EDUCATIONAL PROJECT


While traveling around the world, Laura and I constantly received help from  people of every race, religion and nationality. So we began looking for ways to give back and make a difference in visited communities. We believe that traveling is a quest far beyond the pursuit of personal pleasure.

In 2009, we started the Educational Nomadic Project: a program with ideological anchor in the intrinsic goodness of human being, cooperativism and cultural diversity.

What is it? We carry in our backpacks a portable projector, which was donated to us by the People's Health Movement in support of our project. Thanks to this device we make photographic projections and lectures in schools in towns, villages, suburbs and communities we visit on our trip around the world. These lectures aim at fighting media generated stereotypes through fist hand accounts and photography.

We received the institutional endorsement and recognition INADI international network Matador.
  




After turning on the projector we show it all, the friendship of strangers from every culture and religion that, without knowing us, invited us to their homes, stories of uncertainty and kindness on the road, Buddhist temples and mosques... We display images of every imaginable landscape, and also pics of camels and Antarctic ice, markets in Central America, the Shuar of the Amazon and the colorful Hindu women who presented her bracelets to Laura. Thanks to all this cultural diversity  beauty, poetry and solidarity still abound in the world!

Why we do it? The purpose of these events is to:

* Generate empathy and inter-cultural understanding.
* Turn the trip into a fun and accessible educational platform for
    learning.
* Photographs illustrate everyday life, cultural diversity and gestures of hospitality received along the way.
* Transmit the message that a better world is not only possible, but already exists. (and does not resemble the world of crime, war and catastrophes that TV shows)

AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF TRAVEL IN 60 COUNTRIES, WE HAVE SOME EVIDENCE OF THAT!










What is our counter-proposal to the media discourse? Promote an unmediated horizontal knowledge between peoples. In the crowded suburbs  of Cali, Colombia, adolescents assume that all Arabs are terrorists. And teenagers in Afghanistan have heard that all Colombians are drug dealers. How do you get out of this circle? By bridging the satellite and news presentators, and carrying our message of peace school by school. In addition to rescuing the goodness of human beings, we point to the real demons, spreading social and environmental issues as the mega-mining and the struggle for water, spraying and gender violence.


FINDING AND HIGHLIGHTING HUMAN ESSENCE EVERYWHERE... 






so we  DON`T DOWNLOAD IT FROM CNN...






How do we finnance the project? We receive no funding from any organization or government. The Educational Nomadic Project depends exclusively on the sale of our books. Get one here!

We prefer to coordinate resources and appeal to engaged readers than waiting for an almighty sponsor that may impose limits to our message.


                                         
                                             At the orphanage Miski Wasi, in Sucre, Bolivia.  



                              Donation of a computer in a Shuar village. Equatorian Amazon.



¡Thanks for helping us work towards understanding!

¡Buenos Caminos!

Juan y Laura