Monday, May 02, 2011

A Question of Trust

We've been looking at old newspaper stories about Barbara's work with the disabled here in Mojácar. She started an association called Animo which helped children with physical, mental and sensory problems, by animal assisted therapy: in short, by riding on horseback. She ran the association with around 40 volunteers - many with RDA experience - from around 1988 until the early 2000s, when her health got bad (from an accident related to the charity work). She has now started it up again and has a blogsite here. Besides the charity work (with no support from the Mojácar town hall), annual horse fairs and donkey baseball-games for around eight years, Barbara helped improve life for about fifty 'students'.
I have also worked in something pretty close to a charity - putting out a free weekly paper between 1985 and 1999. The Entertainer was meant to help inform Britons about life in Spain, and to try and support and protect them as possible. I have lived here for a long time and know a lot about this country. Over the years I have produced or edited in all over 2500 newspaper editions, including 200 in Spanish. Eventually I sold the paper - although I was never paid and am now being sued by the 'buyers' for placing some tart remarks about them on the Internet.
Were we both wrong to trust people?

1 comment:

CafeMark said...

I'm reminded of that old saying "No good deed goes unpunished." I suppose you have to weigh up all the good that is done (and any sense of achievement) against the negative stuff. We can't undo the past, but surely it's better to have achieved something than nothing? What the knockers say, doesn't really matter at the end? Best wishes..