“She told us her story of the terrible events which took place in the municipality of Catarroja: how she saw the flood take everything away and how she spent a whole night on top of her car, while her daughter Monica, a young woman with a disability, waited for her at home.
This is Mari Carmen, a brave woman, who is now fighting to put her life back together, in the aftermath of the terrible flooding.
‘’After everything that happened, Monica began to have many more epileptic seizures, up to three in a month. It may not seem like it, but all this affected her a lot. In addition, to dealing with our own trauma, we welcomed David, Monica’s partner at APAMI, and my parents, Maria Dolores and Jose, because their house was completely destroyed. We found ourselves as nine people now living in one home.”
Our relatives asked us all the time if we needed anything and I finally took the decision to take up their offer and to send my daughter Monica to live at my niece’s house, to protect her from having to deal with the upheaval in our lives. Since she couldn’t walk, I put her in a shopping cart, and they took her away. After a few days, my husband, a disabled person, and I decided to move to another nearby town because life was getting too complicated for us.
Since then, Monica can’t stand being alone. She’s afraid it will happen again. She thinks I’m going to abandon her again and she doesn’t want to be separated from me. If I leave the house, she has to call me from her father’s phone to find out how long I will be absent. She now lives in fear that I’ll never come home again.
We still haven’t been able to open the APAMI association. APAMI is an association which allows all these disabled people in the town collaborate in different tasks and participate in all many festivities, such as the Fallas. With APAMI closed, they can’t do anything, and they miss it, since they need to stay active and do activities adapted to their needs. Monica asks me, “Are you going to open APAMI, Mom? When are we going to do things at APAMI?” They notice something strange: they go down the street and see that the benches are broken, and the garbage containers are full.
Although the worst is over, this continues. Many of us are left with nothing and we have learned to start from scratch, surrounded by helplessness. I had to move forward, whether I could or not, I had to do it for these nine people who were at home, to draw strength and pull everyone together: I took my paella pan and with a gas bottle we were able to cook meals. We have all done our best contributing to help each other in the best way each person could.
You have to be strong and, in the end, everything works out. We live in fear but knowing that we have keep going for our children. Being able to enjoy the weekend at the Lukas Foundation was an enormous relief for everyone: we had the opportunity to relax and take some much-needed time for ourselves. This time reminded us that we needed to take care of our own needs. It also enabled us to see once again, that there is something beyond our current reality. What a gift!”