Gen Z is moving to help disaster victims: “They were great”

Apathetic, glued to their cell phones to surf social networks, fragile? In Valencia, young people from generation “Z”, born after 2000, challenged these prejudices by participating massively in clean-up and support operations after the devastating floods.

“Hundreds came, maybe thousands, and they were wonderful,” Noelia Sáez, a 48-year-old resident of Catarroja, near Valencia, told AFP on Wednesday.

Since the disaster, which left at least 219 dead and 89 missing, young volunteers have been on the front line to help the victims, taking the roads leading to the disaster areas every day, boots on their feet, tools in hand or shopping bags on the back.

“The older people will always say that people who are not of their generation are worse, but now that they have given us our chance – which I would have preferred not to have, because the situation is difficult – we, the young , we responded well,” said Angela Noblejas to AFP. This 19-year-old industrial engineering student spent all of Tuesday morning helping out in Algemesí, about forty minutes away from Valencia.

He and his friends brought “mainly cleaning products. Waterproof boots, since there are no more, protections, because there is a lot of mud”, she summarizes: “It’s very dirty, and it’s already a little harmful for health”.

Quite quickly, in a context marked by criticism of the slowness of relief, volunteers, shovels and brooms in hand, organized themselves via social networks to help the victims, and clean houses and streets in the affected communities. Among them, many young people.

Angela Noblejas remembers growing up listening to her grandfather tell stories about “the Riada,” the name given to Valencia by the flooding of the Turia River that left dozens dead in 1957. And it is she who today Today she is storing up experiences that she can in turn tell to her children and grandchildren.

“We care about society,” adds her friend Gisela Huguet, 19, a computer science and mathematics student, rejecting the idea that members of her generation are “always on their cell phones, on social networks, on new technologies”.

José Antonio López-Guitián, a 61-year-old Valencian actor better known as Tonino, also returned from an affected town, Massanassa, where he helped clean up the mud, which still covers his blue overalls and his boots. rain. In his eyes, young people are indeed “soft”, as many older people think, but they owe it to “times which are perhaps not so hard”. “They are people of their time, with their cell phones, and they don’t need to be like those of the past, everyone belongs to a different era,” he adds.

In Sedavi, where her house was ravaged by floods, Teresa Gisbert, 62, said: “They bring us food, they helped us.” For the sixty-year-old, these young people “are angels”.