Translator: Translate TED Reviewer: Ivana Korom
For a start, let's go to East Africa.
What do you know about East Africa?
Wars, hunger, disease, poverty, corruption, beautiful animals and nature,
that is what I knew a few years ago.
That was my story, and nothing else.
Boring statistics and some prejudice, and that's all.
And do you remember those big droughts in East Africa last summer?
Unprecedented droughts in the last many decades.
Countless people died or have been relocated,
and our media almost didn't participate at all
and did not report about it.
They probably thought it was nobody's concern over here,
because that is actually how we perceive Africa,
and most of the faraway world.
As something so distant from us, something intangible,
something that we are indifferent to.
What is the problem? First of all, understanding.
Those stories that we receive through media,
according to which we judge the world and think about it,
are often wrong, shallow and always controlled.
That means they are always biased.
The other problem is compassion.
It is very difficult to sympathize
with those who are outside our most immediate social context:
with those who are not our friends and family,
who live far away from our street, city, country,
and especially with those
who live on an entirely different part of the planet,
because we perceive them as something abstract
something completely separated from ourselves.
In a similar way, people, too, perceive Serbia and this region
from another part of the planet,
they just base all their prejudice and their stands
on those simple and wrong media stories.
Let us now envision a different situation.
Let's envision that you were traveling through East Africa.
Somewhere through that question mark,
travelled through the savanna, to the town of Narok,
situated behind this hill, this left one,
and there you met David,
the local chief of the Maasai tribe.
It is that proud tribe that wears red gowns,
long spears and shields, and the shield is also on the Kenyan flag.
And you are talking with David in a bar,
you are having fun, drinking a beer or two,
and he invites you to spend a few days in his village.
And you say yes, you go to his village and you live with him
in those little houses made of cow dung,
and around you is only savanna
and nothing but empty space, low bushes and trees,
wild animals, reddish dirt, flat horizon and a wide blue circle.
You visit the local school under the open sky,
similar to that ''Green school'',
you drink water from a creek where elephants, zebras and giraffes tread
– this here is an elephant footprint.
In the evening you sit by the fire and share stories.
That's how you find out that David had to kill a lion in his youth
in order to become a Maasai warrior, because that is part of the tradition,
and that's why he has a big scar over his entire shoulder here,
from the lion that hurt him in the fight.
You find out many more exotic things about his life,
but you also find out some other things.
You find out that David dreams of opening a tourist camp
close to the local national park.
He dreams of sending his children to college,
but also wishes for them to return to the village
after finishing school.
He dreams to, in a way,
reconcile his tradition with the modern world,
and understands how difficult that is.
Still, he manages to persist in it.
And then you ask him how he gets in touch with his tribesmen
who live in other villages,
there are many more villages around in the savanna,
and he says, ''Well, we used to use the antelope horns, the hollow ones,
but there is no need for that now, since we all have cell phones.''
And he raises his cell phone
and you see that it's exactly the same model as yours.
This story I just told you really happened
back in 2010 when my two friends from Serbia Travel Club
and I traveled through East Africa
and actually through the entire African continent and the Middle East,
and that is how, for us, Africa got a face and a story.
That is how Africa stopped being unfamiliar,
the map was no longer empty and faceless,
and it became filled with our emotions and experiences.
In a similar way the people who visit Serbia and the Balkans
change and deepen their understanding, just as we changed and deepened
our understanding of Africa.
That's what traveling can do.
Thus, meeting, understanding and sympathizing
become not only possible, but inevitable.
Now, you could say, that's all very nice,
"But traveling is expensive, you need a lot of money!"
The most important thing I want to tell you today
is that that's simply not true.
It's possible to travel with not so much money
if there is a strong will, and if the trip is thoroughly planned.
Transportation, which demands much money, could be solved by hitchhiking,
or cheap local transportation which could be easily found
with some knowledge of the local languages.
As for the accommodation, you could sleep in tents,
or in cheap hostels, but also at hospitable people's houses.
As you can see, this is one of those social networks
for exchange of hospitality and accommodation,
and up there is chief David, with whom we had stayed.
He created an account and put up his photo.
There is an internet café in the town of Narok, next to his village.
He comes every once in a while, checks his profile
and people can contact him and he takes them in, to live with him.
So, that's something that's absolutely possible today.
It's enough to have curiosity and desire.
And what's really necessary, the only thing necessary,
is to give up comfort, to change your attitude
and simply abandon conformism.
I think a plane ticket from Vienna to Nairobi is about 400€, round trip,
and I think that it's not a problem that you,
when you go home now, contact David
and take on a similar trip.
But what's really important, and more important than how to travel,
is why travel.
Alain Badiou said, ''There is only one world''.
The world we live in is full of differences among us:
cultural differences, religious, ideological.
But we are, finally, just people, and the destinies of people in this world
are today more closely connected than ever before.
Economical crises shift easily from one continent to another,
and what we do here affects, and will affect more and more each day,
what happens on the other side of the world.
On the other hand, we judge the world and think about it
on the basis of media information, shallow and wrong;
so the misunderstanding, ignorance and insensitivity for the world
aren't only irresponsible, but also dangerous.
In order to really change the world and to develop compassion,
it is necessary to touch the world.
It is necessary to breath it in, to experience it.
It is necessary to form our personal story
with our personal emotions our personal experiences.
But not everyone can travel everywhere.
That is why it is also necessary to bring the story back to our community,
to share it with others and to tell it,
because you, as travelers, are not only travelers,
you are also messengers.
That is the only way to make the globalization personal,
and not led by anyone's selfish interests.
And now I would like to tell you about that trip to Africa
which was an attempt of such a journey.
It was a journey where, as authors from the Serbia Travel Club,
Lazar Pašćanovic, Marko Đedović and I traveled for three moths
in the Middle East and the African continent.
We passed 13 countries: Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey,
Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda,
Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia
and through South Africa came back by plane.
We separated along the way at one point, that's that node in Central Africa,
and we traveled separately for a month.
We spent months preparing for that trip,
we read a bunch of books, saw a lot of movies
studied African art and philosophy and learned a lot about health
and protection from malaria and AIDS,
got some vaccinations and really had no major health issues.
As for the journey itself, as I said, we hitchhiked a lot,
we used every possible vehicle.
This is a cattle trailer in Namibia... Trucks, vans, buses...
Even bicycles, donkeys and camels,
and most of the time it wasn't comfortable,
but that's what I want to tell you – it doesn't matter at all.
Because you'll usually get the real experience
when you travel in the least comfortable way.
This is a bus in Egypt, and this is a pickup truck in Namibia.
This lady here is wearing a traditional hat,
the hat that some women in Namibia wear
and which should resemble a cow,
because a good woman should resemble a cow.
That's what they believe.
As for the accommodation, we slept here and there,
most often with the hospitable people
we found on the Internet, like David.
This is a house in the Sahara, in Northern Sudan,
which didn't have a lock,
so we improvised and used a makeshift lock during the night.
Improvisation is very important.
That's what gives spirit to the journey.
During our journey we lived with many different people,
and we had long, sincere and intense conversations
about our lives and their lives, about our plans, dreams,
our concepts of the future and the world, and we shared stories.
Those were people from writers and professors to the poorest workers,
mechanics, people who live in the wilderness,
the Maasai, Pigmey and Bushmen tribes,
and with all of them we tried to find a link that connects us
despite all the cultural and other differences.
I'll just name a few.
This is Abdu, a blogger, writer and engineer from Cairo,
who claims that he lives in a country of madmen
and who collects interesting stories of Egyptian artists.
During the entire mess and revolution in Egypt
we were constantly in contact with him
receiving information we couldn't get anywhere in the news.
He should come to Serbia next summer.
This is uncle Abas, on the right hand side. I'm on the left.
He lives in a small house in the Sahara, in northern Sudan.
There's nothing in his small house but a little table with an open suitcase.
It's something like an altar, with photos of Marx, Lenin,
and a few African communist leaders.
He says that the universal humane message of both Islam and communism
is very important.
This is Doris, a humanitarian worker from Kenya
who spends much of her time working in the war-torn regions
of South Sudan and Somalia, because she believes that,
if there's anything she can do to make things better, she has to do it.
All the money that she earns she invests in a small church
that she had promised her father, on his deathbed, she would build.
This is Anonsiata, a grandma from Rwanda, with her four children.
She lives with them and two grandchildren in Kigali, in the suburbs.
Despite her poverty she has profiles on the social networks I talked about.
She has that big, happy smile
that I very rarely encounter with elderly people here.
This is Wiston, in the village of the Pigmeys, in Congo,
a guy who lives beneath an active volcano,
less then 10 km away from the crater of an active volcano,
in a place where the Congo civil war hasn't entirely ended yet.
Despite all that, he wishes to stay where he is,
and he says that a few years ago the volcano did erupt
and destroyed all their houses,
but they came back, cut the lava, the petrified lava, made bricks from it,
and rebuilt their houses.
I asked him, "What will you do if the volcano erupts again?"
He said, "Never mind, we'll rebuild the houses again."
This is a spider that lives in the house of Charles from Zambia,
a guy who has a wife and a child, but cannot live with them
because of a tradition,
that you first have to buy your wife from her family.
He doesn't have enough money and cows, so he lives alone, in his bachelor room,
with no beds, just a few of these spiders, as big as my hand.
We slept there with him, but he told us not to be afraid,
since the spiders can't go through these anti malarial nets
but that we should be afraid of the tribal ghosts
who attack the sleepers in those parts and can go through the nets.
What I've just told you is a very condensed version,
just some of the fates and stories of many, many people we met
and whom we talked with, lengthily, on this journey.
Their stories have never been told before, because those stories, to the media,
are tiny and insignificant.
But we, believe in the stories of tiny and insignificant people.
Of those struggling to find their answer to life and the world,
just like us.
And all the stories we collected,
we released on the Serbia Travel Club website
in different forms, such as text, drawings, photographs, music,
videos and maps,
and actively communicated, throughout the journey,
with people from Serbia.
People here were able to participate in our journey through us as messengers.
They could, for example, ask questions that we would pass on to the Africans.
For example, while we were in Sudan, they asked,
with so many different cultures and traditions in Sudan,
whether there was something like a common Sudanese identity.
They also asked if there was a way
for Sudan not to breakup into North and South,
and what should be done to prevent it.
Those questions show that all of us, although with many cultural differences,
actually have the same problems and could learn much from each other.
And so our project sparked
an abundance of forum discussions on the causes of Africa's problems,
Africa's poverty and wars; on what could be learned
from the parallels between African colonial history and our own history,
which, in a way, could also be considered colonial.
We've also managed to do some very concrete things
with our project.
For example, while we were in Nairobi,
Marko Đedović stayed with a girl called Nancy, who is a nurse.
She's also a hairdresser and a single mother of two little girls.
Thanks to his poignant story in our blog, our readers,
completely self-organized - we had no idea about it,
at the time we were traveling through Tanzania and further along Congo
- our readers raised a donation of Nancy's two monthly salaries.
She put that into a stash, and if she saves more money,
she will open her own hair salon.
Also, we collected a lot of materials that could be called
a handbook for traveling in Africa.
So, information on languages, traveler’s dictionaries,
information on expenses, visas, tricks on how to obtain them easily...
All that makes traveling in Africa much easier
than it was before our project.
Now we know about people planning similar projects,
after having read about ours.
Then there is the cultural exchange, too.
During the trip, we had a DVD with material from Serbia.
Photos, comics, poems, stories, movies, music.
Whenever we got the chance, we would show it to Africans
and try to discuss it in some way,
to look for the similarities and the differences,
and the way they felt about it.
We were also collecting what they were creating,
no matter if they were professional artists or amateurs,
because what's important is the spirit.
And I will tell you a story about a guy whose name is Sam.
Sam lives in the south of Uganda. He lost his parents.
He is a manual labourer and lives with his aunt.
Although in his twenties, he still doesn't manage
to finish high school.
We were sitting by a lake, and it was raining.
I asked him how he felt about it all, and he said,
"I am a very happy man." So I asked him why.
He replied, "Because I really like to draw."
I took out my notebook, handed it to him and asked him
to draw something for our readers.
And he did, and these are his drawings.
But he didn't only draw.
He also wrote his address up there.
Then, when we posted it on our website, many of our readers wrote to him.
He was very surprised and later he sent more drawings,
and a wonderful communication between people happened,
which didn’t need any words, drawings were enough
for the emotions to pass between people.
Also, there is a group of painters from Rwanda,
who are creating a fantastic cultural center
despite all the problems in that country
after the war and the genocide, and these are their paintings.
They say that the war wounds and poverty are not, and mustn't be
an excuse for apathy and inaction in a society.
Simply put, we always have to fight, and we can fight.
And, at the end of it all, we were also making our personal notes
and we are currently finishing a book about this journey,
that should be published soon.
And what I want to say to you in the end is that all this,
the journey and the project, is something you too can do.
It's enough to have the desire and I would like to encourage you
to travel independently, with your eyes, hearts and minds open,
ready to share your experience, your knowledge and your stories.
Because independent travels are not only a great way
to meet and discover the world directly and personally, at first hand.
Independent travels are more than that.
Independent travels are a creative act that connects cultures
raises awareness, kills prejudice,
transfers real, personal stories
and sets the foundation for a world with more compassion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)