won’t report them.
It’s not always the homeless who are forced to live in airports though.
In fact, the world’s most famous whistleblower had to spend quite a bit of time in an airport.
Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor who leaked numerous documents detailing the way the US
government was surveilling people with help from telecommunications companies spent 39
days living in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport while waiting on an asylum request.
He was stuck in the arrival’s transit area but he did at least get a room there.
It’s reported that for a few hours in the day he could look around for food and there
was a sink where he could wash himself and his clothes.
You must now be thinking “ could this ever happen to me?”: After all, you’re not
on the run from a US intelligence agency and unlike the tight-lipped Japanese man, it’s
unlikely you’ll do anything crazy on a whim because you are just not like that.
But…but what if you just got a bit unlucky?
This happened to a 52-year old British man named Gary Peter Austin who’d been in the
Philippines on vacation.
He was on his way back to the UK but he missed his flight.
He didn’t have enough cash to buy another flight, and thus he became stranded at Ninoy
Aquino International Airport in Manila.
The guy really didn’t know what to do, and since he was out of cash things went from
bad to worse.
But again it was the kindness of airport staff that saved the day, a fact he has in common
with many of the other people in this same situation that’s really helping to restore
our faith in humanity.
During his stay at the departure lounge, airport workers fed him and even passed a hat around
to collect money for him.
One of the airport workers said this about Gary in an interview with the Global Nation,
“He slept on the gang chairs with his red luggage.
He used the bathroom and changed clothes and he kept himself neat.”
They didn’t report him, but as time went by they thought it a bit strange that he couldn’t
get out of there.
Didn’t he have family to help him?
He even had to spend Christmas and the new year at the airport.
It seems someone eventually helped him out with money and he got home after 22 days.
It seems like this really could happen to anyone.
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