Opportunities for Re-Imagining Isolated Communities But they are also voyages of the mind, because every journey is necessarily a mental one. These journeys are often physical, taking place over land and sea. They take place on sailing boats, canoes, on foot or horseback. Ninth Wave invites people working in a range of fields including science, arts, environmental protection and communities to join our expeditions. To this end, we embark upon journeys into spaces which are sometimes forgotten, or unknown, and move slowly, focusing on bridging gaps and having conversations. Because when we are vulnerable, uncertain and afraid, and still we step forward, is when we are at our most human, which is to say, most humble and engaged, most able to explore actual journeying, moving beyond what we think we already know, and able to leave our restrictive ideas of ourselves behind. We believe in doing things differently, moving slowly, stopping frequently, not knowing what is around the next bend in the river. As such, we do not believe in travel or exploration in the traditional sense, but we believe in un-exploring. We believe that it’s possible to reimagine exploration not just as a tool for positive change by humbly trying to connect with others and understand place, across spaces and time. Indeed, it is hardly a stretch to say that exploration is systemically problematic, in its acquisitional, traditionally white-European-led 'conquering' of space, whether that be Columbus, or somebody climbing a mountain to stick a flag in the top, or even taking a selfie at the foot of the Grand Canyon to prove we were there. This can’t be seen, though, within the ego-centric process of conventional travel and movement, which is built around the desire to plant a self, import a pre-constructed identity, into a landscape. Getting out and exploring the world has the capacity to be a fundamentally humanising process, one in which contexts and the plate tectonics of our known world shift to reveal not just different cultures, values and people, but also the fact that who we are is not a pre-eminent value, but simply an accident of history and place. These programmes and case studies currently take place in the USA, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru. It may well be that these systems are not as modern, cutting-edge or perfect as imported systems, but they are generated and owned by local communities, which in the short-term may signify less, but in the medium and long term will signify so much more.Īs such, working with communities primarily in the Americas, Ninth Wave is intent not on generating change per se, but on identifying and empowering people who are capable of generating change for themselves and their communities. But someone who believes in themselves is capable of generating the autonomous power - with assistance and guidance - to develop systems for themselves. The water tap may bring clean water but it also brings dependency and encourages people to wait for further outside assistance, causing conflict when it fails to arrive. It is not about a water tap but about a sense of possibility. Having worked in territories over the horizon with remote communities for many years, we fundamentally believe that all meaningful change is necessarily slow, locally-led, attitude-and-aspiration-based. As such, International Development tends to deal in very specific particulars and whilst we do not refute that on occasion infrastructure development is successful and useful, we absolutely reject that this process is not in any way owned by local communities, who are likely to have very different aspirations and needs to those imposed upon them in a time-specific and measures-led way by external first-world bodies. Most particularly, an organisation or government from a developed country will analyse a situation in accordance with their own measures, and decide that a community require Item or Infrastructure A to better further their development, and install said item/infrastructure. Most International Development is top-down, outside-in, item-led. International Development, Community Engagement and Support
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