TESTIMONIALS
"When you land in Ethiopia at the beginning of May, as a North American, you expect the weather to be really hot – come on, it’s Africa! But it’s not. It’s nice and warm and beautiful, just like its people. You don’t expect that wild landscape and all the mountains either, but they are there, proud and noble, just like its people. Its people… It is impossible to think about Ethiopia without seeing all the smiles you came across during your stay. These people are happy. Notwithstanding the poverty and the limited means, these people are happy; happy to survive, happy to work hard, happy to learn. But to survive, to work and to learn is not easy in Ethiopia. When you travel in that country, you don’t only travel geographically, you travel back in time. Sometimes, you feel like you’ve gone back 200 years… Those realities that you experience very early when you travel in Ethiopia make you realize quickly that they need help to be able to get rid of that poverty and to be able to live, not just survive. You also realize that, that help needs to come from the outside, since they obviously cannot do it on their own. When I saw the eyes and the smiles of those people when we distributed clothes with Alchemy World, when I met the students in Bahir Dar and they explained their projects, when we visited the Weyto village and Carlos explained what his vision was for this little community, when I saw Carola take Tadela in her arms, I knew that there was hope. And like Christopher Reeve said: “Once you choose hope, anything's possible”.
Rosemarie Brodeur,
Montreal, Canada
I am a lucky man…
If you read a book about a foreign country you often dream about being on the spot - and generally it remains just a dream…
In my case I read some dozen romances, historical books and essays about Ethiopia and I loved it at first sight. And now - thanks to Alchemy World - I finally went there. That’s why I feel like being a lucky man!
When you make a trip to the country of Africa’s oldest civilisation, you better forget about "tourism and enjoyable life" and make a dive into poverty, absolute poverty fair enough described by Kapuscinski’s books and bureaucratic UN’s statistics.
I visited Alchemy World's Bahir Dar entrepreneurship school and was touched by the high level of integration and education of the students both at the second and first year. Some had big dreams, others had already real projects - but you can’t make projects without dreams.
I am confident that thanks to the ambitious Alchemy World’s strategy, the eradication of poverty and the development of youth’s entrepreneurship have serious chances of success, starting from….Ethiopia!
Carlo Ghezzi,
Varese, Italy
