I’m here out of sheer desperation.

We are a family of farmers running our own business, but due to global circumstances and business decisions that have proved disastrous, we have reached a dead end. We are at the mercy of ruthless debt collectors who are taking advantage of our situation and threatening to seize our assets if we do not pay them the money they are demanding for the debts (even without the knowledge of the creditors with whom we are negotiating directly). My father doesn’t show it all, but he no longer hides his despair; he can’t sleep. My mother is suffering because of this; he has already lost his savings; the old saying applies: ‘in a house where there is no bread, everyone argues and no one is right’. I am due to become a father around January and I see myself with no future, with no strength to fight. It is despairing.

But, like everything in life, only death has no solution. In this case, we’re trying to sell a plot of land and as soon as we sell it, we’ll pay off the debts and free ourselves from the extortion. We’ll have a future. We just need to sell the land. Quickly.

I don’t know if we’ll manage to sell it tomorrow or only in a month’s time, but in a month’s time it will be too late. We don’t have the money to tend the vineyard, to start the harvest, to maintain the tractor… I’m just not saying we don’t have money to eat because the vegetable patch and the animals are keeping us fed. And we don’t have the money to deal with the debt collectors who are constantly threatening to come and seize the equipment we need for our work—the tractor and machinery. As soon as the land is sold, we’ll be able to stabilise things.

I’m not asking for a gift, just a loan until we manage to complete the sale.