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The near future. Climatic catastrophes, social and economic crises have rushed humanity into what's called ''the dark era'' which ended with the birth of a new societal model, the conglomerates. World is now ruled by giant companies that have rendered it stable as humans carry out their modern lives devoid of conflict. Yet, as uncertainty creeps in, some events are to disrupt the present order. Fear rises, conglomerates' future is threatened. One thing seems to link all these troubles: Atlantis. Reading this will make your day better. #Atlantis 2.0 - اتلانتس٢.٠ #webcomic #WEBTOON

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Chapter XXVI - Gafsa - Tunisia

Chapter XXVI – Gafsa – Tunisia

Back from Lebanon, I went straight to Alessandro and Faten. My bag was full of drawings from bukra ahla to give to the kids of one friend’s school in the capital. Being back from the middle east wasn’t easy. There, I was working full time from morning to evening,  here in Tunisia,  everything was going back to slow mode. .. the people, the projects,  the work … everything. ..

    the government…

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I arrived in Jordan by plane, the only way to get there from Lebanon.

Even a little hour away from Beirut, Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom is completely different. It was like arriving in another world made of dust, sand, dry rocks and wind …

The starting point of the desert …

    Here in Jordan, I get to know a completely different situation than in Lebanon.

Both countries have a similar history with Palestine refugees (as they’re bordering the frontiers of Isreal and Palestine) from the late 1940′.

You would expect to find a fucked up situation in this country surrounded by both, Syria, Iraq, Israel and Palestine …Though, Jordan seems to be a calmer place for the people fleeing their homeland… The kingdom feels somehow more stable and peaceful than the little explosive religious and political patchwork that defines Lebanon.

Therefore, here, at the door of the desert, people from many wartorn countries are taking refuge: Syrian, Iraqis, Sudanese, Yemenite, Somalis etc …

It’s not surprising seeing the Zaatari refugee camp 80kms from Amman, being the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world and the fourth biggest ”city” of Jordan.

      I start to work here as an English teacher, which was in the straight continuation of my work in Lebanon, even though this time, I was running adults classes.

Most of my students were Iraqis in their mid-30’s-40’s and had an intermediate level. The work consisted to provide them with the necessary and useful topics and grammar skills in English, as the conditional forms, the superlatives, comparatives, modal verbs etc …  Every day, I was teaching classes, covering debates topics, new english grammatical forms etc … At the center, English wasn’t the only program running and was part of the several different workshops such as music, computer classes, sewing and embroidering workshop, sports and yoga sessions etc … Ashleigh, the teacher coordinator was even building up a one to one communication program to help the people to practice their English with people worldwide using the internet and the communication platform such as Skype, hangout etc …

    The NGO, Collateral Repair Project was established for more than 10 years now and was operating amongst the different refugees’ communities in the country.

The center was based in Hashmi Shamali, a neighborhood of Amman mainly populated by Iraqi.

There we were mainly teaching Iraqis and Syrian but the help was also directed toward the other, less covered refugee populations.

As an instance, we were providing monthly food vouchers for Sudanese population that were a lot less helped than other (mainly because of their skin color and the undercover of the South Sudan war).

  Every day 30 to 40 people were coming to the center for diverse services (social help, food vouchers, classes, psychological help, administrative support, kids after school clubs and activities etc …).

Weekly from the classes to the workshops until the donations distributions and vouchers distributions, we were running all over the city and the different area to sustain the work and to provide help where it was the most needed.

  At the time, CRP was building up a new center in downtown Amman that could answer the needs of people more efficiently.

As a matter of fact, Hasmi Shamali was a good 5km away from the city center and so, most of the refugees and people based in Amman had to walk a long distance to reach the center which was making things more difficult for them.

Then, the NGO was planning to open a second center to more effectively reach all the population in need.

  And even though the help was coming massively from the USA, the needs were still very high.

        Chapter XXV – Amman, Jordan I arrived in Jordan by plane, the only way to get there from Lebanon. Even a little hour away from Beirut, Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom is completely different.

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I arrived in Lebanon a Wednesday after few hours of flight. I was happy not having to carry Marcel with me and felt much better and lighter not having to worry about it.

I straight met Wael, who was waiting for me at the airport. 1 hour later I was arriving at Bukra Ahla center (better tomorrow), the place I was about to work at the coming two months.

    Here myself and the other volunteers coming from all over the place were working on behalf of the SB Overseas organization, a Belgian NGOs providing help for the displaced people and refugees of the area.

  “SB” was operating in Belgium,  Turkey and Lebanon and had three centers in the country; one in Beirut nearby the overcrowded Shatila refugee camp, one in Saida in the biggest refugee shelter of Lebanon and another in Arsal in the Beeka valley next to the Syrian border where thousands of people where stuck…

I was affected in Beirut were I started teaching English,  science and math every day.

      The first week was mainly spent on getting used to the workload and meeting the people. Akshita, Sophie, Malena, Juliette,  Abdullah and the other members of the center I was about to work with.

      I was given a class to teach to and a curriculum to follow.

    As far as I can remember, the teaching work was always something we were doing alongside the volunteering work,  but now, this was the volunteering work by itself and it meant a completely different thing.

      As I was already aware of the importance of education for the future of people (introduced at the salam school in Gaziantep two years ago and later in many other places…) I knew that the point here was much more than simply sharing knowledge.

    It was about teaching the people empowering skills to help them in their future life.

      More than this SB Overseas was somehow filling the education gap that 7 years of war was creating.

        The NGO was based in Belgium but was operating in the most crucial places: Turkey and Lebanon, to support the Syrian refugees.

Here, in Lebanon, the organization was working in three specific places:  the capital Beirut, near the Shatila refugees camp; the Ouzai shelter of Saida, the biggest of Lebanon, and, in the surrounding of Arsal, the last city before Syria, where international volunteers were forbidden due to security reasons.

          These kids, youth and women we were teaching to wouldn’t be able to go to the overwhelmed Lebanese schools (already receiving more Syrian than Lebanese kids) and Bukra Ahla center was somehow their only access to education.

    Then the workload was impressive (and I’d lie telling I was the busiest teacher as I had to save time besides of the teaching work for the other parts of my work here).

        The situation here reminds me the one in Turkey with the difference that in Lebanon, the hundreds of thousands of refugees were packed in a much tinier country.

Moreover,  the state was at the crossing between several unstable countries such as Syria, its direct neighbor, Palestine,  Israel and other bigger players of the area like Saudi Arabia and Iran which were involved in a Proxy war for a long time fighting to take over this piece of land.

  But not only coming from outside, the instability came also from internal movements.

I’d say that, like two years ago in Turkey, you could fell that something was moving in the country, something intangible and blurry, but ready to burst anytime.

  But still, this context didn’t affect the way we were operating. Here in Beirut nearby Shatila refugees camp, the work was tremendous.

  The camp (more a slum than a camp, as it was built some 65 years ago for Palestinian refugees and was now a city ”in the city”) was supposed to host 3000 people, however, up to 50000 were living there, stuck like sardines in this tiny overcrowded space. The Bukra Ahla center was providing help to as many kids youth and women as possible, though we knew that it was just impossible to help everyone.

  Every single day, hundreds of kids were coming to follow the classes. Separated in 3 shifts, the teachers were giving English, Science and Maths lessons alongside the Arabic lessons provided by the crew of the center.

  It was all but easy to teach there, some kids barely knew how to write (even in Arabic) while some other had already good bases in English. Then we had to adjust our teaching plans regarding our students.

From handwriting lessons to phonics, listening practice to speaking, writing and reading … we had to cover all basics of the English language.

  And I was lucky enough to be given one of the smartest class. I’d never forget the class Grade 1 – AE where I found some of the cutest kids ever. From the lovely Ali and Mohammad, the sweet and girlish Rouaa, Amouna and Kawthar passing by the nasty Walied and Moutaz … These twenty kids were making every single day an attraction.

Teaching them was an intense circus made of both, chaos, laugh and knowledge. It was everything but a quiet process and I felt like managing a bunch of cats and dogs put all together in the same space … a wilderness hard to contain sometimes. A harsh and fragile humanity, exploding sometimes in tears, in fights or laughs …

      Another part of my job here was to document the work of the organization.  I have been sent to the different areas where SB was operating and could realize how important the organization was for the people.

    In Saida a little town in the south coast, the school was within the ouazi shelter,  a huge disaffected school building were thousands of people were packed.  The place was a mess, a ruin…

  Everything but a space you would like to live.

Nonetheless,  the refugees were based here and were living in harsh conditions for several years.

     This is in this context that the organization opened the school in the shelter. It was a huge work.  A difficult one…  As Kevin,  the director of the place told me. Having to deal with proximity, diseases, violence etc… was part of the daily work of the staff there and I assume their tasks were twice harder than ours.

      But SB was also working in Arsal, a remote city in the Lebanese mountains bordering Syria. Arsal was in the beeka. I went to the valley before and found what I knew was happening there…  Thousands of people scattered here and there all over the place,  living in tents and shelters just as bad as you could expect.

Informal camps were popping up around the villages and you could barely tell how numerous were the people living there… But as far as I knew around 2 millions Syrians were in the country. That’s were SB was also trying to support the hard life of the people in needs.

In Arsal, their space was located in one of the many ”camps” surrounding the city.  Here the population was bigger…  The city was basically just a rock thrown away from the Syrian border and most of the people there couldn’t pass the checkpoint as they were ”clandestine”.

For these reasons,  and also because of the tensions in the area between several armed groups,  the place was controlled by the army which made the access to the location more difficult.

There,  the school was located in a small building neighboring the tents. The space was composed of the rudimentary material, just enough to keep the school running…  Chairs,  desks, boards one bathroom and rhalass …

You could tell by tasting the ambient temperature that the people there, both the staff and the students were freezing. The temperature in the mountains was really cold and walking through the camp you could see that nothing was prepared to pass the winter, to support the cold,  the wind and the snow…  And still,  the place was the busiest. 

Every day 140 kids were coming to the school to learn French,  science,  maths and Arabic…  I felt that was the place where help was the most needed and I’m sad not to be able to work here.

    But we had enough work to keep us busy in Beyrouth anyway.

Between the classes, the video works, the donations and distribution works,

the Christmas and new year’s eve events, the art projects and the peer exchange that I was continuing between my French student and the Shatila’s youth … 

the two months I spent around the country have been as busy as usual.

So far, I’d say that it’s been one of the most important works I’ve been doing. One of the most useful and rewarding. I met some of the best people I ever know and being struggling with everyone, trying to work out something bright for the next generation, was something beautiful and life-changing. 

Yes, the situation is bad, yes there’s despair, struggle and harness. Yes, the country is unstable but it’s also what’s making it such a lively place full of contrast and diverse stories.

And I feel sad leaving the persons I love to carry on further in Jordan.

But yes I’ll return to Lebanon and I’ll stay there … It’s just a matter of time.

Chapter XXIV – Beyrouth – Lebanon I arrived in Lebanon a Wednesday after few hours of flight. I was happy not having to carry Marcel with me and felt much better and lighter not having to worry about it.

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September.

  After few months spent in France working, studying and passing degrees, I was back on the roads again. To start the third year of my discovery journey, I decided to went back to Palermo.

  Well,  before telling about it, I guess it’s better to talk about the plan for the coming year.

After the tough times,  I decided not to find myself in the same situation: it was too difficult carrying all of my life with me without any security.

  Then I  first decided to become an online teacher, translator and writer to sustain myself anywhere at any time (basically I choose to go completely as a digital nomad and to work remotely from everywhere).

I passed several degrees,  applied what I knew of the digital business to my own lifestyle and it was done; I was now able to work from anywhere at anytime and to carry on volunteering as long as I could handle it.

Secondly, I planned where to go next. As I have been interrupted halfway during the journey,  I had to finish the circle. Then my destinations where still the Mediterranean coastal countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan etc…

And I knew this time, I wouldn’t go there with Marcel (which was too much of a burden to work efficiently on the field) so I decided to leave it in a place I knew it was about to be well used: the Astalli center in Palermo.

The last change in the project was the educational side project I was creating alongside my discovery of the humanitarian work: a peer exchange between youngs of the place I was going to.

It was a huge, involving and tiring process I was diving into…

  Well,  this being established,  I had to start.

    Elodie and I introduced the peer exchange project to two classes in the Valentin high school of Valence, then I left first for Genoa in northern Italy where I went back to meet Luca, a friend with whom I was working at the Genoa University of sociology.

Together, we gathered donations to fill Marcel once again.

  Then I crossed Italy again and went back to the Sicilian capital; Palermo.

      I’d say that nothing had really changed here while being completely different.

    Passed the first few days where I was getting back to the routine while seeing the friends again,  I found myself returning to the habits with a surprising facility.

    This time was different: I knew the people (Emilio, MariaGiulia, Manuela, Linda, Giovanna, Richard, Giulia,  Graziella and all the other hardcore helpers who were still here,  doing the crucial work every day) and I knew the place and the work.

      The breakfast, the clothing space, the sorting, advising appointments,  cleaning,  moving,  translating endless work…  was kind of engraved in my head.

                We also introduced Marcel to Emilio who was the most competent person to use and to take care of.(I have chosen to leave him my house on weel,  my gears…  Well,  all of my life in a way���)

    The things were a bit different though. Now, the center was running several laboratories and workshops for the people in needs alongside the other services provided. The projects were going from sewing lessons to cooking classes passing by carpentry work and ceramic creation…

    DCIM109GOPROG0446288.

    Astalli was also restoring a new area in the city; a place where new families could be hosted (we then had to go to Catania with Emilio to bring the necessary pieces of furniture).

      Some volunteers from Astalli were also sent to help other organizations when the Boats such as the Poseidon or the Aquarius were returning to the city, disembarking the people they had saved in the sea. The organizations were at that moment in a difficult situation, being accused of smuggling people through the Mediterranean sea, trafficking people on mainland Europe etc … so their passages in the ports were much quieter and fewer people were allowed to go to help them.

  Still, the newcomers were provided with all the necessary goods (sleeping bags, shoes, food and the other first assistance services like health care, social care etc …) and the 700 people (including East, West and North Africans, some Syrians and some 150 unaccompanied minors) were received smoothly.

Another thing I wasn’t used to was to run this peer exchange project.

We, Linda and I, had to find the right time and the to introduce the project to the kids. Then, when receiving the letters (I couldn’t handle the overwhelming happiness when receiving the first envelope) we had to start giving the mail to the center’s school students.

It was just the first step of this year exchange experience but it was an indescribable feeling doing the postman and helping the kids working out their way to responding to their correspondent.

I spent a month and a half in the city. As always, the time has passed quickly and I felt like I only spent a week rushing and working. I also used this time to plan the next steps of the project: a quick passage by Tunisia before going to Lebanon for the coming winter.

      Chapter XXIII – Palermo, Italy September.   After few months spent in France working, studying and passing degrees, I was back on the roads again.

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Chapter XIV - Kara Tepe - Lesvos

Chapter XIV – Kara Tepe – Lesvos

I was in France, working on the first part of the documentary, editing recording voice over, translating interview etc… I was also planning the second part, looking at the different place I would go and how to get there when Fred from HSA called me.

He asked me to come back here in Kara Tepe, Lesvos to continue the documentation and video work I started there by winter 2015.  As soon as possible I…

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Chapitre XIV – Kara Tepe – Lesbos

Chapitre XIV – Kara Tepe – Lesbos

J’étais en France, travaillant sur la première partie du documentaire (montage, voix-off, traduction etc …) tout en planifiant la deuxième partie du parcours (de ce projet qui maintenant était devenu bien plus que son but initial), regardant les différents endroits où j’irais etc . lorsque je reçu l’appel de Fred, de HSA me demandant de revenir ici à Kara Tepe, Lesbos pour continuer la…

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Chapter XII - Valence - France

Chapter XII – Valence – France

After roughly 8 months on the roads through the different countries related to the migration crisis, I finally end up going back to France. Being back to the safety and the “civilization” as we used to see it… But something changed, and I wasn’t really the same than I was before.

First, I had to go back because of conferences and…

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Chapitre XII – Valence – France

Chapitre XII – Valence – France

Après environ 8 mois sur les routes à travers les différents pays liés à la crise migratoire, j’ai fini par revenir en France. Retrouvant la sécurité et à la «civilisation» comme nous la imaginions …

Mais quelque chose avait changé, et je n’étais pas vraiment le même qu’avant.

Tout d’abord, je devais rentrer au pays en raison de…

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Chapitre XI – Sid – Serbie

Chapitre XI – Sid – Serbie

Sid.

Nous avons quitté Belgrade avec une autre volontaire pour nous rendre à la frontière serbo-croate à proximité de la petite ville de Sid. Après un trajet de 2 heures, nous sommes arrivés à l’endroit où nous avons été accueillis par Aleksandra, responsable du groupe humanitaire de la “Tchèque-team” de l’ONG “People In Need”.

  J’avais rencontré Aleksandra une semaine plus tôt dans une réunion…

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The Great Outdoors - 2017 EyeEm Awards, Relaxation, Nature Photography, Tranquility, Natural Beauty, Travel, Outdoors, Nature_collection, Landscape_Collection, Beauty In Nature, EyeEm Nature Lover, Scenics, Best EyeEm Shot, Lifestyles, Outdoor Photography, Hiking Adventures, One Person, France🇫🇷, Mountain Range, EyeEm New Here, Enjoying The View, Landscape, Travel Destinations at La tête de la Dame (Vercors) by Félix Brassier on EyeEm

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The Great Outdoors - 2017 EyeEm Awards, EyeEm New Here, Landscape, Enjoying The View, Mountain Range, France🇫🇷, One Person, Hiking Adventures, Outdoor Photography, Best EyeEm Shot, Lifestyles, EyeEm Nature Lover, Scenics, Beauty In Nature, Landscape_Collection, Nature_collection, Outdoors, Travel, Tranquility, Natural Beauty, Nature Photography, Relaxation at La tête de la Dame (Vercors) by Félix Brassier on EyeEm

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Chapter X – Belgrade – Serbie

Chapter X – Belgrade – Serbie

Belgrade

Repasser à nouveau la frontière macédonienne serbe fut un défi, j’ai été en difficulté tous les derniers passages que j’ai accomplis à travers les check-points … Être incité à payer des backshishs pour les Serbes, être contrôlé pendant des heures sous prétexte de présomption de trafic de drogue, de traite ou trafic d’humains, etc. …. être volés par la police de la frontière macédonienne…