In my life, I’ve been through a lot, starting from family abuse, then moving on to bullying, finding myself living on the streets, and facing exploitation at work. And it’s precisely because of this that my secret dream regarding this project, once all the more personal dreams like one day being able to have a little house in the mountains with my family, for example, have been set aside, has always been to provide help to those in need.
Currently, we do it through music, by leaving all our work available for free to anyone and ensuring that donations for our survival are entirely voluntary, and, at least this is our hope, through the thoughts we share daily on social media (especially Facebook).
But the dream, the real one, the one I hold deep inside, is that one day this project can earn enough to allow us not only to survive thanks to the kindness of people but also, thanks to that kindness, to begin a certain type of charity work.
The first idea
At the beginning, the idea was very simple: to set a earnings cap for donations, which would have been €250 per month (which would have been enough for us to continue existing), and beyond that, to start donating 25% of everything to charitable organizations, increasing the percentage based on earnings up to 50%.
We never implemented this “plan” for several reasons, including the fact that the service we use to receive donations is still not 100% complete and does not allow us to set monthly goals (and I keep bothering them constantly to add this “feature”), and the second reason being that, after doing several searches, we didn’t find a single organization among those that accept donations that seemed truly trustworthy to us.
So, does that mean we abandoned the idea forever?
Not at all.
The evolution of the idea
Many years ago, when I had just turned 18 and had literally run away from home to escape from a less than idyllic family situation, I found myself volunteering, in exchange for food and lodging, at a Protestant school where I had to perform various tasks, including washing dishes and helping in the kitchen.
There were countless problems within that institution: I remember one day, while in the kitchen, I found that the mayonnaise and ketchup packets had expired, reduced to small solid bricks, and when I reported it to the person in charge, I was told, against all morality and logic, that “by law, they could still be distributed up to a certain number of weeks/months after the expiration date” and that I should keep quiet about it.
I also remember that every day, especially on weekends, kilograms and kilograms of perfectly edible food were thrown away, so one day I asked why instead of throwing it away, we didn’t distribute it to the homeless.
The response was laughter and a contemptuous, sarcastic comment about how I “needed to grow up” because “you can’t just go around feeding people however you like, you need permits that cost a lot.”
This thing has always stayed with me, and thinking back on it still fills me with dismay to this day.
I think it’s also for this reason that my secret dream, the most personal one that concerns only me, for this project, once I realized I didn’t trust any association, became to be able to earn enough money to obtain this damn permit and then, month by month, set aside, purchase healthy food, not necessarily from supermarkets but directly from sources, and then distribute it to people in need for free.
And the more days pass, and the more I see the food sector of this nation heading towards synthetic poisons, the more I wish I could realize this dream.
A dream is just a dream
Like everything on this planet, unfortunately, cursed money, pieces of devil that only make things worse, are a necessity. So, what is a dream is for now, obviously, just a dream with a taste of unattainability, especially if we consider that to this day we can barely keep ourselves afloat, with many, many sacrifices… but dreams must not fade away, they must give us motivation and hope for the future… so I hold onto it tightly, waiting for the day when it could become reality.
Do you have a dream to fulfill?
Until next time!
All the best,
Luca
