The 140 young Spaniards, between the ages of 16 and 18, who made up the annual expedition of the Spain Rumbo al Sur (ERS) cooperation program in Senegal enjoyed an unconventional way of life last July, far from the comforts of West. Without even cell phones. It is what they were looking for. They toured the country for just over a week. But everything changed on July 27, when the Senegalese government jailed the main opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, whose party was later outlawed.
The subsequent revolts, in which two deaths occurred, precipitated the return of the expedition members. Or the intention to return, because it was not possible to do so immediately. “When we got to the beach, things got complicated,” explains Javier Pérez, one of the members of the group, who had to be transferred on domestic flights to the pilgrims’ pavilion to Mecca (Saudi Arabia) at the Dakar airport. “When we saw that eight soldiers entered accompanied by the Spanish consul, we were quite impressed and realized that it was not something minor,” he says. After three days of waiting, in different batches, everyone was able to fly to Madrid.
However, during the days in Senegal they were not afraid. “We never had a feeling of danger,” says Pérez, 17, who has completed his first year of high school this year and plays for the Hércules CF youth team, the Alicante soccer team. The organization had warned them that there had been riots in the Central African country in June, but everything seemed to have calmed down. This is certified by Telmo de la Quadra-Salcedo, nephew of the legendary Miguel and head of the ERS program. “We decided to go even though we knew that we were traveling to a hot zone,” close to countries like Mali or Niger, he explains, “and that the June riots, which were neither an ethnic nor religious conflict, much less an armed one, had been mitigated.” . However, upon reaching the Casamanza region, “a green area close to the Guineas and with a huge bridge to cross into the Gambia”, the popular insurrection against the government intensified. “We had the bad luck that Sonko’s arrest caught us,” and that, in addition, they were near the hometown of the imprisoned opponent.
Convoy of Spain Heading South blocked by the barricades on the road between Cap Skirring and Ziguinchor due to the political conflict in Senegal.Jose Luis Cuesta
“We were going by bus and we saw that there were tree barricades on the road,” recalls Pérez, “and we had to turn around so they wouldn’t block us with another one from behind.” “They closed all the roads and the capital of the region, Ziguinchor,” says De la Quadra. “We left at four in the morning to avoid trouble and some Piarist nuns put us up in a monastery.” The only way to evacuate the expedition members “was by plane,” “and it took us three days to get them all to Dakar.” “They told us that the situation had gotten complicated during one of the training workshops,” says the young man from Alicante, “and we all felt a lot of sadness, more than fear, because we were locked up on a spectacular beach and we had to return early.” He needed to finish off the adventure with a visit to Gambia and another to the island of Gorea.
“We collected our backpacks”, continues Pérez, “and for three days we were waiting in a very small airfield for the flights to Dakar”. The student was one of the first to arrive in the Senegalese capital and one of the last to be able to embark for Madrid. The local authorities, with the mediation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Army, the Spanish consul and the sponsor of the program, the insurer Mutua Madrileña, housed the expedition members in the pavilion set aside for pilgrims to Mecca. “They supplied us with water and one day they gave us half a hamburger to eat, which for us tasted like heaven,” Pérez jokes, after eating rice or military rations each day. A health team controlled intestinal diarrhea, the main medical problem of the members of the group. “Whoever had mats, he slept on them. If not, you rested your head on the sack,” says Pérez. Between August 3 and 4, they all covered the four long hour flight between Senegal and Spain. Pérez set foot on land “around four in the morning” and lived the reunion of his Madrid companions with his parents, with whom they had not had contact throughout the journey. He took the first AVE to Alicante and around nine o’clock he was already hugging his family. “They were very intense days,” he sums up.
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“It has been a unique experience that has changed my way of thinking,” confesses the young man, who has convinced his 15-year-old sister, Marta, to sign up for the 2024 edition of ERS. After managing to pass the selection process, he spent four days at the end of June in Cerro Muriano (Córdoba), where they received “military instruction and training courses” that “prepare you physically and mentally for the trip.” There they already slept on a soccer field, “we did not touch a bed in the entire expedition,” he says. They visited missions, where they donated computers and soccer balls. They cleaned up beaches, cleared the grounds of a school, undertook “a 20-mile hike through a tropical forest. And they were impregnated with the Senegalese culture. “One day it flooded us, and we took advantage of it to shower, because the water was scarce”, he recounts, “in fact, three or four of us used to hug each other to shower with water from a single bucket”. And instead of mobiles, they wrote down all their experience in a notebook. Parents were promptly informed through the ERS website, where they accessed daily podcasts and photos and videos of the expedition.
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