BORN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

To my team and my family:

I am not ''Santa Teresa of Calcutta'' as my good friend Gloria suggested once. I believe everyone should do something for this country to live better.  Everyone should inspire the community with his/her labor. Everyone should give a part of him/herself. 

I did not discover the boys I worked with, as somebody asked me recently. I invented them like the Invention of America of O' Gorman. I work every day as my roots taught me long time ago.

I was born at the end of the world, a place called Fionnay, ideally the English people Summer Alps' retreat at the beginning of the last century... And here I am.

Fionnay used to be and still is in the middle of no where. It was never really part of ''Switzerland,'' neither of the valley it belongs to. The values acquired by living there in the 60s are quite foreign to the Swiss I know today. Fionnay was just so wild, maybe not like Siberia, but somewhere similar.  I grew up six months a year under tonnes of snow isolated from the world. The road to the village was often closed in winter.

The summer was just a place between silence and solitude.

Growing in such a place has been a privilege in my formation. I believe there was only one life, the one ''within.'' I grew up strong  believing everything was possible. You don't survive so many months isolated without developing a strong relation with yourself. I learnt the Art of the War before knowing the book. Humility, integrity, courage, hard work, responsibility, passion and perseverance are some of the values I owned to this place, my teammates, my parents and our leader at the time, Madame Denise Gabioud.  She was an incredible teacher who was avant-garde in her concepts. She taught us teamwork as nobody really taught me after that in Switzerland. She hated mediocrity and was so exigent that success was the only option.

I own a lot of myself and my character to this wild place. I am not Santa Teresa and I did not discover the boys. My mission with them is what I learnt from the nature I grew up and from this very special teacher. And as Sun Tzu says: Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.

part 2. (coming soon)