La Voz de Galicia – December 28, 2018 →
«A child, Aylan Kurdi, moved us to do all this», the activist Òscar Camps declared during an interview for Unicef. A photograph of the Syrian boy drowned at the edge of the sea was the catalyst of Camp’s journey to save the lives of those who, fleeing wars, injustices or hunger, decide to cross the Mediterranean or the Aegean seas, defying death and guided by a single thought: salvation, survival.
It is incredible to think that an organization born in 2015, Proactiva Open Arms, has saved 59, 395 lives in these last three years. Òscar Camps, the owner of a lifeguard company in Badalona, Catalonia, was able to transform his talent into responsibility and created one of the most relevant NGOs of the last two years.
Today is the Day of the Holy Innocents, a day in which through jokes more or less macabre, we commemorate the execution of children under the age of two as ordered by Herod, the king of Judea. And I sometimes think that it would be better to devote a day such as today to society’s awareness of the thousands of innocents who disappear each year. The images are harsh, but the untold stories, the stories of each of those who succeed in getting somewhere, are stories that would probably help us understand the world around us a little better, that would probably help us learn that, even though it may not seem like it, we are not so far from those realities.
Camps said: «if a group of volunteers almost with no resources like us were capable of doing this, imagine what could be achieved by public administrations.» And if it weren’t for those who decide to step forward to change the world, injustices against the innocent would be, perhaps, more invisible.
