Dominican champion swims across the world to promote MDGs

Dominican champion swims across the world to promote MDGs
June 2, 2010, 3:42 pm
By Tamim Elyan / Special to Daily News Egypt

CAIRO: When Dominican Republic and world ultra distance open water swimming champion, Marcos Diaz, was invited at a high school United Nations model to speak about UN Millennium Development goals (MDGs), little did he know that two years later he would be swimming across the world to promote them.

"I didn't have a clue what the MDGs are when I was invited to the model," Diaz said.

At his second stop in Egypt to cross the Red Sea from Asia to Africa, Diaz is swimming across the five continents in a period of four months to bring public attention and create awareness of the eight UN MDGs.

The MDGs include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing global partnership for development.

"I put a mission for me since the start of my career to always be involved in beneficial programs; for that, we established the Marcos Diaz foundation in 2004 to help children in the Dominican Republic," Diaz told Daily News Egypt.

Diaz and his team were looking for water ways to connect the five continents; however, according to Diaz, they needed a cause to channel these efforts into.

"I asked my friends about the MDGs but they also didn't know about them so I had to learn about them before speaking and I found them to be incredibly great and that's when I said that this should be the cause of our project," Diaz said.

"For the first time in thousands of years, all countries of the world agreed on something, so we thought we can implement our project in the 10th anniversary of the agreement," he added.

Through his foundation, Diaz presented the project to the UN two years ago and got their approval to endorse the initiative.

"Swim Across the Continents" consists of four crossings: the first from Papa New Guinea (Oceania) to Indonesia (Asia), completed two weeks ago, while the second is from Coral Bay, Jordan (Asia) to Taba, Egypt (Africa) scheduled between the June 9 and 11 depending on weather conditions.

The third cross starts from Point Cires, Morocco (Africa) to Tarifa, Spain (Europe) and finally from Big Diomede, Russia (Europe) to Chulotka, Alaska (America).

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