When one set foot there hours after the flood, Paiporta was an open-air funeral home. So, the horizon was to be able to deliver food, rescue those trapped, lift the corpses and search for the missing. We thought the task would take a few hours and it took days. The next day, it seemed that things would be settled by removing the mountains of cars, clearing the streets and reestablishing a minimum social order. It would take weeks. The following Thursday, the challenge was to remove the mush that formed the belongings of its inhabitants from the houses, to wall up the doors of the living and the dead. It would take a month. Later, one realized that there was no elevator or portal in the buildings, nor did the water pump or meters work and that there was no one to fix them. It will take months to rebuild them. Now, when a month has passed since the flood, the broken lives of the people below appear, their battered economies, stark hunger and misery, the mathematical lack of hope. It will be years before it is recovered, if those who were already up to their necks in water before the mud arrived can be managed to refloat. Seeing them it seems that, the more it is fixed, the further away the end seems, the more impossible, the more unreal, and the dreams dissolve in an infinite mud that reduces the future to something improbable: “We don’t have enough to live on. We don’t have to pay for the apartment. I don’t know what’s going to happen to my family. I can’t take it anymore.”Related news standard No Valencia Elisabet, Francisco and José Javier are still missing a month after DANA: “We are still searching” David Maroto standard No Those affected by DANA may receive up to 10,000 euros to buy a new car Juan Roig ValorHer name is Marga, she is 80 years old and lives in Paiporta in a rented high-rise apartment in front of the Casino and the ravine that a month ago claimed 50 lives in that town alone. In the videos that she herself recorded that night, Marga cries at the height of the tsunami and stammers that she has lost her car. He almost lost Paco, his 68-year-old partner, who was guarding a garage. He left the premises at seven twenty after trying to protect it from the entry of water. “A car that was carrying the current pushed me, I held on to it, it ran over me and I went 250 meters down the street fighting against the water until I said to myself: ‘Paco, this is over.'” Then, he tiptoed into a pool and was saved by two young men who at first glance mistook him for a doll. Although it may seem like it now, the Huerta Sur was not Haiti. We are in one of the industrial hubs of one of the richest regions in Spain. There are three polygons here. Among those who live there there is everything except great fortunes. The average gross income is 25,000 euros, average in the table for Spanish municipalities, but it is not like living in Silicon Valley either. On its website, a real estate agency recommends Paiporta as “the best place to live if you don’t have an education” and justifies the ‘claim’ in that employability rates are – were – very high in hospitality, transport and construction. Of all those jobs, Paco had not found a stable one and he guarded that garage for hours “without a contract” for between 400 and 500 euros of salary in B, depending on the months. Now there is no business and he hopes that someone will offer him a job “of whatever.” I hope someone reads it and calls me. After a year of unemployment, his stepson, Alberto, had just started working at Hiperber, a now-devastated store of a supermarket chain in Elche. “The company tells him that he will enter the ERTE and that they will reopen the store, but we don’t know when,” admits Marga. Of the aid from the Generalitat and the State that has not yet arrived, they will receive something for a second-hand car that cost them 2,500 euros and that they continue to pay. “I don’t get up anymore” Things began to go wrong for Marga many years ago when her husband, who was a pharmacist, suffered his first heart attack at the age of 32. She took the last one when she was 43. She raised five children and three grandchildren. When I was old, I cleaned up to three houses. Today there are five in the house, including a 47-year-old daughter who suffers from schizophrenia. Today, only Marga receives 640 euros of widow’s pension, the only salary that comes into the home. The rent for the apartment already costs them 650 and this month they have to pay half of the IBI of the house, 255 euros. «The water has taken away the little we had. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. “I have always risen from my ashes like the Phoenix, but I feel like I can no longer rise from this.” On the wall of the apartment, full of things in the peculiar disorder produced by necessity, hangs a painting in which Marga appears dressed as a fallera, radiant and happy: «Look, son: that’s me, or rather I was. “That woman no longer exists.”
#DANA #infinite #mud
