I am fortunate to be a member of the Rotary eClub Colonne d’Ercole based in Palermo, Italy.
The following article (in Italian) was published in the April 2022 issue of Rotary Distretto 2110 Magazine and highlights the club’s ongoing efforts to help Ukrainian refugees.
Usually I try to approach positive topics, knowing that life has many difficulties, I do not like dark thoughts.
But there are times when I can’t ignore what’s going on. And that’s been happening lately.
When a war begins on the border with your country (Romania), from the first moment (after the panic passes) you think about what you can do to help.
In Romania there are many volunteers who receive refugees, many donations and many people with a big soul who make their homes available to foreigners who have lost everything and run away from bullets and tanks.
Together with my Rotary E-Club Colonne D’Ercole, as always, we mobilized very quickly. To make sure I could help in the best way possible, I contacted those from the Union of Ukrainians in Romania. That’s how I found out that there is a massive lack of medicines in the cities attacked by the Russian army.
The club made a donation with the help of which I bought medicines, disinfectants but also mattresses, sheets and pillows.
Then I started a long-term project in which my colleagues from Palermo, together with the “Ordine dei Farmacisti di Palermo” collected donations of medicines from pharmacies located around the Sicilian city. After being packed in boxes, they were sent to Romania, to UUR representatives who, in turn, send them to the border with Ukraine. From there they are taken over by the Ukrainian Red Cross or the army and transported on humanitarian corridors. This action continues today. The boxes are sent weekly.
So far, donations have reached Vinnitsia City Clinical Hospital No.1, Kharkiev Hospitals and the Mykolaev Regional Oncology Center.
In addition, the company I work for, APOC Aviation, from the Netherlands, donated a large sum of money to buy, this time, the much-needed antibiotics for the Kharhiev hospital. (Kharkov).
There are many ways to help in this war and in this humanitarian crisis. But if you want to work with us on the Colonne D’Ercole Rotary Club, you can contact me here on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.