March 2004. “Traversées” points its wandering caravan in direction of the Maghreb, West Africa, Central Asia, and China. Then, if all goes well, off to Latin America. Two buddies starting out on a two-year wandering tour. Three or four ideas twinkling in our minds like stars. One of these is to explore and collect the realities and dreams of the people of this world. A second one is to discover how different people act, think, organize, and get things moving. To set up connections, to publicize experiences. A third one, then more: to share our discoveries through video and the Internet, to be in motion, to escape from our habits and certainties, to find other balances, to leave.
The road decides where to take us
Difficult, in an authentic journey, to make these few disorganized ideas stay put. The road will soon shake them up, reveal their limits, and sort them out as we meet people on the way and take unexpected turns. First of all, the two years turned into four. Here we are today in Latin America. The road, with its surprises, its share of blues and of rejoicing, did quite a job on our plans! It pulled in its own time, its own stages, its reversals, and it changed our perspectives.
For one year we travelled through West Africa and the Maghreb
in a camping van. In that first chapter of our journey, we spent a lot of time listening to and recording testimonies of NGOs, farmers, politicians, civil servants, young people, women, and academics. All of this in free form, sometimes adding videos, which we edited into portraits for our Web site. We learned much about a lot, in areas often connected by two fundamental themes: the many different challenges of governance, and methods for collective action and strategies for change. Here and there, wishes have cropped up to cooperate with allies or new partners on these questions of methodology and governance. The work of Alliance 21 and its Allies have made it easier for us to decipher realities and discuss certain themes in greater depth. They have also fed into our debates, in particular through the experience of the World Citizens Assembly and that of the World Social Forum.
A radical change in our means of transportation!
The road is beautiful. Embracing. Always different. Erotic. We decide to continue on two bicycles, from Turkey to China. This new movement makes us want to apply it to ourselves. We take time to travel through it into our impressions, our ideas, our ways of seeing thing and of connecting to the world. Our inner world and the collective challenges become two shores between which crossings are being constantly woven. We become more focused on summarizing our interviews: we select them more, and there are fewer of them. Despite the fact that dialog is sometimes made difficult by cultural differences, our limited stays, and our rudimentary exploration tools, the stories and realities, though diverse, are overflowing with obvious facts about governance and this keeps taking us back to the Agenda for the Twenty-first Century.
And how, then, do we set our new destinations?
February 2006 to July 2008. Stopping in Latin America. We’re still on a free-wheeling route, bicycling, motorcycling, hitchhiking, or bussing. Little by little, we are given opportunities to team up with adventures that set our destinations. For example, the trade union CTERA and its thinking on the necessary conditions for sustainable development in Argentina, the methodological questions involved in citizens’ assemblies of countries of the South Cone and those of other continents, the strategies for change being promoted by different Argentine ministries and their thoughts on reforming the state and public policies.
Most of these adventures are recorded on the Traversées Web site.
Traversées Paint Brushes: Portraits of a Journey
On the Road to a Citizens Assembly
A Sustainable World and Environmental Education with CTERA
Fifteen Years of Continuous In-depth Work by the Union School Marina Vilte
One Last Word, for Now …
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Traversées Paint Brushes: Portraits of a Journey