A Modern Fairytale of Self-Discovery
INTRO What happens when you ask local community members, who are professionally involved in tourism, to present and promote themselves and their places to tourists? It depends. In East Africa, for example, we have seen the same story repeating itself. There are two parallel universes: the one they live in and experience every day, and […]
Grassroots Encounters: getting into the mud – Part Two
Part One GETTING INTO THE MUD If we define the boot camp as a field-based learning experience – as Dominic suggested – we can refer to the mud as a metaphor for the amount of learning that the experience provided to our changemakers. In a way, the mud is the proof that the boot camp […]
Grassroots Encounters – Part One
INTRO As a long-time friend of Greg Bagunzi and Red Rocks Rwanda, and an admirer of the work of Judy Kepher-Gona through the STTA in Kenya, I was interested in knowing more about the boot camp that STTA conducted during the annual Cultural Festival at Red Rocks, to which Traveller Storyteller has been a supporting […]
Community Empowerment Lessons In a Tree Nursery
A DELICATE BALANCE TO MAINTAIN The fine balance between conservation and community development is hard to find and even harder to maintain, especially when the survival of the local people is at stake. Last October, I was invited to visit a remarkable project in a remote area of Kenya that day in and day out […]
Transforming Travel Marketing with Local Communities – Kenya22
INTRO October 2022 I met Rosemary in Rwanda. We were walking along under a hot sun, after having planted new trees on the south bank of the local river with other members of our host community in Musanze, when she shared the inspiring story of the women empowerment project that she started many years ago. […]
Mumbuca Quilombo
The gold of the Jalapão Community Tourism in the Mumbuca Quilombo community and Jalapão State park, Tocantins state, Brazil This is a community project established in the Mumbuca Quilombo community, founded by two women, Ilana and Miriam.At 35 km from the town of Mateiro, in the midst of the Jalapão State park, in the Tocantins […]
Huay Pu Keng
Huay Pu Keng, a rural Kayan village at the border with Myanmar, has something special waiting for you. Something that you might not expect. In the imagination of most responsible travellers, the long-neck women are immediately associated with the stigma of tourism exploitation, and therefore thought of as something that we, as ethical visitors, must […]
Red Rocks Rwanda
Internationally renowned for their gorillas and for the successful conservation programme, Rwanda is a rising tourism destination and the home of an inspiring grassroots project, whose goal is to combine local sustainable development with environmental conservation and social innovation. Red Rocks Rwanda was born, from the determination of its founder Greg Bakunzi, as a visionary […]
Morrinho
If you have never been in a carioca slum before, and you still have some cultural resistance, you could not do better than to start by visiting the Morrinho Project in the Pereirão in the Laranjeiras neighbourhood in the southern and wealthy area of the city of Rio de Janeiro. You will be welcomed by […]
Imagining communities and conservation in Rwanda- part 3
PART 1 PART 2 CONSERVATION AND CBT Greg has fulfilled his dream of starting a process that puts communities at its centre, and that ensures they are the direct beneficiaries of all its actions. All the activities that go under the name of Eco-tour have been designed to work on local sustainable development through tourism […]