During this weekend a group of volunteers from Maristas Mediterránea went to Valencia to help with the effects left by the DANA
How to write, in six or seven paragraphs, what has been happening in Valencia since the last days of October? Being direct and knowing that if you are going to continue reading this article it is because you want to know a direct testimony and not just what we have been receiving day after day in RRSS, which in some cases you no longer know if the message is more or less faithful to reality or has more intentions.
We can use all the adjectives we can think of that are synonymous with ‘terrible’, but if there is one idea that must be conveyed, it is that beyond the 15×7 centimetre screens that we have in our hands almost all day long, there is an environment that cannot be seen through them. Mud, destruction and despair do not fit on our mobiles. They can neither be smelled nor stepped on.
The testimony you are reading is from Algemesí, a municipality with more than 25,000 inhabitants, all of whom, without exception, have been affected by the DANA. Directly or through relatives, through their homes, their vehicles or their jobs. And like Algemesí, up to a total of 75 municipalities in which the situation is identical.
And what have we found ten days after the flooding? Streets that are still muddy and where you can’t tell the pavement from the road. Furniture on the doorsteps of houses that are still being washed away. Shops that you wonder whether they will be able to reopen or not and that are absolutely necessary for life, such as pharmacies or grocery shops. You encounter strong smells and slippery footsteps. You find people who have been sleeping in the municipal pavilion for days and spending the rest of the day, from dawn to dusk, cleaning their houses and those of their neighbours.
And what else do you find? Solidarity, gratitude. Volunteers come to help and to give of themselves, but they also carry in their hearts the illusion and hope of those who today only have each other, whose priorities and plans in life have changed in the blink of an eye. And you find yourself in the most absurd paradox of a volunteer: you go to bring illusion and hope and you return home more comforted than you have been able to give.
They do ask one very important thing of us: that we do not forget them. Life, today, changes very fast on the screens we mentioned at the beginning. What is fashionable today is no longer so next week. Valencia will take months to begin to recover normality. Not all of it, but to begin to recover it. And the Valencians will also have to get on with their lives, their work, their studies (oh, how the kids are eager to go back to school now that they can’t. How different from when they could go to school all the time, when they could go to school all the time). How different from when they could go every day). And volunteers will continue to be necessary.
So, if you have read this far, THANK YOU: THANK YOU and stay with this last message: LET’S NOT FORGET THEM, winter is coming, Christmas is coming… let’s not forget them and let’s continue to show solidarity in any way we can.
I don’t want to finish without mentioning the DANA Valencia Emergency Aid Centralisation team (Provincial Solidarity Team of Maristas Mediterránea) for the service they are providing. Ignacio, José Antonio, Brothers Chano and Javier Grajera and the rest of the team, I can’t name them all, but they were there all day long with the best of smiles. Of course, it is true that the measure of love is to love without measure, given all that they have done so far.
Pablo José García Guerrero – Volunteer in the DANA with Maristas Mediterránea – Maristas Murcia
(*) Source of cover and slogan images: RRSS Maristas Mediterránea