Hello, my name is Julian and I want to share with you part of my history and how a friendship has transcended the struggles of my family and me, becoming something bigger and very important, while ignoring, among other things, the barriers that politics impose in third world countries and the rest of the world.I am a Venezuelan, and I fight every day to give my family the best.
In recent years, the crisis in our country has pulled the population down to a level of poverty comparable only to African countries in their worst moments. Venezuelans have had to alter our standard of living drastically, and in order to survive, we must be willing to do almost anything. I, particularly, have reached the point of entering the Amazon jungle in search of gold illegally, a place where I lived with natives of the area, where I got sick twice with malaria, ate poorly, had no communication, and went without seeing my family for months. I had to expose myself to these dangers and risks in order to provide enough money for my family to meet our basic needs (food, medicine, clothes for my children, diapers, and medical care).
I will summarize the last three years of my life in this way. Since October 2017, we were surviving by mining Zcash and other coins of the Equihash algorithm, until we sold our inn in October 2018. On that property, it was also our house. We sold it because the business no longer produced anything due to the operating costs being greater than income. After selling, we decided to invest in several masternodes of different projects, of which only one (SafeInsure) remained stable in the bear market of 2018. The others lost a significant amount of our meager holdings.
I am a generous person, and I always help my friends when they have problems. The situation in Venezuela made my closest friends feel very insecure as to whether they would be able to continue providing their families with food and basic needs, so I helped them all as much as I could.
On March 28, 2019, I was on Safeinsure’s General Discord channel talking about the crisis in Venezuela when a person who was interested in my situation startet to chat with me. Our conversation was extended to DM where I could better inform him about who I am, about my family and community, how many people I help, and what my current situation was. He told me that his name is John and after listening and asking many questions, assured me of his intent to help me.
While we were talking, John explained to me how different the Divi Project community is from the Safeinsure community, and actually from ANY other crypto community with which he’s been involved. I was curious, so I asked him to explain more about the Divi Project, their team and community, and we spent a lot of time talking about it. I asked him to invite me to the Divi Project Telegram channel which he did right away, where he introduced me to all those present and told them about my situation.
The response from the community left me speechless, to say the least. Almost immediately, some VIP members met and made the decision to donate DIVI funds to set up a Silver Divi Masternode for me. One of the other members, Kasper Neist, donated a year of hosting the VPS and assisted me with setting everying up in the most secure way possible. Other members of the Divi Project also made numerous donations, which exceeded 340,000 DIVI in total.
Even now, almost seven weeks later, each day I am still amazed and grateful for the generosity of some people I had just met and who live thousands of miles away, all over the world, who took an immediate interest in my situation and my efforts to help other Venezuelans. That day was when I told myself that I wanted to be part of a project like that, so I offered to be an active, contributing member of the Divi Project community and they welcomed me with open arms.
I am an active Twitter user with more than 1600 followers. Day after day, I had been searching among people for those with generosity and love towards others, and at least a little empathy with the situation in my country.
Some members of the Divi Project even encouraged me to develop an idea that I had in mind a while ago, a humanitarian aid foundation that would allow more people in the crypto community to help Venezuelans suffering in this crisis. With their encouragement and the help of a few other supporters and friends, I formed the Cryptowild Foundation, so that through it I could have access to donations from the world of crypto, in order to allow me to help the people most in need here in my country and immediate community.
The creation of www.cryptowildfoundation.org was succesful thanks againt to the members of the Divi project. They put me in contact with Michael Nye, who is very interested in and sympathetic to the difficult situation in Venezuela, and he offered me an interview on his podcast, which I gladly accepted.
On the day of the interview, very early in the morning, I was the target of a robbery by scammers who posed as members of the Safeinsure Dev team for several days until they deceived me. In the scam, I lost all the SINS and their rewards that had been helping me feed my family and my close friends. Needless to say, the feeling of panic I felt that day, knowing that my family was at risk of starving, was the worst of my life. As I had the interview with Michael Nye in the next couple hours, I had to recompose myself. I called my brother and we talked until I calmed down a bit.
By this time, John had already informed the folks of Divi Crew of the theft of my SINS, something that I was ashamed to mention because I was very upset with myself.A few days later, I learned that John had created a private Telegram group called "Divi Love for Julian" which was meant to help me, my family and the families I help, and privately invited a host of Divi Project community members who had shown great interest in our difficult situation.
As if this were not enough, John came up with a plan to donate at least $150 a week in crypto assets so that I could meet our basic survival needs, solve my financial situation, and recover from the theft. Within a few days they made a donation to me of about $750 worth of crypto, which was yet another surprise that left me speechless once again. Other than John, I have no idea who any of these people are but my feelings of gratitude towards each of them knows no bounds. The help of the Divi Project allowed me to continue with the foundation to aid the most needy that I had in mind for the town where I live, and for Venezuela in general.
Following the advice of John and the other members of the Divi Crew, I created a Discord channel called Cryptowild Foundation and invited them there as advisors. Michael Nye sponsored the Cryptowild Foundation website and lent one of his designers to carry out the creation of the site www.cryptowildfoundation.org. Once again Kasper Neist paid for hosting expenses and domain registry.
The objective of Cryptowild Foundation is to provide help to the most needy people in Venezuela in the form of food, medicine, basic services, education, clothing, and even toys for children. We plan to do this using donations from the crypto space, which eliminate the barriers imposed by the Venezuelan government and provides complete transparency to those who donate to our cause.
The members of the Divi Project have been a pillar of strength by which I have been able to endure the hardships of these last weeks, during which many things happened. I am very grateful that most of the good things during this time came from their efforts and that they also helped without expecting anything in return.
To the kind, loving, supportive people of the Divi Project, I say this: the debt of gratitude that I have with you cannot be paid.I just hope that my sincere friendship, my efforts to benefit the Divi Project, and the success of www.cryptowildfoundation.org are enough to show how truly grateful I am.
I am Julian Alvarez, a member of Divi Crew.