Angela studied Systems Engineering but works as a pastry chef. Nicolazza is a trader and Mayerlin, a student with a three-year-old son, has a real passion for plants. The three suffered physical or psychological violence from their partners in Bolivia, a country where sexist violence is a real scourge. It is estimated that seven out of ten women suffer from it. The three redirected their lives at the Juana Azurduy Center, an institution created 33 years ago in Sucre, the country’s administrative district, to offer legal and psychological support to victims of gender violence, through which some 25,000 women have passed.
The profile, indigenous migrants and workers, most with a low level of education. The director of the center, Martha Noya, explains that the objective of the entity is to break the cycle of violence, but not only from the legal field, but also psychological and labor. “If they do not raise their self-esteem or create a new life project, it is difficult to get out of this loop and they relapse because they live in a toxic context,” explains Noya, who puts the entity’s success rate at 40%. The project, in many cases, allows them to reorient their lives and stop being financially dependent on their abusive husbands.
Giving a second chance to women victims of sexist violence in Bolivia is one of the 480 projects in which Manos Unidas cooperates, a non-governmental development organization dependent on the Catholic Church created in 1959, which was born with a firm commitment to fight against famine in the world. It is estimated that since 1987 the entity, which has 72 branches in Spain, has helped improve the lives of 197 million people and has promoted more than 25,000 projects worth 1,200 million euros. Currently, on average, it carries out about 500 projects per year for an amount of 34 million.
“We basically fight against hunger through education or agriculture projects, which allow their protagonists to have the necessary tools to move forward”, explains Mireia Angerri, president delegate of Mans Unides in Barcelona. But her radius of action also covers other areas such as women’s rights, equity, health or entrepreneurship. The entity will help some 40 young people who have studied at a professional training center in Tororo, in Uganda, to create their small businesses or workshops and in Mozambique they have created a professional agricultural school so that young people do not have to emigrate.
In the health field, this March they will equip a small clinic in Cameroon with modern technical means and photovoltaic panels so that medical personnel are left without light in full operation. The project has the backing of the Fundació Puigvert de Barcelona, ??which will carry out concerted operations and train doctors and nurses in the country in pathologies of the male and female urinary system, in which they are specialists.
Projects that are 86% financed by the contributions of the 76,000 members of the entity. Angerri makes an appeal to incorporate young volunteers to continue helping “the most forgotten”. There is still a lot to do. More than 828 million people suffer from hunger in the world according to the United Nations Organization.
