My name is Hèctor Prat, a passionate for the gorillas since I was a child, perhaps because I was born in a city that had as its maximum representative our missed Copito de Nieve, Snowflake. I have always admired their strength, beauty, intelligence, way of life, eyes and sight. That's why after reading sad news about their endangered situation daily, I decided to do my bit and help them the best as I know. Being a computer programmer I thought of an internet project.
I created SOS Gorilla in 2008, with the hope of raising funds in an unusual way. Contributors can help our friends the gorillas by buying portions of a photo of a gorilla embracing her baby, which will be discovered pixel by pixel. The donor’s name and web link are shown as the visitors move their mouse over the sponsored pixels.

My first goal was to find a good picture and an author who would like to grant it to help the cause. I was lucky enough to find a great photographer, Darren Kumasawa, a gorilla admirer who provided to the project one of his best photos.
I got the necessary support from my wife Raquel and my daughters Ona and Xènia, who were very appreciative and encouraging when I spent hours at home designing and programming the website. Once the core was done I needed to find the support of entities, not just to get some promotion but to give credibility to the project in a world that can generate as much distrust as the Internet. Barcelona Zoo and especially its primate conservator, Dr. Mª Teresa Abelló, were very excited about the project from the beginning and they were responsible for getting reinforcements as from EAZA.
The next step, very important, was to decide how the donations were going to be invested. It was then that Dr. Abelló suggested Berggorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe. She talked so passionately about their activities and her friend Angela Meder, whom I was fortunate to meet in Barcelona, that I did not hesitate to decide it was the best destiny for the donations.
And finally, the only missing factor were the donors, other animal lovers like me who want to do their small bit to save this extraordinary species. You cannot sit and wait for them to come, so I wrote to website owners, newspapers, radio, friends, social networks, until the first results arrived. By July 2012, the project had raised more than 1,000 euros and more than 5,000 pixels of the photo were sold - a remarkable achievement considering the difficult economic situation we are experiencing.
As soon as donors finally will discover the picture completely, they will have raised 96,000 euros. I continue chasing a dream and who knows if it will ever become a reality for our beloved gorillas.

Hèctor Prat