Helping flooded areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia with a lil’ bit of Zumba!

In May of this year, torrential downpours destroyed parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (one of my numerous homelands and the country in which I was born), Serbia and Croatia. The damage caused is devastating – hundreds of homes gone, thousands of people displaced, infrastructure demolished.

Foreign media have moved on, onto new calamities that need coverage, so you will not see much of this devastation in the news anymore. But some estimate that it will take a decade to rebuild these countries, get them back to “normal,” “pre-flood” state. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done – and much help is needed.

I am trying to do the little that I can. I have been organizing charity Zumba courses, with all the proceeds collected going to relief organisations working in the region. So far we’ve collected 700 EUR in two sessions – and we’ll keep going. Thanks to the wonderful support from Holmes Place, who are letting me use their state-of-the-art facilities for free, and the Best of the World Network, who is most generous with their contacts, I am sure we will be able to do even more as these events grow in the future!

I spent some time trying to choose the charities that I would like to support, and I’ve chosen the following four because I do believe they are trustworthy and that they do good work. They are:

Pomozi (BH)
http://www.pomozi.ba/site/

Mozaik (BH)
http://mozaik.ba/bs-lat/

Novak Djokovic Foundation

Home

Croatian Red Cross
http://www.hck.hr/en

We have two events coming up at Holmes Place, Vienna International Club:

SATURDAY, July 19 at 12:30 pm
SATURDAY, August 23 at 12:30 pm

So please come. And bring friends. We will dance, we will sweat and we will have fun – all for a great cause. I look forward to seeing you there!

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Note about the transfer:

For the sake of transparency, I attach the record of all the transfers made to the organisations I supported.

I rounded up the first donations to 480 EUR so that each organisation could receive 160 EUR. I was not aware that the transfer fees would be so high, so I bore additional costs of 32 EUR and 34 EUR for transfers to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, respectively. You will see that the total transferred is 546 EUR, but unfortunately 66 EUR are fees which I covered personally (all money collected did indeed go to the organisations). I learned a lesson from this and made the subsequent donations with my credit card.

Flood relief donations_May 31 2014:  EUR 480

Flood relief donations June 15 2014:  EUR 225

Flood relief donations July 2014: EUR 128 (rounded up to 135)