MADRID — As Spain mourns the death of over 200 victims of the biggest peacetime disaster in decades, volunteers poured into the Valencia region to give a helping hand in cleaning up and offer support to the devastated community. Local parishes and the city’s cultural institutions turned into help centers, storing supplies sent from all over Spain and assigning those that came to help to cleaning streets and houses. “The situation is different in each area and in each town. In Valencia, for example, there are towns that are still cut off from communication, without electricity, telephone connection and without food,” Caritas Spain director Father Luis Miguel Rojo Septién told Spanish Catholic news outlet Alfa y Omega. “It is very dramatic,” he said, adding that “the main task right now is cleaning up the mud left by the flood.” The morning of Nov. 2, 15,000 volunteers from all over the region lined up and waited hours for the distribution of what tasks were needed throughout the affected districts and towns. (OSV News)
