Best Wishes for a More Just, Supportive, Human New Year, Which Sees Us Come Together to Build a Healthier World. 

We will always look back on 2020 as a watershed moment between the old and the new.  
 
It has been a difficult year, one that has taught us to look at the world in a global way, to see how fragile its borders are, and how fragile borders between us as human beings are too. 

It was a year of enforced physical distance but also of coming together, solidarity, humanity thanks to the awareness that the world’s problems are shared. If one person is left behind, then everyone is left behind. 

It was a year when EMERGENCY felt the need to be there, because, though we may have been up against a new disease, we had already seen the potential fallout of unequal access to treatment. 

The end goal of our commitment is the same clear and practical aim it has always been. We may be spread all over the world but we want to decrease distances and above all inequalities. By offering the same level of free, quality treatment, without discrimination, in welcoming, efficient healthcare facilities where profit does not rule, we defend the right to health for all and, with it, dignity for all mankind. 

Our hope has always been to one day become redundant, but until that time we need to become more and more useful, in treating, training, informing and protecting people. 

And that is what we have done at all our hospitals around the world, stepping up prevention measures to make sure indispensable treatment can go on regardless of Covid-19. 

We did it for people who had fled torture and poverty, battled the Mediterranean Sea and above all battled growing apathy. 

We did it for our clinics in Italy, where we added new projects, managing the intensive care unit at the Bergamo field hospital, supporting shelters and community projects, and delivering packages of basic goods to people who found themselves in dire financial straits as a collateral effect of the pandemic. Last but not least there was our recent work in Calabria. 

In such difficult times, we think of all our supporters, old and new. Thanks to you, EMERGENCY has managed to continue its work and take on new challenges.  

The sheer force of shared commitment spread as far as South Darfur, where we reopened our Paediatric Centre in Nyala this year. 

A lot of courage and determination was need in 2020, but we need to find even more reserves of it to stop us hurtling down the slippery slope into separate worlds that shut themselves off and ignore each other’s needs. 

We must demand a different world where everyone’s rights are at last seen as a common good, just as health is.  

So we will never stop being there, hoping to continue counting on the support of so many people. 

Best wishes for a more just, supportive, human New Year, which sees us come together to build a healthier world. 

– Rossella Miccio, President of EMERGENCY