Always on point, always committed, always willing to lend a hand to whoever needs it, for seventy years now.
The Cau Roland Philipps from the Barcelona neighborhood of Vila de Gràcia celebrates these days seven decades of history and life, 70 years giving the chopping block uninterruptedly, seventy years thinking about the other, the neighbor, the neighbor, the same, the the different, in how to lend a hand. It is very probably the most veteran group of this type currently active in all of Catalonia and Spain.
“Yes, well,” recall some of its former members, now well grown, today trying to convince their children to sign up for the happy Cau, “the idea was always that no day ended without having helped someone.”
“No, you didn’t have to save anyone’s life or anything like that. Small everyday actions had a lot of value.” “What it was about was putting others first. If you saw an elderly person carrying a heavy shopping bag, then you would help them, you would take the bag home, even if you were in a hurry”. “It was about incorporating good deeds into your everyday life.”
These days all those kids who somehow grew older on those excursions look in the trunks of memories that are most at hand for any document that reflects this long evolution. Photographs, badges, scarves…
The constitution of a sort of historical archive is truly a responsibility that goes beyond the Cau itself in question. Thanks to new technologies and the digitization of memories, things are changing, but generally it is recent history, the closest past and even the closest past, that of the neighborhood in which we live, that of the street that we have on the other side of our window, the one in our neighborhood, the most reviled and neglected, the one who tends to get lost in warehouses and storage rooms and closets more easily.
And the truth is that then, not so long ago, people did not take as many pictures and with as much ease as they do today. Back then everything was still very analog, tangible, graspable…
“Look, being an escort is something that marks your soul, it’s something very intense -says Isaac Segovia, Cap d’Agrupament-. Being in a cau is learning a lot of things, because the cau teaches you to be brave when you are a small child, to be a good partner when others need your help, to share and collaborate. They are things that then accompany you for the rest of your life.”
Perhaps that is why parents today find it so difficult to convince the kids to agree to spend fifteen days in the mountains, fifteen days without having any plug to recharge the battery of the mobile, tablet or device in question. to be.
“Let’s see, that later the kids get used to it right away -the former members resume, now between smiles-, as if they had never had a telephone. The most difficult thing is for them to get used to the idea that they are going to spend two weeks without the damn cell phone, but then, once on the mountain…”. “It takes a lot to convince them!” “And then, as soon as they come back, they take it again as usual, but at least they disconnected for fifteen days.”
“Yes, then, once they are there, in the mountains, in nature, and completely disconnected, the problem is the parents, that is, ourselves, why are we going to fool ourselves… For many, the idea They don’t like the fact that their son is going to be without a phone for a couple of weeks, in the mountains, because they want to know, intervene, control… they are the helicopter parents, who are always hovering!”.
“That is the other great challenge of our Cau, actually of all the causes of the country: that the kids can maintain a certain independence with respect to the world of adults! These are all supposed to be activities for children and young people made and run by children and young people.”
“And when they have a bad time, because when you spend fifteen days in the field, problems and difficulties always end up arising, because the kid has to manage, he has to learn to get ahead. “No, there you can’t wait for the elders to come and take your chestnuts out of the fire or anything like that.” “This is how you actually teach responsibility, autonomy, independence, solidarity…among other things.” “What happens is that in these times many times parents are unable to accept that our son can have a hard time, that he has to face a difficulty, that he is not happy all the time and having a good time.” “If, in a way, the cau is not only a school for children, it is also for their parents.”
