Jeddah Municipality Sets New Guinness World Record with Volunteers Forum

1,277 participants contributed to setting a new Guinness World Record for 2025. SPA
1,277 participants contributed to setting a new Guinness World Record for 2025. SPA
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Jeddah Municipality Sets New Guinness World Record with Volunteers Forum

1,277 participants contributed to setting a new Guinness World Record for 2025. SPA
1,277 participants contributed to setting a new Guinness World Record for 2025. SPA

The Jeddah Municipality organized the third edition of the Million Volunteers Forum, where 1,277 participants contributed to setting a new Guinness World Record for 2025, earning the forum a Guinness certificate.
Director General of Community Responsibility at Jeddah Municipality Eng. Hattan bin Hashem Hamouda explained that the third edition of the forum focused on several topics and workshops aimed at raising awareness on the importance of volunteer work.
Hamouda emphasized that the event aimed to highlight the efforts of Jeddah's volunteers and their role in supporting government agencies, positioning the city as a model for attracting proactive volunteers.
He added that Jeddah Municipality launched many initiatives to support volunteers that contributed to achieving this exceptional accomplishment.
The Jeddah Municipality set its first Guinness World Record in 2023 by sponsoring the largest mural in the world made of plastic covers.



119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
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119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

Two months away from what she says is her 120th birthday, Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, a great-grandmother from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is rushing to be recognized as the world’s oldest living person by the Guinness World Records.

The institution currently features another Brazilian, Inah Canabarro Lucas, a nun from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul as the oldest living person at 116 years, but Deolira’s family and doctors are confident that she will soon take the religious woman’s title.

“She is still not in the book, but she is the oldest in the world according to the documents we have on her, as I recently discovered,” said Deolira’s granddaughter Doroteia Ferreira da Silva, who is half her age, Reuters reported.

The documents show that Pedro da Silva was born on March 10th 1905 in the rural area of Porciuncula, a small town in the state of Rio. She now lives in a colorfully painted house in Itaperuna, where her two granddaughters Doroteia, 60, and Leida Ferreira da Silva, 64, take care of her.

The grandmother is also supervised by doctors and researchers who are interested in how she outlived the average life expectancy in Brazil, which currently sits at 76.4 years, by more than four decades.

“Mrs. Deolira, in 2025, will be 120 years old. She is in a good general state of health for her condition, she is not taking any medication,” said geriatric doctor Juair de Abreu Pereira, who checks up on Pedro da Silva frequently and is assisting her family in the process with Guinness World Records.

In a statement, Guinness said it couldn't confirm receiving Pedro da Silva's application, because it receives many from people around the world who claim to be the oldest living person.

Major floods in the region almost twenty years ago destroyed most of Deolira’s original documents, her doctor said. That may pose a challenge for the official recognition of her age.

Even if her age is not precise, Pedro da Silva is certainly older than 100 years, according to Mateus Vidigal, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo who has studied her case as part of a project to understand the super elderly population of Brazil.

“Mrs. Deolira has not been excluded from the study, but there is this fragility which is the lack of documentation that is approved by those organizations,” Vidigal said, referring to vetting institutions such as the Guinness World Records.

Pedro Silva’s healthy diet and sleeping habits are key to her longevity, according to Dr. Pereira. To this day, she has a good interaction with her family and likes eating bananas.

“I wish I could get to her age and be like that,” Ferreira da Silva, her granddaughter, said. “While we have high blood pressure and diabetes, she does not have any of that.”