Our blog today presents a special update on the situation in Valencia following the recent DANA, where our faculty- lead program is continuing smoothly despite the recent storm. We had the pleasure of speaking with two of the teachers from the program who were kind enough to share their recent insights, experiences and also reassured us that, the storm has had no impact on their trip or the success of the program. Their experience highlights the resilience of the program and the positive spirit of both staff and participants.

Hello, my name is Giorgio and today we are with Francisco Sabater and Murielle Werner. We will be asking them a few DANA related questions to try and offer an insight to the people not currently in Valencia, with the aim to provide an insightful and informative perspective on the current situation.

Fransisco: So yeah, just to present ourselves a bit, we come from a school in Germany and I actually grew up in Spain, I spent quite a lot of time here and then I moved to Germany.

Murielle: My name is Murielle and I come from Réunion Island where we are actually used to a lot of storms and bad weather conditions but I have been in Germany for a while. So of course, as you can imagine this trip has been planned for a while and Francisco and I did have to have a couple of meetings to make sure everything was safe and ready. My husband was actually thinkning the trip would be cancelled but I was more positive and I turned out to be right! We also had the most important question which was about the safety and insurance issue which I can understand, but it all worked out ok!

Was anyone concerned about you coming to Valencia given the current situation in the region?

Fransisco: We had a lot of parents ask us about the safety issue, if the students could travel etc but the EUROACE team was able to get rid of any doubts and the team actually spoke to some parents directly to let them know that Valencia city was ok and safe. Having said that, we did do our research well and luckily enough we had people to guide us through the whole process. I do understand that for some people it is harder and they are probably thinking if it is safe to travel to Valencia because they don´t have the information so we were lucky with this.

Murielle: I mean yeah, I had a lot of family members and friends asking me if it was safe and if I was sure that I wanted to go because they don´t know much about Valencia and didn´t realise that the city was unaffected. I know that Francisco was the same but he already had some information about the current situation so we quickly found out that everything was running as usual.

Do you think it is difficult to find out accurate information about the situation here in Valencia?

Fransisco: I wouldn´t say that it was difficult to find information about the situation, the difficult thing was being able to verify the information as we saw a lot of things that said we weren´t able to come and also we had to really research ourselves. The German government also released a statement saying that if it isn´t necessary then people shouldn´t travel to this area so that made it harder for us too.

Murielle: I heavily relied on my colleagues opinion as I knew the information he had was reliable as it came from sources from Valenica who were up to date on the situation. I will say that what we saw on television as well as social media was very dramatic and scary but it didn´t represent Valencia city, where the program is based. All of these images are real and true but represented a different part of the region. This may have also been the reason that a lot of people were confused and didn´t really understand what exactly was going on. People didn´t even know what a DANA was, I actually forgot the word and my husband told me yesterday! I definitely think that all of this information would have been useful so people could make their own decision about travelling to Valencia.

Fransisco: Yes, exactly. I mean I also had friends from my town that warned me not to go to Valencia and they thought it was crazy we were even thinking about going but after explaining the location of the DANA and how Valencia city was largely unaffected, they understood my reasoning for going ahead with the trip.

We are pleased to announce and broadcast that our groups have continued to travel to Valencia despite the challenges faced over the past week. We are honored to welcome them and, as always, prioritize the safety and well-being of our students.