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Welcome! I’m Stephen Banick, founder and chief “Gulliver Guide” of The Gulliver Project. I’d like to share with you the origins of the company – why it was founded; our ideals and vision.
Chances are, if you’ve been browsing around our website or flipping through our brochures, that you’re a New Gulliver: that is, you seek personal growth and self-empowerment against the backdrop of a very unique and challenging time – the Age of Globalization. You desire a way of “making sense” of the world and enriching yourself, not only materially, but also mentally, spiritually, and aesthetically. You believe that there is no reason why your own self-interests – vocationally, recreationally, socially, artistically – should be incompatible with anyone else’s; in fact, you believe you can contribute a lot to others precisely because of the talents and interests that you possess. You are very much “in the world” and you like mingling with “Others” outside your inner circle.
My wakeup call came one morning in early 2003. I was absentmindedly staring out of my 12th story living room window at the skyline of Santiago, Chile. In my peripheral vision was the towering 20,000 foot wall of the Andes Mountains. Sipping on my morning coffee, I was reminiscing about the last year. After selling our house and saying goodbye to our respective employers, my wife Alexis and I had trucked around Sub-Saharan Africa for three months. It had been a grand time. During our journey we had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and then zigzagged our way through nine countries and 7,000 miles of rain forests, sweeping deserts, snow-capped mountains, tropical beaches, rolling farmlands, quaint villages and modern cities.
We had then turned our focus a hemisphere away — to Chile and Argentina, two diverse and beautiful South American countries. We got certified to teach English at a fine institute in Santiago, Chile; but frankly, it was too long on monotony, too rigid on hours, and too short on compensation to keep us grounded, so once again we had started plotting other moves.
It was these reveries that were jarred by the 7.0 earthquake
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Now before that sounds too melodramatic, please understand that Santiago’s building construction standards, like those of Tokyo and San Francisco, are some of the most advanced in the world—which is a good thing, considering that the entire 2,700 mile span of that anorexic millipede called The Andes that separates Chile from Argentina is a launching pad for
