María Belón is the woman who inspired the story of the film The Impossible, about the tsunami that devastated several Indian countries in December 2004, such as Thailand, where she spent Christmas with her husband and three children. That natural disaster was an epiphany for her, who since then has dedicated herself to countless social causes and to giving talks to prisoners, battered women, the elderly, schoolchildren…
Last Wednesday he was in the Ocaña prison, in Toledo. One of the inmates who attended his lecture was continually leafing through a little book. It was the Russian Sergei, who had a Russian-Spanish dictionary at hand so he could understand all of his words. Do you know which one I liked the most? Solidarity, which in my language sounds very similar (solidarnost). When I get out of here I would like to dedicate myself to that, to solidarity tasks”.
Doctor and MBA from Esade, María has trained as a humanist psychotherapist and is now dedicated to charitable causes full time. Another prisoner from Ocaña moved this “doctor of the soul.” She asked her name, like everyone else. His face lit up because she did not feel like a number, a file: “Daniel, just like the boy you picked up and helped in Thailand” (as explained in her memories and in the film).
María and her family collaborate with so many NGOs and altruistic entities that they have already lost count. “What difference does it make if there are 40 or 400?” she asks, who now has two dates of birth: the one from 1965, the one that appears on her ID card, and the one from December 26, 2004, the one from the tsunami, “when I was born again: although I already have gray hair, I just turned 18 years old. I don’t know how many more I’ll live or why I’m here, but I do know what I want to live for”.
He has answered that question (“what do I want to live for?”) in countless audiences. Small, like that room in the Ocaña prison. Big, like in front of nearly 1,300 spectators at the Aribau cinemas, at a recent event in Barcelona as a result of the tenth anniversary of the premiere of The Impossible. Or before very, very large audiences, like the 15,000 schoolchildren who listened to it online thanks to the digital platform of the Audi Creativity Challenge foundation.
You have to live to love, explains María. We must focus on what really matters (another of the foundations with which she collaborated in the past is called precisely that: What really matters). “You have to love and help those around you, give them a hand. Touch their hearts, wake them up. If you succeed, I guarantee you that you will be immensely rich, owner of a wealth that cannot be obtained even with all the gold in the world.
“To be light in the dark.” That is another objective. He has collaborated with an endless number of NGOs (Doctors Without Borders, Open Arms and numerous entities linked to rescue teams, rescue teams, the Army and different national and regional security forces). There are so many that María Belón is finally considering promoting her own foundation to help people with mental health problems, especially the youngest.
The idea he is thinking about will not seek prominence or bear his name (About Living, written like this, separately, is currently the most powerful option). The project is just a seed in search of accomplices and financing. “We are all survivors of our particular tsunamis,” says María. And we all need something to hold on to when the current drags us: Sobre Vivir pretends to be that branch next to the shore.
“Giving yourself to others is a way of being selfishly happy,” he explains. Public health is saturated at a particularly delicate moment for the mental health of young people, who are suffering from “an epidemic that is devastating them.” The future foundation does not intend to replace health professionals, but it does offer advice and help to patients who go to the public network and who can wait months to get an appointment.
“We live too fast and sometimes we run so fast that we leave our soul behind. You have to know how to live in a rhythmic way ”. Daniel, Ocaña’s prisoner, asked him what advice he could give him so he wouldn’t give up, so he could find the path he was looking for. And she replied: “The fact that you ask me such a profound question, that you know that you have hit rock bottom, implies that you already have the answer yourself.”
