Silvana Ramos, building the world through marriage and the family"Yes, I am Gustavo Ron's father", says with good humor this hotel businessman, who has turned to the management of volunteers to accompany vulnerable and often lonely people. Because his son Gustavo is a well-known Spanish screenwriter and film director. Nor Gustavo Ron senior (Zaragoza, 1945), is unknown. He chairs the board of Nadiesolo Voluntariado, the fourth largest in the sector in Madrid after Caritas, Red Cross and Manos Unidas, and before that he was, for example, CEO of Hoteles Husa and founded Café y Té.
We recently met Gustavo Ron, the father, "I am doing a voluntary 'tournée', that's why I'm from Nadiesolowhich is a volunteer NGO, with two objectives. To make people aware of existing initiatives; and to recruit volunteers, not immediately, but in the medium term, because we need them. "We have 2,000," adds Ron, "but before the pandemic we had 2,300, and we went to 1,500. Now we are going up. There is more and more social demand for accompaniment, that's the reality".
About the beginnings, Gustavo Ron says: "This is a lay foundation, which does not belong to any creed, but it must be said that this foundation was started in 1995 by a group of supernumeraries of Opus Dei, and they continue to promote it. Our board of trustees is made up of a majority of supernumeraries, without this fact being persecuted, because there are trustees who do not belong to the Work, and they are people concerned about what it means to accompany people who are alone.
"Thank God, I was born into a Catholic family," explains this Aragonese. "My father had belonged to the Luises, he was from Malaga, and my mother, born in Zaragoza, was fundamentally a Pilarista, as befits a good maña. We went to the Cardinal Xavierre school of the Dominicans in Zaragoza, for whom I still have tremendous respect and appreciation. My father died when I was 15 years old. This served to direct my professional future, and I ended up at the School of Hotel Management, which placed me in the world of services, which has a lot to do with my current dedication at Nadiesolo. In other words, we are here to serve, and if we serve and fall in love with it, we have a great time working".
Gustavo Ron explains that he got to know Nadiesolo (Development and Assistance) through its then president, Rafael Izquierdo, a civil engineer. "He was an absolutely endearing person. We met in Fatima, and one day he told me: 'come with me'. Later, when Rafael had passed away, the women, who were the majority on the board of trustees, told me that I had to be president. Ron reveals that "I have accompanied volunteers to visit users, on excursions, to places of leisure, etc., and I have absolutely fallen in love with the task. I defend the work of Nadiesolo's volunteers, because they are enormously available people, and at the same time enormously grateful. And what happens over time, and not much, is that the volunteer becomes a friend of the user, and vice versa, an available friend".
Last year, the organization's volunteers dedicated 83,000 hours of accompaniment through its programs (see nadiesolo.org). "There is a program that is perhaps the most beautiful and easiest to understand, which is to take disabled children out for a walk. These kids, under 13 years of age, because the older ones have a different program, are taken out for a walk one Saturday a month by a married couple with their children. This is 'family volunteering', beneficial for everyone, and also formative".
We talked about the so-called 'Support for homeless people'. "People who live on the street have dependencies, almost all of them, and they are people who are difficult to live with. The Madrid City Council has three residences, shelters. I know the two shelters we serve, and there we go to spend time with these people: playing cards, chatting with those who want to, and with some we become friends. I remember an excursion to Avila with a group of 50 people. I have experienced what the trip meant, the hotel, the visit to the cathedral, the walls...., we have also been to Segovia, Toledo, etc.".
"This is important for these people because they feel loved, because we give them affection, because I shook hands with 50 people I don't usually shake hands with, and at that moment I regretted not doing it often". They have such a good time, and at least provisionally they feel included in society", Gustavo Ron affirms.
