With the Endurance expedition, the highlight of this great social project, the association intends to develop three main objectives:

→ Allow deaf people discover mountains

→ Help develop exchanges between deaf and hearing people

→ Promote sign language

Comprising both deaf and hearing people, supervised by renowned skippers and mountain climbers, the Endurance team left Falkland Islands onboard Tara (Jean-Louis Etienne ex-Antarctica) to reach their South Georgia destination close to Anctartica, a non-questionable choice. First, for its highly symbolic significance: it was the happy ending of the memorable voyage of Sir Shackleton, an Irishman, who, in the early 20th century, succeeded, after a heroic fight against all odds, to rally the coasts of Georgia from the Antarctic peninsula in order to save his crew blocked in the ice-pack. And second, because this island - today a desert place - is considered, thanks to its fauna, flora and relief, as one of the last untouched sites of the earth.

The modern Endurance Expedition didn't want to break any record. On a mountain top, the challenge is not so much to break the ice as to shatter conventional wisdom about the deaf! What is essential are exchanges, tenacity, self-transcendence, adapting to unexpected events, whether from human or nature origin. In short, an extraordinary lesson of courage for a community often wrongly considered as impaired.

"A world that society has reduced to silence"

On the streets, blind people are easily identified, deaf people are not. This simple fact does not fully explain the disregard our society demonstrates towards them.

Do we know for example that for the longest time and even today, deafness has been associated with mental disability? And who knows that until the 1950's, deaf children were interned into psychiatric asylums?

Who knows that the magnificent sign language was forbidden in Europe for one entire century following an absurd decision (1) prioritizing oral language teaching to deaf? This, while in the United States (and thanks to a French deaf), this sign language has been able to develop freely - it is today the third spoken language after English and Spanish.

Do we also know that the sign language, which allows two deaf people coming from different countries to communicate after some adapting time, does not benefit in France from the attention it deserves? Just consider the pathetic number of specialized schools and licensed interpreters available today!

And finally do we know that the percentage of illiterate deaf people reaches 70%, hence triggering consequently high rates of insecurity and unemployment rates? Frightening observations, yet a primal indicator of a society which does not know, unless it despises, its five millions of deaf or hearing-impaired citizens, one tenth of them suffering from severe deafness.

But it would be vain to only hold hearing people responsible. For Daniel Buffard, exclusions mechanisms work both ways: "It is true that deafness is a truly set-apart world: whoever has not been directly confronted with it has a hard time understanding the difficulties deaf people encounter in their daily tasks, whether administrative or professionals. But it is also true that, due to their exclusion, deaf people tend to live in their own community.

Well, this is Endurance vocation to change perspectives. To change the feelings hearing people have towards the deaf but also the image deaf have about themselves.