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INSPIRING SUNDAY STORIES
How my Desire to Help Others Opened Many Doors
The greatest rewards come from serving others. Your biggest opportunities may come from most unexpected places when you decide to simply contribute in some way.
Have you ever done something just because you could help? I am sure you have, as it is an inherent need in most human beings to help others. Some will say it is because we humans have a very big need to be needed. Others will say that we want to be in good company, so we want to make other people happy as well. Who wants to be surrounded by miserable people? Yes, yes...it doesn’t always seem to be the case. I know miserable people often act like they want to see others suffer, but I am sure even they don’t consciously want it!
My simple answer is— we help others because it makes us happy!
Some 10 years ago I was doing a market research for a project of mine. My happiest memories come from Karin — a small village in Croatia where my father comes from. I am very passionate about nature and life in countryside in general. Seeing the abundance around me, I just couldn’t figure out why a lot of people lived in very poor conditions. I went on a 2 month trip all around Croatian countryside. I met a lot of incredibly friendly people, spoke to them about the issues they face daily. The forced sale of their primary goods to middlemen or dominant player on the market for next to nothing, the inability to sell products to the bigger markets, the constant migration of young people to bigger cities and abroad…to the point where there was nobody left to work even if you had a functioning business.
At the same time I started volunteering for an NGO working in rural development in one of Croatia’s poorest regions. I translated all kinds of content from Croatian to English and French, but mostly tourism — focused material. I started working with them because I simply could help. In the end I created a development plan, with typical SWOT analysis of one poor region I considered for a pilot project and finally I outlined clear, actionable steps that we can take to improve things, capitalizing on the region’s…
