Hi, my name is Jodiette and this is the gluten-free cards project. I am trying to help Celiac's travel more safely and with less anxiety by working on Celiac translation cards that are super detailed and that you can show to restaurants as you travel around the world. I was diagnosed with Celiac disease in the early 2000s. It was a time before people were very aware what the disease was and really the strict necessity of what it entailed to eat. Very differently than how I was brought up. I used to work as a lawyer but I quit my job in 2008 to take a one-year sabbatical that seems to have turned into a new career. And in the process, I've been writing mostly about travel and food. Now food is really important to a lot of us as we travel but as a Celiac I really had to pay attention to what I was eating and the ingredients in it and make sure that I wasn't going to get sick. There were many places that still have no understanding of the disease but also no awareness of what gluten is or what it's inside. And I couldn't accurately communicate the restrictions that I had. This came to a head in Japan and I was there for a month and got sick quite a bit including when I had a guide and when I used translation cards in Japanese that were very simple and said that I couldn't eat wheat, barley, rye and soy sauce. So when I came back I built my own cards that were quite long and accounted for cross contamination and local food names. And I sent a reader out after I had paid to translate it so that she could try it out and let me know how it went. But not only did she not get sick but she actually had a fun story where she tried to order an amame and the chef told her no which was a surprise since they are usually gluten free. But it turns out that they have been cooking the amame in the water from the udon noodles and that was enough to have gotten her sick for sure. But also the cards were detailed enough that he was able to communicate and tell her no. It was amazing. I was so happy when I got that email and I decided you know what I'm going to keep going and I'm going to keep building these cards and hopefully other people who want to travel with celiac disease could do so more easily. Each of the cards not only talks about cross contamination but it's researched by a food loving celiac and they're translated twice and the second translator goes through to make sure each of the translation words that are used are extremely rigorous because small mistakes are enough to get anybody sick. Ultimately these were created to be as simple as possible. You download them straight to your phone. They're sized for smartphones since many of us travel with smartphones these days. And my goal really was to help people with celiac disease not have to stay whole because they were too worried to travel. Understandably it's a real anxiety inducing thing to not know if you can communicate your food restrictions safely. So I really hope that these cards help demystify that process and give people a little more confidence to go out and explore while knowing that their stomachs will hopefully be okay. you