It was after a divorce in the 80s that Kerstin Ulfsberg moved from a villa in central Södertälje to a tenement in the socio-economically vulnerable district of Ronna. She helped start Stockholm County’s first “immigrant preschool” for newly arrived children from wartime Lebanon.
– That’s what it was called, she says.
SVT News in Ronna
Here, young people are queuing up to become leaders: “Can help me in the future”
Come along when the police play ping-pong in Ronna
And despite the fact that neither the children nor the parents knew Swedish, nothing prevented them from becoming friends.
– I have no children of my own, so I used to say that all the children in Ronna were mine.
“My Eddie is no more”
A stone’s throw away from Ronna’s center, Kerstin sits at the kitchen table and flips through her photo album from her time as a kindergarten teacher. She falls silent when a group picture appears.
– And here in my lap, here is Eddie. My little Eddie.
– But Eddie no longer exists. It was like my own child had passed away, says Kerstin.
Eddie Moussa and his older brother were shot dead at the gambling club Oasen in Ronna. The event that occurred in 2010 shook Södertälje for a long time. Not least Kerstin, who then also managed to become close friends with the boys’ mother, whom she met regularly at the allotments.
And Eddie would not be the only kindergartner Kerstin lost to gang violence.
SVT has followed Kerstin for several months and got to share a story that few people know about. In the report above, she says that after every shooting in Ronna, she intended to move but regretted it. About the love between the neighbors – and about bottomless grief every time one of “her” children is murdered.