As my world tour gets underway, I will be making a special trip to East Africa to visit the United Nations World Food Programme’s projects in the area.

(click on image for a larger map courtesy: Google Maps)

This two-weeks expedition is not part of the tour which will begin in September — if all goes well, so let’s call it the pre-tour whose role is to raise awareness about The Big Journey, my epic 6-7 year journey around the world by car DJing to fight child hunger worldwide because quite frankly with the many resources that this planet has it’s shameful to let a child die of hunger every 6 seconds!

Here’s the rough itinerary: New York, London, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Mombasa and Rome. (Tunis & Paris to be confirmed)

The good people at the United Nations World Food Programme are working out the details on showing me around given that both our schedules are super tight.

But it’s important for me to make these visits to be able to better tell the millions of people who will follow my trip on the Internet why we all should be supporting the WFP financially and by spreading the words to our friends without forgetting to let our leaders know that these children need our support and now is no time to cut down the aid.

As usual, I will have a camera with me and I cannot wait to share with you my trip in photographs. I know that I have many friends and fans in the cities that I will be visiting so I am counting on you to show me around!

It’s not everyday that a piece of information completely catches me off-guard and utterly leaves me speechless and wondering whether I am an idiot or not…

Let’s start at the beginning to shed some light, shall we?

As you know (after a year yapping about it!) I am gearing up for a Big Journey unlike others: to drive around the world DJing in every country to fight child hunger worldwide.

Most people, including me it turns out, think that it’s only in developing countries that some children go to bed hungry at night because their parents or caretakers do not have enough to provide for them.

Wrong!

Robbie Pesut, the owner of Globe, one of the trendy spots I regularly DJ at, revealed to me — while I was sharing with him my world tour plans and the mission behind it — that his business ventures also support an agency that provides school meals to children whose parents cannot afford to properly feed them. And, these are not kids a few continents away but in Montreal!

That’s the piece of reality check that left me speechless in shock and embarrassment in perfect measures.

I was initially planning one $25 000 fundraiser DJ marathon in Montreal to benefit United Nations World Food Programme in their school meals projects that would be able to feed 100 000 children in developing nations (this was pushed to May 2011).

But I decided to support Montreal my hometown, first. I have lived and traveled in many cities and Montreal has been the best home for me, yes even with the brutal winters!

Just in case the message has not been heard loud and clear, here goes again: I believe that NO human being, especially a child, should go to bed hungry at night because she or he does not enough to eat. And that includes a child in Montreal, a city in a G8 country!

Silvana Pesut, a senior Globe exec put me in touch with Valérie Morquette, the communications coordinator at Le Garde-Manger Pour Tous which is a Montreal organisation that produces 3000 HOT & BALANCED meals per school day, which amounts to HALF A MILLION meals every year for children mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds in Montreal.

On a minus 30 degrees (Celsius) day (Yes, I never forget freezing cold days!), I met with Ms Morquette to expose her my plan to raise $25 000 in a single week month for her organisation and that’s how the JaBig’s $25 000 DJ Marathon Fundraiser for Montreal’s Hungry School Kids, on Monday 21st March until Sunday 28th March 2011** Sunday 27th March  until Wednesday 27th April came about.

Check it out on Facebook as details are still panned out. To show your support please RSVP “Attending”. This does not imply your physical presence but your seal of approval.

** The dates were shifted around due to scheduling conflicts related to professional engagements that I had to fulfill since they were booked a few months prior.

It turns out that planning a DJ world tour by car is no child’s play and it’s a daunting task that I greatly underestimated.

I was under the impression that it was a matter of setting course, getting the needed tools and simply sailing, err, driving away to see the world and its beautiful people and places.

Well, there are organizations and corporations to be partnered with, logistics to be dealt with, people to be sold onto the idea and the ultimate uncontrollable factor: the unknown such as a laptop theft that contained the Big Journey’s details thus throwing everything back by a couple of months while I rewrote everything.

At this stage, you must be wondering: “Is he still going away?”

The answer is “Of course I am!”

“When?”, I hear you ask.

“When I am ready”, has become my cautious answer, picked up from polite politicians.

While I still figure everything out, I have been traveling a bit for fun and sometimes for biz but I am also actively gearing up for my trip by mastering the art of leading kick-butt workshops (for the DEX 101 initiative) for example or learning how to shoot perfect photographs, as I will be the principal photographer on my epic adventure.

The holiday season is here so it means many events to perform at which will keep my already busy schedule even tighter but I love it and would not have it any other way.

To you my family, friends, supporters, colleagues and partners, I thank you for the constant words of encouragement and I look forward to crossing paths with all of you wherever you are spread out on this huge planet.

Exactly six months ago, I made the biggest announcement of my life ever by revealing that I was about to embark on a round-the-world tour by… car! It goes without saying that this is a huge project especially given the fact that no other DJ in history, or artist/entertainer for that matter, has ever undertaken such an adventure.

What have I been up to in the last six months?

Well, it turns out that planning an adventure around the world that is half a trip and half a DJ tour is as complex as staging a project as big as a huge festival!

Let’s use the most popular festival in Canada as an example. Over 2 million people attend the Montreal International Jazz Fest yearly and attendance to some shows is over 100,000 and sometimes over 200,000 according to official figures.

While I don’t think that any of my shows will attract as many people overall my Big Journey (the project name of my world tour), I believe that it will have the same reach if not ten times more overall.

Wishful thinking on my part?

Not if you consider this:

- Four to five years performing in nightclubs, at festivals and at other various music events in hundreds of countries on six continents, will certainly put the total live audience to over 150 000.

- The Big Journey will also include a round-the-world radio tour where I will be guest DJing live on the air. Personally, I don’t listen to the radio but it turns out that millions around the world still do which make sense given the fact that when stuck in a traffic jam there are no other methods of entertainment.

- Blogs: my personal Big Journey blog/official website (JaBig.com) does not get a significant amount of traffic, yet. However, I will be a contributing editor and columnist for a number of blogs that make the Technorati Top 100 Blogs list. To put numbers into perspective, they each attract over 2 million monthly unique visitors.

- I cannot predict the reach of television and newspaper publicity efforts because it’s like trying to predict the lotto. I can score small or score big but will hopefully score big

Before I get carried away with numbers (I am semi-obsessed with “the reach” because the more people are aware of the Big Journey, the better I can champion my cause), let me get back to the original point of explaining why this is a complex project that requires meticulous planning as so many variables will be at play once I hit the road and one off little element can have semi-disastrous consequences.

When I made the big announcement six months ago, I just wanted to get in a car and drive around the world without too much fanfare. As time went by, the project grew more than I had anticipated. From there, my team and I decided to go all out and make it as big as possible if we really want to impact the world.

Thus, we’ve been planning and slaving over details to make sure that the Big Journey and its related projects such as Beats for Life, DEX 101, the radio tour, the speaking engagements and more (without forgetting sightseeing and having fun of course!)  are a success in all the countries and cities around the world that they will tour.

This is getting too long so I will stop here

In a future post, I will be detailing exactly what I will be doing when I am travelling and touring. In the meantime, I’d like to thank you for your support and kind words and I look forward to seeing you in your country, city or community