So, what’s the main deliverable? Well, we plan to follow a team of PhD and grad students from California to visit and connect with educational institutions around the world. The most tangible deliverable is a documentary on how the common practice of education can be a bridge that transcends cultural barriers.
The goal is to take 5 trips with a camera team over 5 summers and tell the story from our expertise, experiences, and relationships– 5 years to connect with people and build trust, 5 years to gather information and launch ideas, 5 years to follow our own personal/professional growth.
If you’ve been following our story, the agenda is clear. We want to connect with places as inaccessible as they may be through building academic bridges. To an audience of intellectuals, each perspective will have a different take on what the “problems” are in the world, and we’re simply bringing information through our experiences to aid in finding the best approach, if any.
So, why not tell our story? If there’s a message worth sharing and there’s no reason not to tell it, then there’s no reason we can’t. I mean, we’ll always have “other” things to do, but we won’t likely find anything new if we just do what everyone else is already doing.
Here’s the (semi) finalized itinerary for trip #1:
- August 3rd – Cabo Delgado, visiting orphanages
- August 21st – University of Fort Hare, known for having Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela as alumni
- September 4th – Wits University, in the big city of Johannesberg
- September 17th – Return
We plan to accomplish the following by the end of the month:
- Launch indiegogo
- Submit grant proposal
- Purchase plane tickets
What I can tell you all now is that in Cabo Delgado, we will be living with orphans and helping out with the primary and secondary schools there. There’s talk about launching a university there, which is why they told us to come see what it’s like. At University of Fort Hare and Wits we will be connecting with graduate students and faculty, giving guest lectures, and connecting through research interests, as we tend do anywhere. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead 5 years down the line. That is about how long it took us to get our PhD’s after all 🙂
