Nomads United is an organization that has crossed countries on horseback throughout the world since 1998. Integrated by more than 300 people, from more than 30 nationalities, that collaborate, live and learn to create a wave of environmental conscience, a social current, focused in stimulating values of sustainability, through the several groups that ride through rural areas, to learn and to contribute to innovative solutions to the critical environmental conditions of the Earth.
The movement began as a romantic dream, though within time it became the biggest and most culturally diverse horse caravan on the planet. It proves how a group of people from all over the world, Arabs, Jews, Europeans, Americans, etc, could can be united with a common intention, beyond the differences of races or beliefs. Not as an expedition, tour or competition but as a system of nomadic organic communal life.
Nine years have past since the birth of Nomads United and the movement continues growing and touching more remote villages, seeking to open the doors of change through reason and compassion, art and science, so that we can attempt to see beyond the spaces that separates to us, harmonize humans among the animals and the Earth.
We go an organic step at a time, and every week we organize events that are a mixture of ethnic music and dances rescued from several countries, like Arab, African, Flamenco, dancers with fire torches and acrobatics with horses, clowns and everything to spark a festival of planetary sensations.
The latest caravan began in Costa Rica in March of 2004, and it's already more than 3 years since the caravan took on crossing rural Central America, stopping town by town, village by village bringing the message of peace and ecology. When the locals by surprise see us arrive, they become curious. A day as any other is contrasted by the colorful parade of worldwide riders. Little villages where the natives still live and work with their horses and on land, where people perhaps never had the chance to leave their country. They are suddenly faced with representatives of distant nations, lands that many never heard mentioned, thus awakening them to the awareness of the differences and similitudes among cultures.
There are several projects that comprise this wave of conscience in different areas from ecological and social development, cultural interactions, which together form an integral holistic and non polluting campaign that seeks to address the root causes of environmental degradation without creating a negative impact on the environment.
Our Projects
After years of developing our projects we registered an NGO, in 2006 we developed a program with the UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico, the biggest and most renowned university in Latin America) where we can receive students to complete their social service with us. Veterinarians, Biologists and other fields of study will be applying their studies, doing fieldwork, surveys, databases and several other initiatives to help rural communities in their path towards sustainability.
We organize reforestations with sustainability workshops, with music and art. We organize these festivals especially in places with great natural beauty, our intention is to present participants a unique learning experience of living in nature and planting trees, our events are fused with the dynamics of ecological community life.
Our environmental education program, which fuses art with science, seeks to awaken in the young audiences a deep connection to revitalize natural values, and spread environmental awareness through practical and invigorating activities thus helping revert certain ecologically destructive patterns. We use interactive theater, garbage collecting and other workshops as tools to deepen their understanding as students to become responsible individuals within the ecological context.
Research is underway that investigates how students react to a form of informal environmental education that is based on art, music and games that they can relate to, seeking to build a more effective method of raising environmental awareness.
In our next stage we will be introducing the first on earth organic ambulatory veterinarian clinics. Which consist in helping rural communities solve health issues with their horses, as well as to raise awareness on care and proper treatment. Another focus is an epidemiological survey of equines and an interracial performance evaluation, as well as a ethno-veterinarian database.
We are currently creating the layout of a database of communities where we present them with alternatives of sustainable development. Together with the locals we feed the database with information of what is needed, alternative energy, water treatment, organic agriculture among others proposals are published in the database that provides to the UNAM, NGO's and foundations on specific information that needs to be addressed to help these villages develop within a clean mechanism of development.
