Prelude…

We first realized that we shared the same point of view about the lack of comprehension that one has towards other cultures.

Something we share: the will to live things differently and in an original way, to go far away as to meet people who live, think and experience things in a way that has nothing to do with ours. To get many points of view about life. This will to discover.. life goes along with the will to share experiences and maybe if we can do it, to help anytime we will be able to do it

The opportunity: we decided to seize an opportunity offered by Audencia to stop our studies for one year in order to lead a ambitious social project all by ourselves. Our project and our motivation interested them and here we are today, telling you our story.

Objectives:

Shoot, write, learn and share…

On November  28th, 2011, we’ll fly away for a world tour with those major points:

• 3 friends:

• During 8 months

• Through 43 countries

• backpacking

• en CouchSurfing :

Couchsurfing is a non-profit making association where people sign up from all over the world to host, ask for a home for a few nights or simply have a dring where they go by a city they don’t live in. This is not only a way to travel cheap or to avoid tourist traps: this is moreover an opportunity to meet locals.

• with 5 major projects:

•  Photo-reporting: the aim here is to shoot people as they live everyday, to be able to show them as they really are and to seize emotions rather than bringing back pictures that every tourist can bring back from Brazil, India, Australia and so on. We really want to get quality pictures and we will organize some exhibitions as soon as we get back home.

• Interviews: it is true that pictures sometimes  say more than words, but we also want to collect interviews all around the world, to ask people we will meet how they feel, think and live. Moreover, one of our objectives with these interviews is to make a portrait of France as it is seen from all over the world. So as to draw it, we will ask people wherever we go how do they imagine France or what do they think about this country.

• Hop&Trip: This project was initiated by Hélène to allow students from Nantes to go abroad while they wouldn’t be able to afford such trip by themselves. They will be hosted by volunteer families during their stay. It is obvious that those families have got to be checked to make sure the students can stay safely with them, and that is what we will do. This year, all the volunteer families are living in Benin. To help the project grow, we will also try to recruit new families for this project.

• Sharing our experience with young students: all along the project, we will give news to a class of young kids and answer every questions they may have about the world in general or a particular country. We will answer them through our site and by recording videos of us giving them explanations and little fun lessons.

• Helping foreign students to learn French: we also work hand in hand with a French institution whose goal is to teach French to young people who fled their country and often never went to school. The goal here is to make them eager to learn French and to make their lessons interesting and funny. We will particularly work on prejudices about every country in the world: countries we will go through but also countries where they come from, in addition to prejudices about French people.

Étonnants voyageurs ! quelles nobles histoires
Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds comme les mers !
Montrez-nous les écrins de vos riches mémoires,
Ces bijoux merveilleux, faits d’astres et d’éthers.

Nous voulons voyager sans vapeur et sans voile !
Faites, pour égayer l’ennui de nos prisons,
Passer sur nos esprits, tendus comme une toile,
Vos souvenirs avec leurs cadres d’horizons.

Dites, qu’avez-vous vu ?

Baudelaire, “Le Voyage” (extrait)

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