During my one-month mission, I lived in the north mountainous part of Kenia where you can find beautiful green fields of corn, tea, coffie, mango and bananas. Prolonged droughts are common there, but with my arrival it started to rain almost everyday. Staying and volunteering at the Franciscan mission was useful and unforgetable experience of a lifetime. For me, it was a turning point and experience that led a path for my further work which is charity work, even though I was doing charity work my whole life, especially through my school years when I volunteered in my community. There in Africa, I mostly went to faraway villages where live the porrest people, families with a lot of children, old and ill people. Everyday I was visiting different families, talking to them, brining them food, promising them to collect financial help when I get back to Croatia. They really do need our help, and we can help them. They call us and they need us! We just need to hear them. They want us to be with them, where noone comes and where the help isn`t comming through. They are wonderful people, nice, calm, always smiling, never complaining, although very poor, but so rich with spirit. I was hiding my tears so many times, trying not to show them how much I was impressed because they are dealing with poverty with such dignity, and it seems that they don`t know for better way. With the headmaster I visited highchool, 25 years old one, that hasn`t been improved or changed since the first day. Furniture in the classrooms is in a terrible state, and the walls need painting. During my mission I also visited a camp, the biggest in that part of Kenia, that exists for 4 years now and where hundreds of children and adults live in torn tents, horrible conditions, without any food or water, electricity, drainage, and with the diseases spreading all around. I know that in this world there are good people that will help me to buy food and help others, with their donations. In Africa, a little amount of money is a big amount. If I will feed and save one child, then I will do a lot and in my heart I`ll be happy as if I saved all of them. There is huge injustice. Natural resources are so irregularly positioned. Currently, the hardest situation is in Somali Republic, where inhabitants are moving to big camps just to get a piece of bread, and there already are thousands and thousands of people without drinking water. Imagine how these mothers feel when they have to decide which child to take with them and which child should be left to die, because they can not take all of them. Horrible... Statistics say that 1% of people in the world are so rich that they are richer than the rest of the population togheter. Every 3 and a half seconds in the world one person dies from starvation, and ¾ are children.
My humanitarian mission last Summer was entirely sponsored, with all the costs, by Diners club, that made a donation of 10 000€ for education of children in Kenia. From the bottom of my heart thanks to Diners for their sponsorship and donation!
Donation of 10 000€ is allocated to 18 poorest children so that they can have free education for the next four years in high school. Those children are saved from poverty in their homes because they will have 3 meals a day, clothes, footwear and supplies for schools. Food aid will get two families too (family with 12 and family with 13 children).
With my return from Africa I didn`t stop, but I established a charity association called ˝Blue Angel˝ for charity work, volunteering and helping children and the poor ones in Croatia and abroad. First big activity of Association is humanitarian-selling exhibition with photographs of children that have been taken in villages of Kenia. The exhibiton will be held at Czech House, Šubićeva 20, on the 19th of December at 7 p.m. The exhibition of photographs will be involved in all our future projects. Please, be a part of this activity and help the children and the poorest in Kenia with your donation. Let`s provide to the children of Africa carefree childhood, the kind of that our kids know. Beside Kenia, we will do activities for children in other African countries and we are currently preparing big project because we want to help poor single mothers and poor multimember families.
Dragica Kopjar, 19.12.2011.
If we want the people to hear a message of love, we have to send it into the world.
If we want the lamp to light us we have to keep putting the oil for it.
Mother Teresa
