Just before Christmas I decided to make myself a special gift, obviously ignoring what would have happened a few days later in South East Asia.
I became a member of Il Sole, a local charity organization active with child distance adoption and abused women recovery programs in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and India.
Thanks to my Uncles who are members since a long time I had the pleasure to get in touch with this organization a bit at a time and to appreciate the good work and the outstanding results of its staff and the genuine dedication of his president and founder Olivia Piro.
So in the end this appreciation naturally turned into my decision to support them as much as was in my possibilities. Then the deadly Tsunami stroke and brought his waves of destruction up to India including Pallepalem, a village in the Nellore district where Il Sole operates. It’s a village of poor fishers (Pallekars) and the 394 families living there lost all their mud-huts and their boats, so Il Sole immediately decided to act in two phases, a first emergency phase in which they provided rice, medicines, water and sheets, now concluded, and a more financially demanding second phase aiming at rebuilding the fishing activity to gradually overcome the damages caused by the Tsunami. You can visit their website and read this article published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia and decide to give your help in their project.
This is a concrete way to help the Tsunami victims in my opinion, not by SMS.
When I became a member I also purchased some of their merchandise I’m very proud to wear, but there was a really original thing I couldn’t miss: the Planiverso.
As you can read in the description it’s actually a big poster showing the world upside down with the meaning to give back dignity to the so called third world. I liked it because it was cool and with a serious meaning at the same time, but now that it’s hanging on the wall of my room I can’t but notice the area around the Indian Ocean every time I look at it.
It’s as if the Tsunami did really put upside down the world…

Update: Mrs. Piro wrote a touching letter to La Provincia about the Tsunami tragedy, which you can read in two parts, here and here. After some days of thinking I wrote my reply which you can read here. They cut it a bit, but they did it perfectly since you can read here in my blog what’s missing.