Of the 40 people who traveled on the last boat that arrived last Tuesday at the port of Arrecife (Lanzarote), it was impossible for one of them to go unnoticed. Gilzan, a 39-year-old Moroccan woman, had to be helped by a Red Cross volunteer to get off the Salvamar Al Nair, while another waited for her on the dock with a wheelchair.
Without legs since she was a child, Gilzan disembarked in Lanzarote with a smile that could be seen from a distance and dressed in a dark blue anorak with a hood included.
"She was crazy happy", someone who attended her tells EFE. "On the boat, everyone was very aware of her," she adds.
Three of the 40 people who arrived on the boat had to be transferred to the José Molina Orosa Hospital to receive medical attention, but not Gilzan. The Red Cross provided her with a chair and transferred her to the reception center managed in Lanzarote by the NGO Accem, which plans to transfer her to another place in the coming days.
Her inflatable boat departed from Agadir (Morocco) on Sunday, July 27 and the journey lasted three days, until the Salvamar rescued its crew and took them to Arrecife. It has not transpired how Gilzan made the 460-kilometer journey that separates Casablanca, where she lived with her mother, from Agadir. Nor has she said where she left the wheelchair with which she moved around in her country.
What she has told several people she has spoken with during these days is that she survived thanks to the solidarity of her neighbors and that she decided to embark on the boat, together with a cousin who accompanies her at all times, due to the lack of other types of aid in her country, but with the fixed idea of helping her mother from Spain.
Gilzan lost her legs in a traffic accident on a bus, when she was only four years old. Her cousin serves as her support, although sources say that she gets along perfectly and that she is a very autonomous person.
Along with her, another 39 people arrived in the capital of Lanzarote: 31 men, 25 of them from the Maghreb and six from sub-Saharan Africa, and nine women, eight of them from the Maghreb. Six of the members of the boat are minors: four boys and two girls.
