In Leo Sanmartín’s hair salon, where only a chair remains standing in front of a mirror, some nurses who have arrived in Paiporta from Córdoba are removing mud. Their names are Carmen Prieto and Carmen Garrido. Ignacio’s flooded house was emptied completely by some kids from Barcelona and Logroño and from a thousand places that Ignacio no longer remembers. This big man’s voice shakes and he has to force himself not to cry as he reminds them: “They were just kids. So that later they say that youth is lazy, or this or that.” In the Calzados Ribera shoe store there were volunteers from Malaga, Murcia and Galicia. The owner Pedro Ribera and then two volunteers who wash boots and sneakers in a bucket. Diego Fernández, 21, and Álvaro de Tejada, 22, who arrived from El Escorial, among others, were in charge of removing sticky, dense mud with brooms from a horchatería and a tobacconist’s shop. They traveled in a van, they started cleaning, they slept in the van and the next day they continued cleaning. Diego made up his mind after seeing a report on television about a man who drowned trying to save his dog and his brother, who drowned trying to save him. “I thought that was crazy, that I had to go there to lend a hand.” Álvaro has another reason: “I spent the summer at my grandmother’s house here, I came when I was little, so I had to come now.” Next to it there is a very young boy sitting on the floor looking at his cell phone, exhausted and completely covered in mud. He is from San Isidro, a nearby neighborhood of Valencia.
The improvised army of thousands of young people that every morning enters the towns affected by the flood with a broom on their shoulders not only does not subside, but is increasing, and will reach its peak this Saturday. There will surely be more than the The mayors of five affected towns, met on Thursday by this newspaper, agreed in stating that one of the few positive things that the flood has brought is the rapid, useful, unusual and colossal response of the young people who seem to multiply every day and they leave their backs shoveling mud and dirt.
Antonio Casas, a retiree, pulled his granddaughter out of the flood from the back of his house in Paiporta on Tuesday and had to fight to move towards a neighbor’s house because the current was fatally dragging them towards a dead end. where they had drowned. Eight days later, with the house empty and all the furniture turned into a damp pile of rubble piled on the next street, he tells what happened with integrity and clarity. He only gets emotional until he loses track when he remembers the students who appeared unexpectedly the first few days and helped him and, above all, made him feel less alone and isolated in the middle of the ruin.
Fix St. George’s Parish
In the parish of San Jorge de Paiporta, a group of young Christians from Madrid religiously obey Francisco Bravo, the parishioner in charge of maintaining the church. In the last six years, this man painted all the drawings and fretwork that adorn the walls of the parish. Now, at 65 years old, he will start over, ornament by ornament, because the flood has destroyed almost everything. Meanwhile, distribute the platoon of volunteers and a handful of soldiers so that, together, they remove the mud from the kneelers, the benches, the baptismal font and the confessional. They already have a lot of progress. In fact, masses were celebrated again on Wednesday.
There are Belgian nuns removing mud from the floor of the municipal library and police officers from Elda (Alicante) who have asked for days off to travel to Alfafar or Paiporta every day. There is a firefighter from Cádiz who lives in Ireland and asked permission to come help. The police say that the entire Elda police station wanted to come while they change to return home and plan the next day’s trip. Near them are Noel Olivas, 20 years old, Mario Vargas, 38, and Miguel Ruiz, 28. They have come from Madrid and will be sleeping in the van for a week. They are gardeners, they are used to physical work and they arrived in Valencia with a wheelbarrow that in the first days – full of shortages of everything – was in great demand. The first is from Bolivia, the second from Nicaragua and the third from Peru. When asked why they decided to travel, they shrug their shoulders and point to the muddy landscape, the cars piled on top of each other, and the neighbors’ lives turned upside down, implying that the question is out of place. On an open path between two mountains of rubble on a street with slushy mud almost up to the knee, Álvaro, from Zaragoza, a strong and tall young man, passes a destroyed wardrobe to his friend Damián, from Figueras, who deposits it in a corner . They are emptying the house of a woman who looks at them in amazement. “Why do I come?” Álvaro asks himself. “The question is the other way around: how come I didn’t come sooner, I’m damned.” In one of the houses in this area, on Colon Street, Vicente Guijarro says that a few days ago a mother from Valencia showed up with her six children, ages 10 to 18, and had them clean her house, which was completely muddy. from top to bottom. Vicente adds: “But before that mother with her children, others arrived: the first were from Alfará del Patriarca (Valencia), then others from Barcelona and others from Madrid and others from I don’t know where…” Like the others, Vicente was It’s hard to finish the sentence and you end up trying not to cry. His wife, next to him, nods and runs a hand down his back. Oto Sabater, a university student from the province of Valencia, emphasizes something: “We should not be so many, nor so necessary. That we are indicates that something has failed.”
Some volunteers come with plastic waterproof suits, protective glasses, a mask, special gloves and almost knee-high wellies. Others go casually, with sneakers wrapped in plastic and duct tape and shorts. They try to organize themselves so as not to get in the way of workers driving cranes, excavators or trucks. They coordinate well with the battalion of police, firefighters and soldiers who little by little have been invading the streets of the affected towns and who order the passage of each other. It is not unusual to see groups of students sweeping shops and houses shoulder to shoulder with the military. Other times young people form chains to empty parking lots filled to the brim with dense mud that almost looks like grease. They do it in baskets. In a morning they can make hundreds of trips from the parking lot to the river and from the river to that parking lot. Montse Velis, a neighbor, sums up this effort in one sentence: “The response of young people is proportional to the magnitude of the disaster.”
At dusk, when the sun goes down, they prepare to leave. Many take it. Others walk back, with the broom on their shoulders. Some will sleep in cars, vans, tents, friends’ houses or in a municipal sports center. Most will return tomorrow. With each passing day, cities like Paiporta are a little better. Or a little less bad. Not just for them. But also for them. Every day that passes there are more balconies with sheets hung by neighbors with a clearly visible painted word: “Thank you.”
