Volunteer interpreter for World Central Kitchen

As you probably know and have seen on the news, on Tuesday 29^th Octobre, disaster struck in Valencia. What looked like a typical Octobre storm in many Valencian villages, turned out to be ahorrible, destructive disaster causing catastrophic floods in several villagesin the south of the city of Valencia. Too many people lost their lives, and many others lost their houses, cars and all their belongings.

While the Government’s response was, to say the least, ridiculously and embarrassingly slow, tens of thousands of volunteers took matters into their own hands and went to the affected areas to clean houses, schools and businesses, bring them food and help them wherever they could.

When the storm hit Valencia, I was on my way home, quite scared because of the strong wind and rainfall. But luckily, I got home safe and sound. My street was flooded for a couple of hours (as usually happens, even when it’s not raining that much), but everything cleared up during the evening.

Very early the next day, I had to travel to my home country – Belgium, still not knowing what had actually taken place in the southern villages of Valencia, because they were completely isolated from everyone, without phone or internet connection. It only dawned on me what happened when my plane arrived in Brussels, and I’ve had tens of unread messages from worried family members and friends.

In the next couple of days, I felt so powerless, not knowing what to do or how to help, so when I came back to Valencia, I started asking around and looking for places where I could be of any help. A colleague of mine, Beatriz, told me World Central Kitchen was looking for translators / interpreters to translate between the staff, volunteers and suppliers. And that’s where my story as a volunteer interpreter started.

World Central Kitchen is one of the first NGOs that set up base in Valencia to provide hot meals, prepared by amazing chefs, to the affected people. They prepare about 20.000 hot meals a day in their base in the Port of Valencia, thanks to the help of hundreds of volunteers.

When we read that they were looking for translators / interpreters to facilitate communication between the different native speakers who were helping in their kitchen and warehouse, we thought it would be a great idea to offer our services as professional interpreters.

For almost two weeks, me and my colleagues took turns to break down the language barrier with our interpreting skills. We made sure the staff, volunteers and suppliers were able to talk to each other, even though they didn’t have the same mother tongue. As you can imagine, people from all over the world came to Valencia to help out (I’ve spoken to people from Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, France and Belgium to name a few) so it was key to ensure a clear communication.

Just to give you an idea of what we did: we interpreted during phone calls between the responsible staff of the warehouse and Spanish suppliers or companies wanting to donate food or materials, we translated the different conversations between staff and truck drivers, we interpreted meetings between the different members of staff, and we translated the instructions given by the responsible staff to the Spanish-speaking volunteers. And on quieter moments, we rolled up our sleeves and helped out the staff wherever we could, e.g. building trolleys and shelves, supplying the kitchen with the necessary equipment and (un)loading trucks. Turns out I’m quite the handywoman (just joking).

I feel honoured to have been part of this interpreters’ team, coordinated by my colleague Beatriz, and to have met the amazing people behind this initiative. They’ve managed to put together a great team of people, who are dedicated to the cause and are doing very long hours to make sure their meals reach a lot of people, and on top of that, they’re always doing it with a big smile. They’ve thanked us over and over again for our service, but I feel it should be the other way around.

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THANK YOU to World Central Kitchen for coming to Valencia and provide food to those in need, THANK YOU to the wonderful warehouse team (you know who you are) for including me in your team and making me feel really useful, THANK YOU to all the volunteers who have been and are still helping the Valencian people day and night and THANK YOU to everyone who has been donating food, money or anything else.