At the entrance to the Safranar building where those affected by the Campanar fire are being relocated, someone has hung a children’s drawing that reads “Much courage.” It welcomes the families, around ten so far, who already occupy the property owned by the Valencia City Council. On Monday night, 21 adults and 11 children arrived and throughout this week the rest of those affected will access the homes.
Ani Pérez and her son, Mauri Morales, are waiting for the call from the council so that the former, with whom her son lived intermittently in the Campanar apartment, can settle in. “These are days of many errands, but we are very grateful,” explains Ani, a Colombian with Spanish nationality who the Colombian consul called on the first day to help her with “everything she needed. She was very cute.” She talks to journalists at the doors of the Safranar building while dozens of workers enter and leave.
The truck carrying new mattresses maneuvers onto the sidewalk while Red Cross volunteers, municipal officials, and SAUS psychologists enter and exit. Meanwhile, Mauri says that he found out about the fire through a call from a relative and that he stood in front of the roundabout – next to the dealership – without being able to believe that those flames came from his house, where he had been renting for some time. one of each.
“We went with what we were wearing. In one hour, 25 years of photos have been burned. Everything has gone to waste,” she explains calmly and calmly, admirable after what she has experienced. Her partner watches them from nearby. It was she who called him last Thursday to reassure him by telling him that she was already with her mother on the street, while the building was burning. “A while ago I brought them a lifetime’s worth of family albums from Colombia… and there they stayed. There is nothing,” recalls the woman, who is hosting mother and son in her house these days, worried about how they are going to manage what they have experienced.
Normalizing the abnormal, because of how different its reality was a week ago, is the message that the volunteers insist on conveying. They talk to them and accompany them, as did on Monday afternoon some victims of the fires of the Grenfell buildings, in 2017 in London, and the Torre dei Moro in Milan, in 2021, who also came through their new neighborhood to give them support. It is what they need most, according to the psychologists from the NGO V de Valientes, who arrive overwhelmed and hoarse on the fourth day after the tragedy. Overwhelmed and satisfied because “the flood of solidarity is reaching the families in boxes,” they manage the many donations that have been made for the affected families, now on an individualized basis.
“Now we are working on the new buildings and we continue trying to add all the solidarity,” explains Amalia Correcher, director of Valientes. In the building premises yesterday the workers organized the boxes with duvets, sheets, towels and even toys wrapped in gift paper for the children who will live in the buildings after the fire.
They explain that their primary needs are covered, but “the outlook is bleak, they need to be accompanied and listened to and disconnect,” adds Cristina Hernández, also director and psychologist at Valientes. “Being brave is returning to normality, making the neighborhood feel that everything has to happen little by little; respecting the grieving process of each person and making the neighborhood work again,” she reflects.
At the end of the morning, Mauri and Ani go up to see the two- and three-bedroom apartments, accompanied by municipal technicians. “It’s much more than we were expecting,” they say when they get off. Still excited, they say they are “very grateful.”
