He still had the gold medal hanging around his neck and was already looking at his new challenge. For Eduardo Blasco (San Sebastián, 1994) the “competition mode” was left behind with hardly any time to celebrate the World rescue and lifesaving conquered “against all odds” in Gold Coast (Australia). His goal was almost 19,000 kilometersthose that separated him from the Saharan city of Dajlathe destiny of a “different” mission… which is saying a lot for an activist accustomed to almost everything.
The emotion of victory gave way to a feeling, “responsibility”which he himself confessed in the first messages still in oceanic lands. surpassed the jet lag and after a fleeting passage through La MoncloaEduardo Blasco got on a plane with destination Western Sahara. A round trip told to El HuffPost in the few moments of internet connection that you have enjoyed in a long week. And intense, above all intense.
The order this time had little to do with his usual migrant rescue tasks in the middle of the seaas one of the most recognized figures of the ‘Aita Marie’ or ‘Open Arms’. “This time it was a delivery of medications, 500 kilos of eminently pediatric materialalong with other more generic drugs”, he confessed already in Dakhla, as humanitarian response to floods from the end of September.
The oenegé Saharafuerte has been responsible for organizing the trip, with material from the Fuerteventura Hospital and of pharmacies from the Canary Island, explains the swimmer returning to the islands. He and his companions have been dividing the kilos of medicines loaded up to their Wilayas health centers —settlements that make up the camps—and in the Rabuni General Hospital.
The adventure, however, was born with a double purpose, because in addition to the medical emergency, Eduardo Blasco and the NGO Saharafuerte they were looking for “make the Saharawi problem visiblewhich I think is the most abandoned of all“. For this reason, he admits having put aside his usual rescues in the Mediterranean and other critical points for a few weeks.
This nature of awareness has led them to propose a different logistics. “When I go on mission to conflict zones we stay on the boatbut in this case, since the fighting is taking place on the wall, we have stayed, in the Boujdour campbecause it is the closest to the wall, which is about 70 kilometers“. The longest wall that separates two parts of a country, he laments, in the middle of discussions about the future of the Sahara. Not in vain It is known as the ‘Wall of Shame’with more than 2,700 kilometers.
Eduardo Blasco, in front of a destroyed daycare center in Western Sahara
There, for several days “we have done night in the camps civilians, which has nothing to do with the Polisario Front.” Of those experiences, Eduardo remembers that “we contributed what we could for food and we slept with them in the tents“But, obviously, he admits that it was not as simple as arriving and depositing the medications.
“First there was a structure recognitionbecause you have to know who you give the medicine to and the material, and on the other hand it was necessary ensure own delivery, that was not so clear as could happen in more conventional missions,” he continues, comparing with previous experiences.
Aware of the opportunity that arose to be in the heart of Western Sahara, Blasco and the rest of the team have taken the opportunity to soak up life from withinalso from the political path that fights for recognition of a territory which returns to focus due to the recent position of the UN in favor of its autonomy.
“We have spoken with the authorities, including the president of the Sahrawi Republic,” Brahim Galiwhose emergency healthcare in Spain caused a crisis opened by Morocco. And in those conversations and coexistences, he has discovered “an amazing societywith a Parliament that borders on parity in its composition and in which women have more weight than could be imagined from the outside.
But also “the problems of a youth that knows it has no future here; The kids here confess to you that there are no options, life is very hard in the camps and despite that they have been holding on for decades, enduring day after day without rest.”
Problems that multiply, he continues, because to an “almost impossible” future is added a present of constant dangerslike “the mines” that populate the entire area of the wall. A critical frontier that separates Western Sahara occupied by Morocco of the territories liberated by the Polisario Front. The number of artifacts located on the line is impossible to specify, but it runs into the millions.
A “deterrent tactic by Morocco against possible maneuvers by the Polisario Front, but whose consequences the usual people end up paying, the population“adds the recent world champion. For a few days, records, medals and new missions have been left behind, given the impact of having experienced something “different.”
Source: www.huffingtonpost.es
