The Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort, Spa & Casino 4* has collected 18.928 Euros to finance a project which allows the creation of a sustainable water supply system for protected families; this project is carried out by the NGO ‘OrphanAid Africa’ in the village of Ayenyah, situated at a distance of about 40 km from Accra, the capital of Ghana, and it is about a supply net which works by a sand filter system, necessary to guarantee water supply in this rural region.

The donation is the consequence of the solidarity of the hotel’s guests and employees who by their small voluntary contributions are helping to improve in a substantial way the precarious life conditions of the village’s inhabitants where the lack of drinking water represents a serious threat for the people and where hundreds of children suffer from extreme situations and live in poverty lacking even the most basic resources.

It is already several years since the Lopesan Hotel Group is cooperating with ‘OrphanAid Africa’ a humanitarian organisation working in Ghana with the aim of offering protection, education and sanitarian help to orphan children who have been abandoned, being most of them sick, the major part of them infected with Aids. In coordination with UNICEF and the Ghanaian government, this organisation applies its resources to help the community and to strengthen family assistance and protection of the most vulnerable boys and girls of this West African country. This NGO is of the opinion that a family environment is the best place to take care of children and that keeping them a long time in institutions may have a negative influence on their development; apart from that there are many cases in which not even their basic rights are being respected.

VOLUNTARY WORK. The cooperation between the Lopesan Hotel Group and ‘OrphanAid Africa’ has been canalized in the past years through Carmen Delia Pérez de la Cruz, a woman from Gran Canaria who has been a member of the management of various of the Canarian hotel group’s premises and who has worked for two years as a volunteer in the centre in Ayenyah. At present Mrs. Pérez de la Cruz is the humanitarian organisation’s representative for the Canary Islands.

The Lopesan Hotel Group support to this non profit-making organization is given in three different ways: by voluntary contributions from employees and managers; by collecting money through saving boxes at the hotel receptions; and by the campaign ‘Towels for Life’ which intends to create the hotel guests’ sensibility for the environment and the need to save water; contributing that way to the good aim by paying a symbolic amount of 1 Euro when changing the dirty pool towels for clean ones; these amounts go integrally to the mentioned NGO.

It is important to remember that according to the UNICEF Report called “Situation of the World’s Childhood”, 49% of the children from sub-Saharan African countries die before they reach the age of five. The study says that “these children are easily infected by respiratory diseases or diarrheas which in developed countries do not mean any danger or can be fought by vaccination”. UNICEF is appealing to the international community to do much more in means of easier accesses to treatments and prevention in order to be able to fight better the consequences of pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria, as well as severe and acute malnutrition and AIDS.

www.oafrica.org