“They are angels”: young people on the front line to help disaster victims in Spain

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 ones 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, young people, 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 in normal times — perhaps three times more in current conditions.

With her friends, they brought “mainly cleaning products. Waterproof boots, since there are no more, protections, because there is a lot of mud”, she summarizes: “C “It’s very dirty, and it’s already a bit harmful to your health.”

On Tuesday, Angela Noblejas and her friends participated in clean-up and relief efforts for the fourth day in a row. A commitment that began on Saturday, four days after the disaster.

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.

– “We care about society” –

Angela Noblejas remembers growing up listening to her grandfather tell stories about “the Riada”, the name given in Valencia to the flooding of the Turia River that left dozens dead in 1957.

And it is she who today stores experiences that she will be able to tell in turn to her children and grandchildren: “I think that the fact of having gone there, of having been in the mud, of “having helped is still better than having to tell them ‘no, I stayed at home and I didn’t do anything'”.

“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.

Everyone knows people, often their age, who suffered from the disaster, which can also explain their mobilization, says the young woman: the victims and those affected are “people from our city, people like us, comrades of university.”

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 this to a “time which is 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. “I think, above all, that what young people do not have the opportunity to do is to do something meaningful”, and for a few days, they have “a real objective, which is above all to help”.

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”.

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