The Dany Foundation is named after Dany Estevão, a
Capeverdian boy who lived till the age of nineteen years old. After a long and
hard struggle of 15 months he eventually died of the consequences of leukaemia.
Dany was a promising student coming from a poor family background. His mother
had passed away four years earlier. He was an evening student attending tertiary
schooling in São Vicente, Cape Verde and preparing himself to eventually go
study in Lisbon. During the daytime he had a job to pay his studies and to help
out at home. Grace Beatriz, a friend of Dany, tells the story:
"Through some mutual acquaintances I heard about Dany
and his deteriorating health. As I got even more details about his situation I
felt an increasing connection with Dany and everything he and his family had to
endure. I very much wanted to help in any way possible although I myself live in
Haarlem in the Netherlands. Dany was eventually transferred to a hospital in
Portugal because the doctors in Cape Verde could not diagnose his disease. Three
days after he arrived there, I flew to Lisbon from Holland to visit him in the
hospital. He did not know me and I had never met him before, but from that day
on I never left his side.
A long battle began. A battle against cancer. The doctors
had diagnosed Dany as suffering from acute leukaemia. One year I have fought
with Dany against this terrible disease. But it was an unequal battle that Dany
ultimately lost on the day he died, the fifth of december 2003. Besides physical
pain Dany also suffered a lot from being all alone during most of his stay in
Portugal, an alien country for him in which he felt very isolated. Dany put some
of his experiences on paper and I promised to write a book about his struggle
and his sorrows based on his own words and also on the diary I was keeping
during that time. Dany also wanted this book to help put the spotlights on all
seriously ill people in Cape Verde like himself who can't be adequately taken
care off in their own country. This book has been published in Cape Verde in
april 2005 by my own financing. And I have personally promoted this book and
it's message among the Capeverdean migrant communities in the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy and the U.S.A. Everywhere I came I got a warm
reception and people were very much moved by the contents of this book.
It
was Dany's dream to build a pension in Lisbon especially for Capeverdean
patients. A place that could function as a safe haven, so that these patients
would feel at ease and maybe even temporarily forget about their illness and
their worries. I want to continue this dream. I feel that after the writing of a
book about Dany's suffering and the international promotion of this book that
the new Dany Foundation will be a further step in making this dream eventually
come true."
Dany
Estevão
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