Manon Ossevoort is a dutch theatre maker/actress who had the dream of travelling to the southpole with a tractor, while collecting the dreams of the people she meets. After passing through 22 countries, she wants to build a snowman that has the little pieces of paper with the dreams of the people she met in it’s belly.
The tractor girl was travelling three years and 4 months, 38.000 kilometers with a maximum speed of 20km/h from Terschelling, an island in the north of the Netherlands, to the cape of good hope in South Africa, where she’s preparing the final part of her journey, the expedition to the south pole. A ship will bring her to Antarctica, from there she plans to go on with her tractor. For that, she’s looking for sponsors to rebuild her tractor to a caterpillar and exchange the diesel driven engine to run with kerosine, pay the insurance for her tractor and a mechanic and a guide who come her way. The date of her final expedition hasn’t been announced yet.
The aim of the project was not just to collect the dreams of the people she learned to know, but to gain publicity for important issues and organizations, for example war child international. She went through former war areas like the Kosovo as she did with current crisis zones in Africa, inspiring the people with her story to go for their own dreams. Manon documented her story on video, as well as in a book that was published in the Netherlands. In this, one can find inspiring stories, like the one of the pregnant mother in Zimbabwe that she took to the next hospital on her tractor, where she should get her baby and call it “Manonika”.
“While traveling I’ve collected dreams of people everywhere.
Wishes, written on small pieces of paper.
They travel with me on the back of the tractor.
I’ll take them all the way to the geographical South Pole
and there I want to build this big snowman
with the dreams of the world in it’s belly.
I hope that people will hear about this story and think to themselves: if you can drive a tractor all the way to the South Pole, and be safe, maybe this one dream that I have is also possible. Maybe I should just do it!”
Get the whole story in this talk Manon gave at TEDxDelft:
More information:
Comments