Claudia, our moderator from Ticino

Buongiorno Community!

I joined the Community right from the beginning. When I started working for Swiss Paraplegic Research in 2011, the Community was just an idea: the idea was to enable people with spinal cord injury (SCI) and their relatives to share ideas and experiences, to ask people with more experience, to learn from each other and to support each other.

Back then, I really knew very little about SCI. Just what everybody knows: you move around in a wheelchair. Thanks to my colleagues and the first Community, which was launched in 2012, I learnt step by step that SCI also has consequences that you can‘t see and that go far beyond the wheelchair. But just as with people without SCI: many obstacles are created by ourselves – by overcoming these obstacles, we are able to achieve incredible things. The Community can help us.

I‘m a researcher. I want to understand how people live with chronic diseases and how they handle them – and I want to learn from their experience. Together with my colleagues, I develop tools that help other people to better manage their disease and that facilitate cooperation with health professionals.

I’m going to be responsible for the moderation of two sections of the Community: the Italian and the French one. Italian is my native language. I was born and raised in Ticino. Then I moved to Romandie for my studies and finally ended up in Lucerne, where I will possibly settle. This city with its lake and the mountains, where you can go hiking on sunny days, is exactly the right city for me: I feel like I‘m on holiday when drinking Latte Macchiato at Café Luz on Sunday afternoon. And I also feel like a city dweller when going to the movies or going to a new restaurant with a new ethnic cuisine. In a nutshell: Lucerne is home... even though I still have difficulties understanding Swiss-German ;-)

See you soon

Claudia

[translation from the original Italian blog post]