The very next day, March 26, George Menamparampil, the Congregation’s official coordinator for responding to any serious disaster in any part of the world, wrote his first mail to the Provinces. He announced an email address (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for all correspondence regarding this crisis. Mails sent to this single address are delivered to each member of the core-team that handles the crisis. It provided various formats for sending in news, collection of data, information on the availability of resources, requests for resources, etc.
News reports, stories, photos, videos and data of all kinds started flowing into the coordinator’s office. A team (shoestring agency) in the USA digests the data and information and prepares a briefing that the coordinator shares around the world. The coordinator of Don Bosco Network (DBN) constantly maintains a table of resources. It shows in real time the resources requested by any structure of the Salesian Family anywhere in the world, the resources available and the resources already distributed. This table guarantees the absolute transparency of all the resources collected and distributed.
Fr Menamparampil, the coordinator at the Generalate (Sede Centrale) in Rome, goes through all the material that comes in from all corners of the world. He selects what he considers the most important for everyone to know from the news, data, stories, photos and videos. He prepares a package of them in four languages and emails it out to about 300 individuals and structures of the Congregation. A package of this sort has been sent out every single day starting 26 March, non-stop, including weekends, festivals or holidays.
Since the beginning of the crisis, the Rector Major of the Salesian Congregation, Fr Ángel Fernandez Artime, has sent video messages to the whole Salesian Family to invite them to commit themselves to respond to this threat.
Message April 1 – Italian - English - Spanish
Message April 10 – Italian - English - Spanish
Numerous other videos have been produced by various provinces and uploaded on the YouTube channel Don Bosco Solidarity VS Covid-19.
A special international video was produced with the participation of people from some 70 countries around the world. The video explains briefly the work done by the Salesian family in the war against Covid-19. The links to this video are: English - Spanish - Italiano - Francais - Portuguese - Polish - Korean.
Photos, videos and short messages are also uploaded on a wall of Facebook: Don Bosco Solidarity Vs Covid-19.
