My place in the world

What leads a young lawyer to change his successful career in Madrid for a life dedicated to others in Ethiopia? For Paco Moreno, author of these moving pages, his future was well established: a graduate in law, he set up his own office and from a very young age enjoyed a privileged economic situation. However, by chance, or perhaps motivated by a need to give something back in exchange for his good fortune, he travelled as a volunteer to Ethiopia and was never the same person again. He observed there that the nomadic tribes of the region do not have enough water and that the girls can not go to school because every day they have to travel a long way along the scorching desert sand to fill their containers. And he saw how those people, babies, children, pregnant mothers and the elderly, died from malnutrition or from diseases that he believed had been totally eradicated. Paco Moreno then insisted on returning more and more frequently, and finally founded an NGO, Amigos de Silva, in Afar, the hottest region in the world. In return, he has found his place in this world. This book, winner of the first edition of the Feel Good Award, is a testimony of what it means to give something back, and it details the reasons why doing so can make us happy.

Paco Moreno (Madrid, 1974) is a cum laude Doctor in financial and tax law from the University of Granada and a Master's degree in Human resources management from the Chamber of commerce of Madrid. He worked as a lawyer in Madrid and was a professor in different Masters in real estate law and tax law at the Complutense University in Madrid, as well as a professor at the SEK University. He is currently the president and director of projects of the NGO Amigos de Silva in Ethiopia, in which he has been working since September 2005, by carrying out health, nutrition and drinking water projects for the most disadvantaged population. He is also a speaker at the What Really Matters values congress, participates in seminars, courses and other presentations about development in conjunction with the University of Almería and is a regular contributor to the Ayudare Foundation.