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Friends of Columbia
Country background:
Colombia officially the Republic of Colombia is a country in northwestern South America. Colombia is bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the northwest by Panama; and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. Colombia also shares maritime borders with Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Colombia is the 26th largest nation in the world and the fourth largest in South America. It has the 29th largest population in the world and the second largest in South America, after Brazil. Colombia has the third largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico and Spain.
Colombia has a long tradition of constitutional government, and the Liberal and Conservative parties, founded in 1848 and 1849 respectively, are two of the oldest surviving political parties in the Americas. However, tensions between the two have frequently erupted into violence, most notably in the Thousand Days War (1899-1902) and La Violencia, beginning in 1948. Since the 1960s, government forces, left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries have been engaged in the continent's longest-running armed conflict. Fuelled by the cocaine trade, this escalated dramatically in the 1990s. However, the insurgents lack the military or popular support necessary to overthrow the government, and in recent years the violence has been decreasing. Many paramilitary groups have demobilized as part of a controversial peace process with the government, and the guerrillas have lost control in many areas where they once dominated. Meanwhile Colombia's homicide rate, for many years the highest in the world, has almost halved since 2002.
Colombia is a standing middle power with the fourth largest economy in South America. It is very ethnically diverse, and the interaction between descendants of the original native inhabitants, Spanish colonists, African slaves and twentieth-century immigrants from Europe and the Middle East has produced a rich cultural heritage. This has also been influenced by Colombia's varied geography. The majority of the urban centres are located in the highlands of the Andes mountains, but Colombian territory also encompasses Amazon rainforest, tropical grassland and both Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. Ecologically, Colombia is one of the world's 18 megadiverse countries.
Organization:
Friends of Colombia for Social Aid is a UK-registered Charity, No 274778, founded twenty seven years ago by Mrs Lucia Holguin de Vazquez Carrisoza with the purpose of helping deprived children in Colombia to receive better medical care. Their mission is to help to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged children of Colombia by donating medical, educational and other necessary equipment to institutions that have been set up to help these children.
They are constantly receiving many requests for help from children's hospitals and institutions which are very poor and cannot cope with the demand of services due to lack of government funds. Here is where FOSCA is doing its utmost to help and though in a small degree we are sending medical equipment to aliviate those needs.
Friends of Colombia consider requests for assistance from public hospitals with the help of medical consultants; we establish priorities according to the need for equipment and the inability of the hospitals to acquire the equipment from their own resources. We also establish follow-up mechanisms to ensure the equipment we provide is being properly used.
Project Overview:
Apartado received a incubator and other equipment for their children's hospital. (More information coming soon.)
Event where money was raised:
First DLA Film Festival, we raised £4,500 and welcomed 450 visitors