We are so happy and proud that we got an award from the Maria Cristina Foundation.
We got the award as a Family, for our activities for and with the Maria Cristina Foundation and its members.

But our daughter Mara got one additionally, for herself.
I like this a lot and I am proud of it and of Mara, who really earned this.
I am proud because I know what it means to be 14 years old, like Mara is now.
This is the age where you think about how you look, how to get a new phone, how to have fun etc. It’s the time when you sleep long and you go to bed late, you like to order food and you like to go out.
Mostly you are thinking about yourself.
Helping others, trying to change at least a small piece, is not in the scope of most 14-year-old girls.
Preparing 200 packages for the children in the slums, bringing them all the way to Dhaka and then distributing them in a small room without any air condition and with over 40° C for hours, is certainly not an easy task.
It’s also not an easy task to search for exhibition subjects and to work on them the whole day.
It is not easy to talk to children and parents in order to identify needs, trying to help as much as you can. This is definitely not easy.

But what’s really, really hard, is to make an interview with a 6-year-old boy, who has to work in a samosa-shop in order to help his family instead of going to school or visiting a Kindergarten.
It‘s very hard to see small children without shoes, playing in mud so deep like you’ve never seen before, or behind a mountain of trash or in water as black as a night without the moon.
It’s very hard to walk with a 7-year-old girl wearing an old dress and telling you that she doesn’t have such a nice dress like you do.
It is very hard to be invited to the house of a family with 4 children, and to be offered to sit on their bed as they all live in only one room, with exactly one bed and nothing else to sit on.
It’s very hard to smell the scruffy trash all around you for hours, while you are walking and trying not to the step in it.
It is very hard to take families who never left the slum their whole life, to a trip outside of Dhaka, and you yourself just came back from a 30-day USA trip.
It’s very easy inviting a 9-year-old boy to have breakfast in a restaurant, but it’s not easy watching him eating cornflakes for the first time in his whole life, while you have at least 4 different kinds of cornflakes at home, with and without chocolate.
It‘s very hard to buy shampoos for a 10-year-old girl, because otherwise her mother will cut her beautiful hair because they can’t afford any shampoos. At the same time your own hair is nice and dyed.
For Mara having been there and trying to change at least a small part of the world, for trying to put a smile on the face of at least one child is what I am proud of. Proud of Mara and the reward that she earned.
Bravo Mara!