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“Hundreds, perhaps thousands have come, they have conducted themselves magnificently,” said Noelia Saez, a 48-year-old from the devastated town of Catarroja.
The altruism also overjoyed 62-year-old Teresa Gisbert, a resident of the ruined town of Sedavi, where dozens of young volunteers rushed to assist as mud covered the streets and her home.
“They bring us food, they have helped us… they are angels,” she told AFP.
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Their towns are in the eastern Valencia region, where almost all the destruction and the more than 200 deaths have been recorded since the floods struck a week ago.
With the authorities absent from some of the worst-affected areas for days, an army of ordinary citizens travelled on foot to provide food, water and cleaning equipment to clear the mud.
Young people have been at the forefront of this wave of solidarity and were at work again in Catarroja on Wednesday, loading trucks with fresh supplies, an AFP journalist saw.
It was a far cry from stereotypes caricaturing the generation born in this millennium as self-centred “snowflakes” addicted to endless scrolling on social media.
“The elderly are always going to say that people who aren’t from their generation are worse,” said Ángela Noblejas, a 19-year-old industrial engineering student.
“But now that they’ve given us an opportunity, that maybe they wouldn’t have given us, because it’s not a good situation, we young have responded pretty well.”
A group of young women carry bucketloads of mud out from a flooded house in Catarroja, Valencia province.(Photo by Cesar Manso / AFP)
‘A real goal’
Noblejas and her fellow millennial friends spent Tuesday immersed in muck and debris in the town of Algemesi to aid the clean-up.
Her grandfather had told her of a 1957 flood that razed the Valencia region and killed dozens. Now Noblejas believes she is creating stories for her children and grandchildren.
“I think going, getting covered in mud, helping, will have been much better than telling them, ‘No, I stayed at home without doing anything’,” she said.
Her friend Gisela Huguet also dismissed the accusation that today’s young are always on their mobile phones avidly seeking the next “like”.
“We’re concerned about society,” the 19-year-old IT and mathematics student told AFP, saying the victims were “people from our town, people like us, university buddies”.
For José Antonio López-Guitian, a 61-year-old humourist from the city of Valencia who has joined the volunteer mobilisation, modern youths are “soft” because they live in “times that are perhaps not so hard”.
“They are people of their time, and with their mobiles there’s no reason why they should be like those who came before,” he said.
“Young people don’t have the chance to do something meaningful,” he said, but Spain’s greatest crisis in living memory has given them “a real goal, which above all is to help”.