Running for Your Life: Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Couple That You Should Know About

Their names are Christopher and Regina Catrambone, two thirtysomethings who live in Malta, who founded the dark niche of all niches in today’s grave new world: a war-zone insurance company, Tangiers International, that provides kidnapping, terrorism and death and injury coverage to journalists and military contractors.

They also have been in the forefront – before the headlines of the past several months – of a consciousness-raising high-energy civilian approach to the migrants-at-sea crisis in the Mediterranean.

You might miss their story. I would have, if not for a random reading of Outside magazine. Typically, the magazine is not for me. Too much about mountain climbing, extreme sports, pricey and wonky gadgets that, if anyone has read even a shred of this blog will know I don’t cotton to the high falutin when it comes to exercise or fitness.

Occasionally, though, Outside will surprise you. With articles like this one by Joshua Hammer, whose “The Bad-Ass Librarians to Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts,” will be published by Simon and Schuster next April. See this link: http://bit.ly/1FDwnwt.

Chris, of Louisiana, and Regina, of Italy, might not have everyday routines like you and me. They live millionaire lives on an island in the Mediterranean. But they couldn’t stand by and watch as the crisis worsened in those waters. The Catrambones should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize because they answered the call, the one we all feel when we see the pictures on television and ask how in the world can we ever get ahead of this crisis, or even make a little bit of a difference. I mean it’s all in the article, including their self-financed 131-foot rescue vessel MV Phoenix, but here, to me, is the moment of truth. From whence Nobel Peace Prizes are born:

One day near Lampedusa, an Italian island south of Malta that has become a  purgatory for tens of thousands of migrants, Regina was sunning on the top deck  [of their yacht] when she noticed a winter jacket bobbing in the water. The Catrambones asked their captain, Marco Cauchi, a search and rescue commander moonlighting from the Armed Forces of Malta, about the incongruous piece of clothing. It was, he replied, almost certainly the jacket of a refugee. Cauchi told them how, during one military rescue, he’d watched a migrant sink beneath the waves a few feet from him. “There were 29 people on this boat that capsized, and most could not swim,” he told them. “I saw those big eyes open, and I saw him go down so fast. I couldn’t reach him. It stayed with me always.”

 As Hammer tells the story, the Catrambones refused to look back. They jumped on board and since that day in July 2013 have worked to save thousands upon thousands of these desperate souls. These are the kinds of actions that should be more widely known. A Nobel Peace Prize, an evening’s visit with Stephen Colbert. Couldn’t we just dream of a world in which “Keeping Up With the Catrambones” was must-watch television?

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War