Chef Javier Muñoz-Calero, head of the Ovillo restaurant (Madrid), remembers perfectly how he met Mamady Diallo, Madybecause it changed his life. It was the end of 2010. “He was super skinny and had a look full of sadness. That child thought that his whole family was dead, he barely spoke Spanish and they put him in my hands. Today he is my son.” He does not lie. He speaks of Mady with the pride with which parents share the successes of the children they have brought into the world. It does not matter that the brother of his 12-year-old daughter and his 14-year-old twins was born on another continent, Africa; that he belongs to a different race or that he practices a different religion. Fourteen years later they are family. “Ours,” the cook sums up, “is a beautiful love story without borders.”
“Nacho de la Mata, from the Raíces Foundation, told me that he would send me some CVs of the kids they helped through Cocina Conciencia [proyecto que da empleo y formación a jóvenes sin referentes adultos en España y en el que han colaborado algunos de los mejores chefs del país, varios de ellos con estrellas Michelin]. I said, ‘Send me the boy who is having the worst time and we’ll get him through.’ And he sent me Mady.” He was 15 when he boarded a pirogue in Mauritania with almost 60 strangers. “I have never been so scared in my life,” he recalls, on the phone from Oslo, where he now lives. “There were so many of us that people were sitting on top of each other. I was bleeding from my leg because I had gotten a bad wound from the engine and it hurt a lot because of the salt from the sea. There was a moment when the boat broke and water started coming in. I didn’t know how to swim. I was convinced that I wasn’t going to get out of there alive. I don’t even wish those who attacked my family what I went through those days at sea.” By then I had been wandering around for months. “I belong to an ethnic minority in southern Guinea Conakry and they attacked my house. They called me when I was coming back from school and told me not to come back, so I fled, first to Mali and then to Mauritania, where I got on the canoe.”
The boat was rescued on reaching the Spanish coast and his wound was treated. More setbacks: Tenerife, Lanzarote, Madrid. The first X-ray of his life; people examining his teeth to try to determine his age. In the capital he met Nacho de la Mata, the lawyer who managed to change the system and prevent unwarranted repatriations of unaccompanied foreign minors with two important appeals before the Constitutional Court. The first and only time that Mady, a Muslim, set foot in a church was at his funeral. “That day I cried so much that I lost my voice.” De la Mata and his wife, Lourdes Reyzábal, the creator of the Roots Foundation, They were the first people to help him in Spain. The couple had met on the Train of Hope, accompanying the disabled and sick to Lourdes (France). On their honeymoon in Scotland, De la Mata had a crisis. When he returned to Madrid, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which he battled for 12 years. “When he died,” Mady recalls, “I felt a huge emptiness. But he had already put me on the path to Javier. I don’t know what would have become of me without them. They changed my life.”
He knew nothing about restaurants. “They taught me everything,” he recalls. He started out as a common waiter and managed one of the restaurants run by Muñoz-Calero, who, in the meantime, helped him look for his family. “We sent money to an uncle of his to investigate. We wrote many letters to the embassy. I told him: ‘Mady, many years have passed and we have tried everything.’ But he did not give up. One night, at four in the morning, he called me crying. His uncle had just told him that he had found his mother and his brothers. Today I have tears in my eyes when I remember it,” says the chef. After the attack, the family had fled to another country, but when things calmed down in Guinea, they returned. They thought Mady had died, but he was in Spain, serving cocktails and even inventing some new ones – “without trying them, of course, because I don’t drink.” “With the money she earned,” recalls Muñoz-Calero, “Mady created a kind of taxi fleet in her father’s village to get him out of the hard work in the fields. She sent her sister to school. She bought them a house…”
When he met his girlfriend, also born in Guinea but living in Norway, Mady decided to leave it all behind. “I was doing very well in Spain, but she was a nurse there and I thought it would be easier for me to move there and work in whatever.” He learned another language, his fifth; he had two children. He worked as a driver and set up his own business. “One day,” Muñoz-Calero recalls, “he sent me a beautiful audio recording. He said: ‘Dad, thanks to you and your family, to everything you did for me and everything I learned with you, I am now an entrepreneur, like you.’”
Both of them often use the verb “to learn” when talking about each other. “Mady has taught me many things,” explains the chef. “Sometimes in life things don’t go as you expected and it’s easy to dramatize, but I had her example: I saw her fight to improve herself and always help those around her. She taught me that you should never forget where you come from and loyalty. All of it.”
When Mady, already in Norway, found out that Muñoz-Calero was going to open his first solo restaurant, Ovillo, he called him on the phone to tell him that he was going to Spain to help him get it up and running. “His second child had just been born at the time,” the chef recalls, “and I told him that it wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t listen to me. He told me: ‘You gave me everything and I will never leave you alone.’” When he was about to return to Oslo, the pandemic broke out and Mady had to wait, confined, to return home. He has no regrets. “Whenever Javier needs me, I will go. Just as I know that whenever I need him, he will come.” That’s what families do, they help each other. It was also that reason, loyalty, that led Anouar, another African boy who had arrived in Spain at the age of 14 clinging to the undercarriage of a truck, to return to the first house where he had been taken in in Spain to take care of Nacho de la Mata in his last year of life.
Muñoz-Calero has already worked with around 80 children from the Raíces Foundation thanks to the project Kitchen Consciousness, The chef has given an opportunity to almost half a thousand young people since 2010. The chef says, indignant, that some people have called him asking for migrants to work without a contract. “And then there are those who think that the foreign person who takes care of their parents is great, but they don’t want the black guy next door because he’s a criminal. There is a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of ignorance, people who live in gilded castles, accustomed to having everything given to them in a short and easy way. Fortunately, I was born into a well-off but very open family. Mady has a beautiful relationship with my mother, Paloma. And my children have also had the opportunity to grow up seeing migrant children at home, during the year, on Christmas Eve, sharing, learning… I am very happy about that when I see how the extreme right tries to attract children through the Internet and social networks with racist speeches.” Growing up with Mady has been like a vaccine against racism, a virus that is spreading in Spain at the hands of irresponsible politicians and activists who in recent days, after the terrible murder of an 11-year-old boy in Mocejón (Toledo), were quick to link foreigners as the perpetrators of the crime.
Outside the family she created with the Muñoz-Caleros, Mady also suffered. “Racism is everywhere. Also in my country, where we are all black, although there discrimination was based on ethnicity. In Spain they shouted at me in the street: ‘Go back to your country! Fucking black!’. They tried to attack me. Once, when leaving a restaurant, the police stopped me and another colleague, insulted us and put their hands on a car… But I prefer to take the good things: those happy people, the sun… For me, Spain will always be the best in the world thanks to Nacho and Javier.”
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