On a certain occasion, Andre Agassi, the famous American tennis player, made donations for the poor children of Las Vegas, because, as he himself explained: “believe it or not, in Las Vegas there is also poverty.”

Many Maimenses will never forget Many Pacquiao, not so much because of his fights but because, on Thanksgiving Day, he distributed turkeys to poor people. Mounted on a truck, he personally delivered 500 bucks to the needy people of Miami.

Many Pacquiao

Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos (founder and majority shareholder of Amazon), has donated almost six billion dollars in a very particular way: the institutions to which she has donated money, did not ask for it. And they can use it as they see fit. In this way, she donated 30 million to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, 15 million to a college in Nebraska, 18 million to the YMCA of Charlotte (whose executive president received the check with tears in his eyes), and to many other organizations until completing the 5,800 million of dollars.

We also have Bill and Melinda Gates (29.8 billion dollars donated throughout their lives) and Warren Buffett (42.8 billion), called the “Oracle of Omaha”, for his accurate predictions in their investments in the stock market.

These are donations generously made by famous people and I’m sure there are many more people who are not well known or make headlines but just as selflessly donate their money, time or work and we should thank them for this.

But who would be willing, apart from donating their money or their time, to live with these people who are going to benefit from these donations? who would be willing, not only to live with them but to feed them, clothe them, educate them, raise them, in other words, to adopt them? Surely the number of people would be greatly reduced. And within this small number of people, who would be willing to adopt a boy or a girl with serious health problems? Probably the fingers of the hand would be enough to count them. It is within this small number of people that Angelina Jolie is found. Apart from her three natural children she has adopted three children in Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam (one in each country). The girl she adopted from Ethiopia suffered from malnutrition.

But she has not been satisfied with adopting the children. While shooting his film Tomb Raider in Cambodia, she got to know first hand the situation of extreme poverty in which its inhabitants live and was mainly interested in a special group within them: the displaced (also called refugees), those who are forced to leave his home to save his life, away from violence and armed conflicts.

Apart from Cambodia, she has visited refugees in Sierra Leone and Tanzania (2001), Pakistan (where she met Afghan refugees and donated a million dollars), Thailand (2002), Ecuador (met Colombian refugees), Kosovo, Kenya, again Tanzania (with Congolese refugees, 2003), Russia, Jordan (with Iraqi refugees), Egypt (with Sudanese refugees), United States, Arizona (where she visited different facilities where asylum seekers are detained), Chad ( with Sudanese refugees, 2004).

She also traveled back to Thailand (meeting Afghan refugees), Lebanon (war refugees and cancer patients), Pakistan again (2005 Afghan refugees), Kashmir (meeting those affected by the 2005 earthquake). ), Haiti (2006), India (with Burmese refugees), Costa Rica (spent Christmas 2006 with Colombian refugees), again Chad (where she donated one million dollars, 2007), Iraq (with Iraqi refugees).

In 2007 Angelina announced the founding of the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, an organization that provides free assistance to child asylum seekers who lack legal representation. She contributed $500,000 to the financing of this center.
In 2010 she visited Haiti and donated a million dollars to help the victims of that year’s catastrophic earthquake.

She has been named Goodwill Ambassador by the UN refugee agency; the king of Cambodia named her a citizen of his country and she has received numerous awards for her humanitarian work, but she has declared that she cannot close her eyes to the suffering of so many people, that she wants to help and that any of us would like to receive help if we were in a similar situation.

As a UN ambassador, she has pledged to fight sexual violence against women in war. Her first film as director “In the Land of Blood and Honey”, released in 2011, especially denounced the mass rapes in Bosnia.

I think what she does is admirable. Angelina Jolie is not a saint, she has flaws and virtues like all of us, but I think she has a very beautiful body and an even more beautiful soul.

REFERENCES: Internet, Wikipedia, TIME magazine and the newspaper El Nuevo Herald.