This Wednesday, El Corte Inglés in Elche ended its Playmobil figure exhibition. The event showed off the company’s history and work around the world over the past six months. The concluding event also served to thank Neumáticos Soledad and Juan Arcides for their help.
The exhibition
Antonio Ramón Guilabert, the local head of the Red Cross, said that the display drew an audience that was “impossible to count.” However, guided tours show that more than 1,200 people have come, including school groups, associations, and different groups of people serviced by the Elche branch. Some of them even came from Guardamar, Petrer, Novelda, Elda, and Torrevieja.
The Spanish Association of Playmobil Collectors (Aesclick) helped put on the show, which had four tiny settings showing different types of humanitarian work. The first one was a reenactment of the Battle of Solferino, which is where the group got its start.
Actions that help people
Guilabert says that the following displays showed the job they did during the Valencia flood, with details like “cars covered in mud, training centres and shelters,” as well as “other wars” with “armies fighting, fleeing populations, and destroyed houses.”
Lastly, a look at what Valencian volunteers are doing in Burkina Faso, a country that has been torn apart by war since 2015 and where the Red Cross is also present. “The first thing we do is make sure we have water and power. The president says, “With that, we start building greenhouses and teach them how to grow crops to rebuild their world and make sure they have food.”
The deed
Also at the closing event were Celia Lastra, the Councillor for Social Action and Cooperation; José Navarro, the Head of Culture of El Corte Inglés; and Jésica Pérez and Rosa Pérez, who were there as representatives of the Soledad Group.
Also, some of the Elche volunteers helped out, including Juan Arcides, a Venezuelan who has been working to guide the youngsters from the six educational centres that have visited the exhibition. Four of these centres have also attended a training workshop.
Prizes
The head of the Red Cross praised Arcides for being bold. He had to leave his home country because he couldn’t disagree with what the government was doing. For years, he worked as an oil engineer at Petromed, a company in his home nation.
Neumáticos Soledad’s “indispensable work” during the Valencia storm was also praised. As Guilabert puts it, “When we were in the most stressful situation possible, when we were stuck in mud and our vehicles were getting punctures, they had the enormous courtesy of allowing us to repair all the tires free of charge in Valencia, and that is a gesture that we want to acknowledge here today.”
Councilwoman Celia Lastra of the Red Cross also praised the group’s work and stressed how important it is to raise awareness of its efforts to “counter all those campaigns against the Red Cross, which I find disproportionate and unfair, driven by an incredible desire to cause harm.” She also said that “we must continue to publicise the organization’s work” and that “in September we will organise something to promote its humanitarian work.”
José Navarro, who works for El Corte Inglés’s culture department, also spoke at the event. He said he wanted to do it again with the Red Cross and stressed how important it is to let people know about “the organisation’s work, which is important and depends on volunteers.”
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