Shouting from my shed

Get the latest news, updates and happenings via my shed-based newsletter.

 

Inspirations for Rowing the Pacific

Sarah Weldon shares her inspirations and motivations for rowing the Pacific. The photos at the foot were taken by one of the students  who started the charity, Artur Zarafyan.  He is profoundly deaf, so opportunities are few for him in Georgia. He is now 15 years old. Sarah’s dream is to bring him to the UK as the official row photographer:

The inspiration for our 2014 Pacific Ocean row came when the three of us, (teachers from the UK and South Africa), were recruited by the Ministry of Education and Science in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, to bring about educational reform.  I was one of the first recruits, and the government sent me an all expenses paid plane ticket, told me I’md be met at the airport, and to expect a high media presence because this programme was so ‘out there’. (If you’d like to know more about Georgia before 2012 watch Ted Tbilisi talks in 2012,  ‘English Teachers‘ and ‘Power Trip‘).

When I arrived in 2010, there was very little information available. No traveller’s blogs, forums, or internet references to anything other than Georgia’s recent problems with Russia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, and many of the children I came to know best, were refugees and IDPs from these struggles.  I had my Bradt guide to Georgia, the latest edition but still quite out of date given Georgia’s rapid progress. I was picked up at the airport by a guy I assumed worked for the government, but who spoke very little English, and tried overly hard to put me at ease by offering me sweets and playing Barry White. Given that most flights arrive in Georgia around 3am, the dark streets did little to allay the headlines and horror stories running through my head. Many people warned not to go to Georgia because it was ‘dangerous’ and ‘politically unstable’ and here I was, having got into the car of a complete stranger, and pretending I’md eaten his sweets as he encouraged me to eat more of them. As it turns out, Georgians are renowned for their hospitality and over feeding their guests, but at that stage I was far too aware of having broken the first rules that every British child is taught: 1) don’t accept sweets or get into the car of a stranger!! Georgia was also the only country in the world, where I couldn’t get a signal on my phone.

We arrived at the Sheraton Metechi Hotel, certainly a far cry from what I’md imagined they’d put us up in. No carpeted walls, stinky toilets, or stained mattresses on squeeky beds which were a continuous theme on my previous world travels. I looked up the hotel in my Bradt guide:

“The city’s premier hotel for many years, this has packed a lot of living into its short life. In 1994 it was taken over by Kalashnikov-toting Mkhedrioni, supposedly there to guard the place; instead there were lurid stories of shootings in the bar & drug dealing in the corridors. The US Embassy banned its officials from going there  (although the EC office was there), and its general manager fled back to Austria. Famously, a sign at the door read ‘Handguns allowed, semi-automatics to be left at reception'”.

My misgivings didn’t improve over our intensive induction week. We learnt about bride knapping, not to go to certain areas because we might get abducted, and heard that men were renowned for heavy drinking, and seeing Western women as ‘easy’. We would be going out to the poorest and most remote regions of Georgia.  The language was impossible to learn or pronounce, and besides, we would be in an area where the language was a mix of Turkish, Armenian, Russian, and local dialect that even Georgians couldn’t understand and avoided at all costs!

Three years on, having fallen in love with the country, I was now working full time for the government and on my charity ‘Oceans Project Georgia‘.  The project began when I used the BBC Oceans television series to teach English.  Resources were scarce, students had to buy their own books (the equivalent of a week’s wage for some families).  My school had no windows or electricity, but I had my laptop and the DVD, so the whole class were able to huddle around the computer, with the elderly Soviet style teacher giving them a clip around the head, or pinching their ear, for blocking the computer screen or getting too close. It soon became clear that this was so much more than learning English.  This was about seeing another culture for the first time, seeing people who looked different to them, and seeing the kinds of creatures that lived under the water.  They asked whether the creatures were real, did they actually exist, and we started to use Skype to chat with children all over the world. Now English was a necessity to get the latest opinions on Justin Bieber. and we soon had children aged 8-25 from different schools and universities joining us for our BBC Oceans sessions on Saturdays.  We were following Roz Savage as she rowed across the Indian Ocean, learning about the places she visited and talking about the challenges she faced, much more exciting and far more useful than reciting English grammar by heart.  My school asked me to teach geography as well as English, and I was astounded to discover that many children had no idea where to find their country on a world map.  So we related everything, back to their sea, the Black Sea, and the home of Noah’s Ark, and the largest meromictic basin in the world. (Georgia is considered one of 34 world biodiversity hotspots, along with the Amazon rainforest, yet most children know nothing of the endemic and at risk species living there, like the Caucasus Leopard).

We recruited 8 voluntary Project Leaders from the UK, Australia, South Africa, USA, and Georgia, and we started to organise field trips, as well as introducing the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award in Georgia for the first time.  It was through these activities that I first met the other members who would one day make up our ocean row team Fourbirdsaboating.  We already knew we wanted to row across the Pacific Ocean, and the approximate route, so the launch of the New Ocean Wave race was perfect timing, and would enable us to get a little extra support and experience during the race from Monterey Bay to Hawaii, before going it alone to Cairns, Australia. Times were also changing in Georgia with the upcoming elections and around the same time, we ran a pilot version of Oceans Project Georgia using a web platform called WizIQ in India.  It was a great success and within a short space of time we had students just like our Georgian ‘Oceans Ambassadors’, only from Egypt, Mexico, USA, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Albania, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Spain, Ethiopia, Canada, Turkey, Sudan, France, Portugal, Yemen, Somalia, Brazil, Oman, India, Pakistan, Algeria, Iran, Kazakhstan, Peru, Jordan, Indonesia, Morocco, Israel, Quatar, United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, China, Argentina, Ukraine, Dominican republic, Columbia, Honduras, Nigeria, Philippines, Vanuatu, Germany, Kenya, Rabat-Sale, Vietnam, Tatarstan, malaysia, Hong Kong, Namibia, Korea, Lithuania, Latvia, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Venezuela. We’d started the online course so we could reach village children in Georgia, so were surprised to have so many other students enroll and interact with us.

Oceans Project Georgia is now a free, online environmental education programme for young people aged 8-25, and our aim is to teach our students live from the ocean.  We have a school in London designing an expedition app to update followers, and our mission is to raise the funds to provide tablet computers, projectors, solar chargers, a Foldedsheet map, twinned toilet, and loads of lesson plans and activities linked to STEM subjects to make learning a bit more fun.  We already have lots of children’s projects signed up to receive the educational packages, as well as many orphanages across Thailand, some of whom lost family in a tsunami, so now we have the huge task of raising the funds we need for our long term charitable work and for the expedition.

Our fundraising goals are simple: to raise one million pounds in donations through our charitable status, and to use the accumulated interest each year, to fund tablet computers and educational packs for each new recipient group of children so we can teach them online forever, and give them the opportunity to communicate with the best scientists and explorers in each field. For each £1 donated to us, we can claim 25p in GiftAid and this (along with any boat and kit sponsors and donations of kit ‘in-kind’) will fund our Pacific Ocean row, and our plans to reach the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility in 2015.

 

Our official launch event is a film screening and Q&A at the Regal Cinema in Henley-On-Thames and is the Discovery Channel documentary ‘Rowing the Pacific‘, narrated by Olympic Rower James Cracknell.  The film follows ocean rowers Chris Martin and Mick Dawson as they row from Japan to San Francisco, and afterwards there will be a Q&A with Chris, Mick, and the film’s Producer Liz Tucker.  Also in attendance will be Olympic Rower Debbie Flood who is coaching the Fourbirdsaboating team as they learn to row.  Tickets have just been released on sale through the box office, and are available to buy online here.  The plan is to hold a fundraising film screening and Q&A on the 15th of each month for as long as it continues to be popular.  So if you have always wanted to know about ocean rowing then now is a good chance to come and chat to Chris and Mick, especially as Chris is the organiser for the New Ocean Wave Pacific Ocean row race.  We hope that the event will be a great opportunity for expedition film makers and adventurers to share their own stories with a new audience, so if you have a film you’d like to show, or would like to give a talk, then drop us a line.

You can watch a trailer of the film here.

376506_306906102677560_252510038_n 387794_306065432761627_946001477_n 388575_318006788234158_636687953_n 391797_306249666076537_116238034_n 397919_322666117768225_69194971_n 409124_325944607440376_140478303_n_1 409124_325944607440376_140478303_n 409368_318006891567481_698911459_n 431665_348677758500394_1723072907_n 525152_420394361328733_1516290682_n 534293_419573681410801_101089602_n 555614_398873786814124_1065366868_n

Read Comments

You might also like

10500 Days (and almost as many words) “My thoughts first turned to adventure 10,500 days ago today. The idea of adventure for me at first was simple and uncomplicated. It was the prospect of excitement, fun, and novelty that were pulling me forward, and the push of […]...
Survey results: What direction shall I go next? I recently asked the wonderful readers of my newsletter for a bit of advice on what things I should focus my attention on for the next few months and years. I thought I’d share the results here, partly to show […]...
Embracing the Adventurous Spirit in Life and Leadership In the journey of life, we often find ourselves at crossroads, contemplating the path less traveled versus the familiar road. Drawing parallels from a life dedicated to adventure, we can extract profound lessons that not only motivate us but also […]...
 

Comments


 
 

Post a Comment

HTML tags you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

 

Shouting from my shed

Get the latest news, updates and happenings via my shed-based newsletter.

© Copyright 2012 – 2013 Alastair Humphreys. All rights reserved.

Site design by JSummertonBuilt by Steve Perry Creative