“I worked with Patricia at Ampla (now Enel Distribuição, Rio de Janeiro) on several cultural transformation projects. Her contribution was truly remarkable: for her diversity, intensity, and passion in everything she undertook. She was 100% emotionally and professionally involved in all projects, and her unique perspective proved invaluable in driving the transformation of our company.
I am happy to see that today she is leading her own organization and I’m convinced that her work will have a great impact.
Taking care of how we relate to water is very important due to the critical moment that our civilization is facing, with an environmental crisis generated by ourselves!
If water had to choose a spokesperson, I have no doubts that Patricia would be one of the main candidates! She can convey what water needs and wants to tell us.
Patricia is aware about the impact we have on the environment and the importance of discovering how to connect with other living beings. She knows that it is necessary to use another type of language. Water asks us for a connection that goes beyond words! And she understands the language used by water, by the environment, and can translate it with an enviable passion and energy.”
"I remember well the day I crossed paths with Patricia Furtado de Mendonça. It was at a conference in Cascais about the sea and the protection of the oceans - the Ocean Talks, organized by Galp at the Cascais Museum of the Sea - in which I had the honor to participate as Executive Secretary of OSPAR, an international convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Northeast Atlantic. This happened at a time when I was organizing the OSPAR Ministerial Meeting that would take place in Cascais, and I immediately invited her to give the opening speech, which was eventually postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic. Patricia's inspiring strength lies in her ability to genuinely express her truth, which is also ours, that of all human beings and living beings on this planet: that without water there is no life, and that without healthy oceans, there can be no healthy life.
Naturally, like many other colleagues used to these events, I participate in more or less technical and/or scientific debates, structured in a similar way, resulting in conclusions, documents, reports, action plans. Patricia's presentation was overwhelming because the revelation of the simple truth appeared to everyone right there: protect water because we are water. Thanks to her brilliant communicative ability and putting everything she felt into the words she expressed, Patricia set the tone for the conference. She was the beginning, the inspiration, and the conclusion. Everything is so simple and obvious that it is not always seen. Patricia reveals the simple and the true, speaks to everyone and to each one simultaneously, reminds us of that primordial connection with water, the cradle of life.
I was moved by the authenticity and fullness of her purpose, by the strength of her conviction and very grateful to meet someone who can reconcile and convey knowledge, science, culture, and life, invoking our mother-water, the sea of our childhood, how much we are water.
I deeply believe in the noble action of Acqua Mater led by the excellence and professionalism of Patricia in the fight for the preservation of the sea and marine biodiversity, as well as in her fundamental role in disseminating knowledge about the ocean and - as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, the poet of immanence, of the concrete and the visible things, would say - in helping us all to "discover the presence of the real".
