‘I lost everything’, the dream of a Honduran woman shattered after the tragedy in Valencia

“I lost everything,” says Cinthya Torres , her voice breaking with grief. She is a Honduran woman who saw the water pour in through the doors and windows of her apartment on the ground floor of a building in Alfafar, one of the towns in Valencia hardest hit by the storm.

“The door collapsed and everything was flooded. If we stayed, we would have drowned, so we got out as best we could and went upstairs to the neighbors’ house,” she said in a telephone conversation with Efe.

Cinthya lives in Alfafar, one of the so-called “ground zero” of the worst storm to hit Spain this century, which has caused more than 200 deaths – including a British couple, a Venezuelan citizen and a Colombian -, an unspecified number of missing people and tens of thousands of victims.

She lived in the home of an elderly woman whom she cares for, with a friend and the lady’s son. They all had to leave the house and are now sheltering in the homes of relatives and friends because the flat is still uninhabitable.

Before the water forced them to leave, Cinthya called her family in Honduras, where her two children, her mother and her siblings live, but the calls were cut off mid-conversation and her family spent two days without hearing from her.

Worried, they called friends and acquaintances in Spain, but the water had cut off access to Cinthya’s house.

Among the things he has lost, he is particularly saddened by the 600 euros (16,506.60 lempiras) he had prepared to send to his family in Honduras, the photographs and his passport.

She is also very worried about her future, because she has nowhere to live and all her clothes, food and belongings have been washed away into the water.

The cry of Bolivian Norma

Norma has been luckier. She is 67 years old, Bolivian and lives in Valencia with her 76-year-old husband. She never imagined she would live through such a nightmare.

Covid hit her hard a few days before the flood. She had just recovered and last Tuesday – the day of the storm – she was supposed to go from Catarroja – one of the hardest hit towns – to Valencia to work as a beautician for a client, but the appointment was cancelled at the last minute. “That saved my life,” she said today through tears in a telephone conversation with Efe.

From his apartment on the third floor of a block in Catarroja, he saw how the water swept away cars, furniture and people. He still remembers the sound of the impact against the building. He spent three days without water, without electricity and with hardly any food.

“It was the end of the month and I hadn’t gone shopping,” she recalls. Now she can hardly go out, she has to look after her husband and she goes to a closed school where volunteers organise to distribute food.

She thinks of those who have lost everything. “My blood pressure is high, I cry. I need a psychologist.”

Claudia and the “survivor syndrome”

Claudia Méndez left Colombia 20 years ago to settle in Valencia and knows well the areas hit by the flood, neighborhoods where her children grew up and which are now devastated.

“I’m shocked,” she said in a telephone conversation with Efe. “It had rained a lot since Saturday,” she recalls, “and measures could have been taken.”

Claudia and her family are safe, but some of her acquaintances have lost everything. “It makes me angry that help is arriving so late, that there are still people without assistance. We should have been prepared, there is blame everywhere,” she continues.

Now, he feels the “survivor syndrome,” which makes him ask himself every day “why one is fine and others have died, why I am fine if there is a ravine near my house, why they are and we are not.”

A “syndrome,” he says, which partly explains the unprecedented wave of solidarity that brought thousands of volunteers to the affected areas to help over the weekend.