Her clear blue eyes contrast with her skin tanned by the sun, a dark complexion that is not the result of long hours on the beach, but of kick yourself up and down the streets of the neighborhoods Florida and Les Planes from L’Hospitalet de Llobregat day in and day out. Mari Carmen Zafra46, is the pedagogical coordinator of Esplai Les Planes and head of the Center Obert of Esplai La Florida, a local entity with a social function that goes far beyond that of most esplais.
Although she is a figure far from the media and the spotlight, she is not exactly unknown in the city. “Half L’Hospitalet has my mobile& rdquor ;, she jokes. The truth is that it is impossible to walk with Mari Carmen through the northern neighborhoods of L’Hospitalet without coming across a person or family who stops by her to greet her, hug her and thank her for her work or without her having to answer a neighbor’s call who asks for advice.
Hundreds of children and adolescents participate throughout the year in one of the multiple projects with which Esplai La Florida works, a entity born in 1984 and who also works for identify and prevent situations of social risk among minors in the neighborhood. The Esplai Les Planes is a subdivision of the one in Florida that mainly works in the Florida Blocksone of the most vulnerable of the entire metropolitan area of Barcelona. And that is where Mari Carmen, along with other monitors and social educators, spends a good part of her work.
Such is her involvement in the neighborhood that, despite living now and for a good part of her life in El Prat de Llobregat, the mayor’s office of the L’Hospitalet City Council has called her to help them organize a ride with the mayoress Nuria Marin around the blocks and a meeting with some of the families that inhabit them to discuss the main problems in the area.
“They could still come, nothing is going to happen. But yes it’s true with me families are closer”, says Mari Carmen Zafra.
A family of fairgrounds
Mari Carmen arrived at Esplai Les Planes in 2018. At that time, as she herself recounts, she worked in the dining rooms of the Pau Vila school, located next to the Florida Blocks. The then director of Esplai La Florida, who knew Mari Carmen from before because she had already had contact with Esplai, ran into her one day on the street and suggested that she run that subdivision that had just opened in Les Planes.
Mari Carmen Zafra accepted. Although at that time she had been away from social work for a while, her link with this world began when i was only 12 years old. It was the eighties and his family had recently settled in the Prat de Llobregat. “My parents were fairgrounds. I come from a very complicated world, that of the fair, but where you live in community and we all helped each other& rdquor ;, recalls Mari Carmen, born halfway between Barcelona and Andalusia -the usual route of the fair-.
“There was a time when they forbade us to carry the school on our backs”, remember. The minors at the fair were going to be taken to boarding schools, but their parents didn’t want that, so they They got out of the fairground world “without thinking twice& rdquor ;. After a first stage in Jaén, the whole family moved to El Prat. “I did not want. I came from an open school and they put me between four walls. And at that moment I hated Catalan and I hated everything”, he explains. It also recognizes that at that stage it gave “a lot of problems & rdquor;.
So, recounts Mari Carmen, a social educator “he told me: ‘Do you want to know what it is to have real problems? I have set up an association with people who do have problems’. And I said, okay, well, I want to go. But he wouldn’t let me because I was only 12 years old. So I messed her up more and more until she let me go. One day she told me that he could, but that he believed that he was going to leave me. I replied: ‘You’ll see how not’. And from then until today”.
The self-denial by flag
That early involvement in the social world -in addition to other family circumstances- led her to become a teenager with adult responsibilities in a short time. All this experience explains that she now helps her understand many of the vulnerable and/or troubled young people with whom she works and with whom you identify. “No teacher spent even a minute asking me what is happening at home,” says Mari Carmen, who reiterates a motto: “Treat others as you would like to be treated”.
Good faith of it gives Jacqueline Carvallomother of an eleven-year-old girl who has been attending the Esplai La Florida for seven years: “I think heaven has already won it. Of those people there are few. I’m embarrassed to ask him, but I know whatever salary it is, crI see that what he earns is not enough for the dedication he has”.
Jacqueline defines herself as “very protective”, a condition that she reinforced after her daughter was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and dyslexia. All in all, this mother explains how Mari Carmen guided her to get accepted into a foundation that has allowed her to have speech therapists and rehabilitators for her daughter.
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Not only with her daughter, Jacqueline is also grateful for the work she has done with herself to help her overcome this overprotection and, for example, has managed to encourage her daughter to go to some colonies: “She told me that if anything happened she herself would go whenever it was and bring it. Who is going to offer that? & rdquor;. For her part, Mari Carmen insists that if a child or a mother changes, it is not thanks to her: “I’m just a tool to reach your goal. You use me and I let myself be used, that’s what I’m for, but people change by themselves.”
Despite this constant willingness to help -she even welcomes people with few resources into her own home- is aware that not everyone has the same capacity for change. In fact, he explains that on occasions he has had to disassociate himself from some people or families after finding himself without the tools to give them more help -although he also stresses that some of these people have later remade themselves-. “I do not ask for miracles. I know that there are people who are not going to change, but if a minimum of awareness is already created, that is worth it to me, “says Mari Carmen.