Welcome to our latest blog! It was the ancient Greek philosopher Seneca who once said that “Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind”. Well this quote couldn’t have been more appropriate for us at PerMondo this week, as we have finished projects for organisations in five different countries! I hope you’ve got your passport, suitcase and travel mug at hand, because you’re about to go all over Europe!
Let’s begin our trip in Spain, home to PerMondo, and also to our first new organisation of the week: the Union Romani, which is based in Barcelona. This NGO is dedicated to supporting Spain’s gypsy community, working together with the International Union Romani on activities designed to gain recognition of the gypsy culture. We’re very grateful for Ann Southwick, who has completed our debut project with this organisation, translating into English a very informative article about Brazil’s former gypsy president Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira.
The second new organisation of the week is located France. We are proud to have taken on the first two projects for French organisation Association Gibraltar 2017. The NGO is organising a bike ride of an astonishing 5,000km in April and May next year in order to raise awareness for disability and raise money for two associations: “Ensemble avec Nolan” and “FégréAction”. We would like to thank Magda Gautier, who has recently finished translating the event’s promotional booklet into Portuguese, and also Paulo Lopes, who is currently translating several pages for the Association’s website into the same language.
We’d like to welcome both of these new organisations and we hope for a longstanding collaboration with both!
We’re now heading north to the Netherlands where, after almost two years, we have resumed our collaboration with the Marijke Foundation, a medical organisation which has developed an advanced technological diagnosis for the diseases Giant Cell Arthritis and Polymyalgia Rheumatica. We´d like to thank Tania Mariani for proofreading the Foundation’s recent book, which goes into detail about the advantages and uses of their diagnostic tool, the Symptomatrix. We look forward to seeing the publication of this book in the near future and we wish the organisation well in their efforts to improve the efficiency of medical diagnosis and treatment.
Let’s hop across the southern border into Belgium, headquarters of the ECOG (European Childhood Obesity Group), an NGO which brings together experts from all fields to tackle the issues of child obesity. Arianne Lopez and Nerea Aguilera Garcia from Spain, and Leonardo Rafael Silva and Melissa Guimaraes from Portugal have been in charge of translating some recent medical papers from English into Spanish and Portuguese respectively. Many thanks guys!
Now we’re going back to the Mediterranean, but this time we’re in Italy, where we have offered our services to NGO Associazione pro Terra Sancta. Antonia Cordignano has completed translating from Italian into French an article about the work of some of the NGO’s members who are stationed in Greece in response to the refugee crisis in South-Eastern Europe. In addition, both Antonia and Tamara Unterleiter have translated into Italian and German respectively of a piece about the Middle East Community Program (MECP), a project led by the Associazione to improve people’s understanding of the Middle East in Israel and Palestine.
So, having darted here, there and everywhere throughout the blog, I think we should return to Spain, where we began our journey. A huge thank you to all our volunteers who, as always, have completed all projects to a very high level, and we hope to work with you all in the near future. As for the NGOs themselves, thank you for giving us this opportunity to help you help others, we wish you all the best in all the projects and work you do, and we hope it’s not too long before we work alongside you again! I don’t know where PerMondo’s services will be needed in the coming weeks, but I think it’s safe to say that we do our fair share of travelling!
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