Dear son:
I hope you are well upon receiving this letter, just as we are as we send it. You will tell me how your job in Germany is going. You know that since you had to leave, the situation has not improved, quite the opposite. Many people have left for all places. Some to Las Palmas and Tenerife, most of them, but many others like you, to Germany, France, Venezuela or the peninsula.
Many of those who worked in Puerto del Carmen and Playa Blanca have also returned to the town to work the farms. Who would have thought that after regularizing the situation of the 22 illegal hotels, practically all of them have their doors closed due to lack of tourists.
Anyway, nobody thought that what happened with Repsol could happen, but it did. Almost a year after that misfortune, there is still tar everywhere, the tuna fishermen still have the fleet tied to port, since the fish went south, to Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde.
I am told that the Cabildo of Lanzarote is finalizing a study to find out how many people stayed on the island, but I tell you that of about 145,000 people, now we are practically half. This is a ruin, empty houses everywhere, closed businesses, nobody finds work in the hotel industry, since the number of tourists has dropped from about 2 million to less than 400,000.
This is very depressing son. They don't stop jumping from Famara, and there are a lot of people with depression. The government enabled economic aid through the emergency cabinet, but 426 euros is barely enough to eat. And to think that I thought this oil thing was good, I thought it was almost impossible for what finally happened to happen. And although it was 60 kilometers away, the tar reached Lanzarote and Fuerteventura in a few hours and almost all the islands.
Your aunt, the one from Valverde in El Hierro, also cannot explain how it also arrived there and in what way. Anyway son, I apologize, I feel in my soul that you had to emigrate, that you are not with us and through my fault.
PS: I curse the hour when I did not go out into the street neither on the famous March 24, nor even on March 22, 2014, where many of you went with a good heart to demonstrate against this madness. Forgive me.
In Arrecife de Lanzarote, March 1, 2015.
