Toni Rüttimann - Toni El Suizo (the Swiss) - as the peasants call him in Latin America, forty one years old, bridgebuilder, of Swiss Citizenship, polyglot. Or as the Times in London has defined him, one of the world’s more elusive heroes. He has not got a home, he carries all he needs in two small bags. One is for his personal effects, the second one for his suspension bridgebuilding. Toni helps the more destitute people to build or re-build their own bridges, often after a hurricane, an earthquake, a war event.

  The story began after seeing on TV the images of a horrible earthquake in Ecuador. Toni, at the age of nineteen, in the same night of graduating from high-school, left Switzerland to go and help the victims. He had no idea how to help, didn’t know the language, and nobody was waiting for him. Finally, in the disaster area he sees the need of the people to cross a river, desperate without a bridge that can make the difference between death and life. To help the people with bridges becomes his life’s reason to be lived. So begins his journey of 22 years, guided only by the need of the people and the forces of nature. Often just following earthquakes, floods, hurricanes he passed through Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico all the way to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and now Burma.

  Along the way he builds up local bridgebuilder teams, and supplies them with material from an incredible solidarity chain around him. Used steel wire rope from the Swiss cableways, the steel pipes from pipeline companies and national oil companies, transports and other materials are all offered to him free of charge. People on the spot build on his instructions.

  Until today Toni and his local teams have built 600 bridges, serving over one million peasants in Latin America and Southeast Asia. He does it for free, and totally independently. He speaks with simplicity, smiles and shows his stories of the bridges, over which pass people smiling and singing, too. The bridges of love and we would say of happiness. Come and hear this inspiring story!