CURRENT MISSION

Discover Africa, ask ourselves big questions about our life and participate to North-South linkage before coming back in France

ABOUT ME

Amelie is 26, done with her studies, she will be a lawyer when we will be back in France. Thomas is 23, still a student in Master 2 « Sciences and Policies of the Environment » (Sciences Po & UPMC).

Our project is based on two phases:
-the first one started in Septembre 2009 when we arrived in Bamako, Mali. We stayed there as volounteer workers during 6 months. Amelie was working in an NGO fighting for children rights (mainly children in prison and young mothers in difficult situations). Thomas was working in the Malian administration about climate change (mainly about international negociations, you know, COP15...). We wanted to know more about Africa by staying quite a long time at the same place, in order to have a neighbourhood life, to get friends etc. such that we could feel what is African daily life.

However, as the black continent is much more AfricaS than simply Africa, we wanted as well to discover a part of its huge diversity.

That's why the second phase started in March when we left Bamako to travel through Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin (where we currently are), Togo, Ghana, and which should lead us to Namibia and South Africa before going back to France at the end of August 2010. During our travel, we try to meet people who are leading local development projects (mostly NGOs teams, but it can be entrepreneurs or civil servants as well).

We have chosen to keep a large approach: no restriction a priori; we meet projects about renewable energy, anti-corruption action, architecture, arts, agriculture etc... Of course, this choice implies that we cannot go very deep through each subject, but our goal is to better understand African societies and, more generaly, in which world we are living. We are sick with « out of context analysis », we want an opportunity to see the world as it is: complex!

PHILOSOPHY

Not clearly dertermined yet! Work in progress.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

We have heard a lot of goods things about CS from other travellers (some of whom are now friends)... so, we are very impatient to know more about it by practising!

Interests

As many as possible. :) We try to be "open-minded" and "open-eyed" to get some elements of some questions in our life (some little things like: in what world we want to life? what kind of role we want to play in? and so on).
We are very concerned by our common future: social issues, environmental degradation, global economy... we want to play our role in that big mess, and that is why we try to understand this mess.

• arts
• architecture
• traveling
• agriculture
• law

Countries I’ve Visited

Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, Togo

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, Mali, United Kingdom

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