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Vancouver — Living in a Downtown Eastside homeless shelter, sharing a room with up to 30 strangers and separated from his wife and four daughters by an hour-plus transit ride — when he could afford a ticket — José Guerra found a silver lining.

“It was really hard,” the 53-year-old said. “I love my wife and children so much, I love to be with them. … For some families, they have a movie night once a week. Our family, we did something together every night.”

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A native of Peru who’d moved to Canada in 2000, Guerra and his family fell on hard times when he was laid off by an oil company in his native country in 2015 after the price of a barrel of oil tanked the year before.

Ineligible for benefits when the family returned to Canada, where Guerra had lived until he took the Peru job in 2012, the family was forced to split up, his wife Silvia and their daughters moving into a women’s shelter in Surrey.

“I wound up in a room with people I don’t know, sometimes 30 people in one room,” Guerra said. “People have addictions, people have mental-health issues. But me, I’m a hard snorer, I don’t know how my wife puts up with it. And people would climb up on my bed and tell me to stop snoring. It was scary sometimes.