11 Dec 2010

This Christmas you can Help Us to make 2011 a better year for many!!

Mediterranea Project: Three King's Day 500!

Mediterranea's New Members 
Dear Members & Volunteers;

I hope you would agree that our Mediterranea family have achieved much in just a very few years. Working in five continents with projects as diverse as: providing endoscopes to Cuba; medicine to Congo; supporting the homeless of Mallorca; constructing and supporting schools in Ethiopia; supplying a tractor to an orphanage in Ghana; bringing children from Africa to Son Dureta Hospital for specialist operations; food packs to Mali and Senegalese citizens in Mallorca... the list, as you know, is very long.

Through the efforts of our volunteers and the donations of our members we have treated illnesses, comforted the dying, fed the hungry, clothed, sheltered and educated hundreds of children, saved lives, put smiles on small faces, joy in hearts and given hope where there was none.

In this time we have learned much, established good contacts and built a reputation for being a humanitarian organization that follows through and delivers on our promises. I feel that we are now at a stage, with the experience we have gained and expertise we have acquired, that we can take on more projects and bring support, comfort and hope to even more who are in need.

In order to do this we need to significantly grow our membership. For this reason I am initiating Three King's Day 500!!! I would like us to take our membership to 500 by King's Day (6 Jan 2011). An ambitious goal... yes... but one I'm sure we can achieve.

To succeed in this we will need the commitment and help of every one of our existing members. Each one of us knows well what we have achieved at Mediterranea. Each one of us knows the incredible value of €10 or €20 (approx. $13 or $26) spent in the third world. Each one of us knows how our direct and unencumbered way of working quickly reaches the heart of the problem. Each one of us has our own circle of friends and acquaintances. Each one of us is in the best position to explain what we do and what we can achieve.

I would ask you therefore, over these next few weeks of Christmas and New Year, this time of contemplation and giving, to take the opportunity to speak with friends, tell them what we do and ask them to join us. I'm sure you'd agree that €10 ($13) a month is very little to ask in return for the joy and hope it can bring. If each of us can enlist at least one new member - or even 3 or 4 new members - over this period then we will achieve our goal of 500 members by Three King's Day.

Membership forms can be downloaded and additional information about this newest Three Kings Day 500 Project can be found on these websites:
www.MediterraneaHelps.org OR www.MediterraneaNGO.org

As a small, close and giving community we have achieved an incredible amount in a very short time. We have changed the lives of thousands of people. Allow us, through this project, to bring help and hope and life to many many more.

Michael Stoma
Giving, gives meaning... and life.
Help Us Give Help

To assist with this project I have included some points below that you might find helpful, entitled "Why Mediterranea?" and have given a few ideas for increasing our membership. At the very end I have attached a link to get to our membership form which new members will need to fill in and return to us. I have added a new box "How did you hear about Mediterranea ?.........." where your friends can enter your name if they wish. 

Why Mediterranea? 
  • Direct Help - we ensure that all money given, 100% reaches and supports our projects directly. We have no staff, no salaries, we run on volunteer power alone. Our volunteers fund themselves and their travel expenses wherever they travel.
  • Community based and supported - Mediterranea is centred on Michael and Victoria Stoma's surgery in Portals Nous, Mallorca. We are a small, personal, community organization with members supporting and helping us from mainland Spain and all over the world.
  • Personal Feedback - because we are small we are able to give very personal reports on the work we are doing. In our emails and on our blogs you can read personal accounts of visits, feedback and successes. You can see photos and hear directly from the people we are supporting. You can see directly how your support and donations are making huge differences to peoples lives.
  • Focused and effective - we are an NGO and because we have no government support we have no constraints or red tape. We are able to act quickly and effectively, going to the heart of the problem. We take on small and medium sized projects, focus our efforts and resources and deliver on our promises.
  • €20 a month ($26) - is all it costs to feed, clothe, educate and protect a child in our care.
How can we increase our membership? 
  • Whenever you can, it is best to meet face to face with friends and acquaintances to tell them about what we do and to ask for their support.
  • Christmas is a good time to make contact with old friends. Perhaps while catching up with them on email you could tell them about Mediterranea and ask for their support. €10 ($13) is little for us but makes a huge impact in the third world.
  • Perhaps give your child or children a membership to Mediterranea as a gift. In this way, introduce them early in their lives to the concept of giving. Allow them to see, nearly firsthand, how others less fortunate live and can be helped. They will receive regular emails and links to our blogs, where they can keep up to date with what we are achieving. They can of course volunteer and help directly, we already have many children and teenagers helping.

Ways to Help

Contact us at Mediterranea via email at anytime:mediterranea.ong@gmail.com
The Mediterranea Organization is based in Portals Nous in Mallorca, Spain. If you wish to collaborate and help support our non-governmental, non-profit organization, volunteer only organization, we offer our download-able form as a Word document here (just click below):

Mediterranea Membership Form
Mediterranea Support & Membership Form (click to download)

Or you can collaborate with us using PayPal 
(note: currently info is in Spanish):
 

The teams that form Mediterranea are comprised of volunteers. All the money we get goes directly to the projects. Website enhancements, all online tools and forms, and special emails (such as this newly formatted one seen here) is given to Mediterranea free of charge. We thank all of those who help us give help!

Our Calendars Have Arrived !





Happy December !!

The Mediterranea calendars have arrived !!

They are beautiful calendars that will surprise you.
They show our hard work over the past few years.
They show our feelings.
They show our close relationship with Ethiopia.
They show our future projects.
They show 12 months full of hope.

We wish you a very Happy 2011...with our calendar on your wall, of course.

Calendars cost only 5 Euros each

HELP US TO ACHIEVE A DREAM


We hope that the donations received from the sale of the calendars will allow us to construct and maintain a school for deaf and blind children and teenagers in Ethiopia.


It is a very important project, these children and teenagers do not have the opportunity to live a life with dignity, in fact they live confined, without diagnosis, medical attention or adequate stimulation.


We want to open classrooms for children aged 3 to 12 and workshops where the teenagers can learn a trade.  Also we believe that some will be able to partially recover their vision or hearing with proper medical assistance.


If you would like to order some calendars please send your name, address and telephone number to us at :
apadrinamediterranea@gmail.com and we shall quickly send you by 'blue mail' (where you pay postage on arrival) all the calendars you need, to sell or to give as presents.  The postage costs vary depending on the volume.  The more you request the cheaper will be the postage per calendar.

Remembering Part 2


We are going to register ourselves as an NGO (non government organisation) in Ethiopia…and so start a new stage for Mediterranea in that country, one that we hope will go very well.

Here we continue our recollections of our first steps in the land of the Queen of Sheba…

We first discovered Abugida School in 2007.  At this time we had chosen a lady as our first representative in the country.  We decided on her, thinking that a woman would be best suited for the position, perhaps having more social sensitivity in dealing with women and children…

Well in the case of this woman none of this turned out to be true.  The best that could be said for her was that she must have been a direct descendent of Elizabeth Bathory, the bloodthirsty countess of Transylvania.

The lady in question had lived many years in the US and told us that she had returned to her country to help her people and that she had founded a small NGO.  Our second ‘marvellous’ experience at the hands of local NGO’s…

Abugida was at that time a small and ruined school that was not able to pay its teachers.  It had 40 children but no way of supporting itself.  It had been constructed by a Dutch NGO that had subsequently left the country and had abandoned the school to its own luck.

Here our intrepid representative had founded her own fiefdom: dedicating herself to threatening and blackmailing all who didn’t comply with her aims and demands.  From us she stole some money, which luckily was less than it could have been as we discovered it quickly.  Meanwhile she was bringing people from the US (who she attracted through her contacts) to Abugida to see the school and the children and of course to relieve them of their money, money that she kept, naturally.

Since then only members who contribute directly to the school are allowed to visit Abugida.

When we sacked her she didn’t take it very well and we experienced scenes like the smashing of the windows of our car by a woman sent by her.  Her intent over the years was to sink Abugida and with her started the threats such as “it doesn’t matter how long it takes but I will send someone who will cause you a lot of harm, in Ethiopia it is very easy to have an accident” etc etc. It only remained for her to say, “You are an easy white target”.

This dearly loved tradition of threats continued with our next representative.
But that’s another story… 

5 Dec 2010

Volunteer Nurse for Abugida


If you are a qualified nurse, have pediatrics experience and like children. If you can speak English, enjoy planning, organising and putting the house in order.  If you would like to go to Abugida school in Akaki Kaliti, Ethiopia as a volunteer to assess the school nurse in her daily duties.  Then please send your cv to:

mediterranea.ong@gmail.com

It is essential that you are or become a member of Mediterranea.  We can offer
free board and lodging at the school.

The Vegetable Garden



Greetings Mediterranea from our vegetable plot.

We are delighted to publish this post from our school in Akaki, Ethiopia because these young men have turned themselves into our favourites, into our teacher’s pets!! 

They are extremely enthusiastic and according to their teachers arrive much earlier than usual to work in our new vegetable garden.  It is work that they seem to love.  What’s more they are successfully growing lettuces, cabbages, carrots and beetroots.




Anyway, here they are proudly posing while hard at work.  Mubarak, who is the leader of the team, is in the centre.  

Once they have gained some more experience they will be able to take on the plot on the other side of the school, which is much bigger.  

Before the creation of this vegetable garden the boys and girls who work in the garden passed their time in the classroom doing very little.




Because of this success we are now trying to expand this ‘Vegetable Garden Project’ to other schools in Akaki. 


PS The date showing on the photos is incorrect, they were taken just a few days ago.