A spontaneous idea became a heart project for Melanie Schellerer: The Pullach woman sacrificed her vacation to help the flood victims in the Ahr valley.
Pullach
- When Melanie Schellerer came home from summer vacation this year, she sank into the sofa for the first time.
On the one hand, this was due to the pneumonia she had caught in the end.
On the other hand, it was also because she was now asking herself questions that hadn't even occurred to her at the end of the summer.
She wondered what is really important in her life.
The 33-year-old from Pullach, who works in the administration in the combing, also spent an unusual vacation this year.
She went on vacation that wasn't really one - namely, in the Ahr Valley in the Ahrweiler district, Rheiland-Palatinate, she helped all the people who lost everything there after the flood disaster in July.
For three weeks Melanie Schellerer, together with other helpers and those affected, lifted plaster from the walls, knocked off tiles here, and drilled floors there.
“You get so much into your thinking,” she says.
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On the first day she thought there was no way she could hold out for three weeks: Melanie Schellerer removing the oil-contaminated plaster.
© private
A spontaneous decision
Originally she wanted to take a traditional vacation. She, who bought a Suzuki Jimny some time ago and then fitted it with a roof attachment, has long been a member of the "roof tent nomads" who come together again and again at festivals. Sometimes she went on an off-road tour over the western Alps with like-minded people, and sometimes she spent a day curving around between mud puddles in off-road parks. This year she had actually wanted to cross the Pyrenees with friends, but at the last moment the whole thing fell through. But Melanie Schellerer had long since submitted a vacation, she now had three weeks off - and then spontaneously decided to go to the Ahr Valley. To help out there. Other roof tent nomads were also there.
“I repacked my car within hours, then slept a bit and went there that night.” Inwardly, she adjusted to the fact that she would be going on a “I'm-now-completely-dirty-vacation” there .
As long as one can speak of vacation at all.
After the water came the mold
With every word you can tell how much Melanie Schellerer took with what she saw on site.
There are villages in the Ahr Valley where 95 percent of the houses have been washed away or destroyed.
“You can't describe it at all.” For hours the water did not run off, for hours everything soaked up, the walls, the ceilings, the floors.
The mold came later.
From one day to the next, she says, the residents there “lost their entire lives, there was simply nothing left”.
You could tell from how grateful people were that they were helped, how bad they really were.
Experiences that won't let you go
When she was sick at home, she “never let go” of what she experienced.
She thought about the meaningfulness of her everyday life.
Cured himself - and drove off again.
She was back in the Ahr Valley for the last week of October and the first week of November, now it was no longer a question of exposing walls so that they could dry out.
But about other work, to dismantle houses, for example, whose owners in the old village did not want to dare to start again.
“Some,” she says, “just don't know what to do next”.
40 people to core a house
At the beginning of September, when Schellerer was there, the main thing was to chop off the walls, the houses were "completely soggy". “Some of them ran,” she says, “streams of water out of the wall.” It took 40 people around a day and a half to remove the core from a house. She was repeatedly deployed in other villages, in Dernau, in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, in Antweiler. On the first morning she thought: "Then I'll hold the hammer drill in my hand, it won't be that difficult." After an hour and a half, she couldn't. Then helped for a while to clear away rubble, which also had to be done. At some point someone said encouragingly that after a week the pain in the muscles would subside. So it was in her case too. There was also a problem, she says,that the flood had repeatedly burst oil tanks, so some of the rubble was contaminated with oil.
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Melanie Schellerer helped out in the Ahr Valley for three weeks.
© Andrea Kästle
They were 40 to 50 people during the week, and up to 120 volunteers on the weekends.
They always ate together, the roof tent nomads also had a kitchen tent.
Melanie Schellerer also worked there for a day and a half.
The togetherness counted
The young woman took with her the memory of the warmth of the people there, whom she and the other rooftop tent nomads helped.
She has learned, she says, “how great it can be when there is solidarity”.
And in no moment, that was actually the beautiful thing, was it about what the individual might be able to do under certain circumstances.
“The question was always: What can we achieve together?
We counted. "
