Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch more episodes of One World Youth Project TV at this link: http://bit.ly/GVrfog

While I fully support the missions of organizations that focus on increasing studying abroad numbers, which are at a dismal 1% in the US, I believe that this single approach is not enough for substantial change. There are financial barriers and issues of student access with study abroad programs, and these opportunities usually favor countries like the UK, Italy, Spain, France, China and Australia — six countries that claim nearly 50 percent of the total US study abroad pool (IIE, Open Doors 2011).This leaves a group of countries, which might not have an established partnership, isolated from becoming a part of the ‘global network’. For example, no country in Africa is in the top 25 leading destinations for US students studying abroad — yet the continent is incredibly diverse, rich in history, important to world affairs and open to such exchanges — which is why One World Youth Project is concentrating expansion efforts in Africa for the 2013/2014 program year.

Depending on the student and the program, the study abroad experience could change perspectives or could simply be a prolonged summer, semester or year of partying with other Americans in a foreign nation. It takes dedication from the students, a sound host family (if this route is even chosen at all) and an intentional program that allows cross-cultural engagement to really create an intercultural experience. Nonetheless, the focus of this article is not to completely undermine or berate the concept of study abroad. In fact, I myself am a product of some amazing study abroad experiences which changed my life and career trajectory. I would not be working for OWYP if it weren’t for the opportunities I’ve had to go abroad. Organizations that promote study abroad continue to work tirelessly to extend these opportunities and we at OWYP are in solidarity with them concerning this same mission: global citizens with global competence.

The point I’m trying to make, which echos Ota’s conclusions in his article, is that studying abroad isn’t the only way to internationalize a populace. There needs to be an internationalization of a curricula throughout the educational pipeline from pre-school until university graduation. There need to be activities in schools that promote diversity, cross-cultural exchange and working with individuals of different cultures. The challenge is two-pronged and we cannot achieve one without the other. The government needs to take global skill sets and a 21st century education seriously, so that public education systems can adapt appropriately.

Ota’s column reiterates this when he states that “…the Japanese government is expected to continue to support the strategic initiatives of university internationalization in order to provide a catalyst for the functional transformation of Japanese universities towards meeting the demands of the 21st century’s global knowledge-based society.”

While governments around the world like Japan are focusing such efforts on their educational system, it seems the US is falling behind and focusing too much on areas like STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math), and although important for economic development, even engineers need global competence to operate in the reality of the integrated and globalized world we now live in.

 ”Challenging students to expand their views outside of their typical personal bubbles by directly connecting them to global peers will allow them to be respectful to other people’s beliefs and practices” -Project Ambassador, Washington D.C., U.S.A.

“Having experienced living abroad and studying abroad I understand the importance of global awareness built through interacting with others. I want to pass that on.” -Project Ambassador, Boston, U.S.A.

“I have a keen interest in working alongside other university students from around the world, to make the outer world accessible to my community.” -Project Ambassador, Georgetown, Guyana

“I’m excited to interact with other people around the world and build cross-cultural relationships, and also act as a link to other countries among students who don’t have access to technology and media.” -Project Ambassador, Islamabad, Pakistan

“Even though people live very far from each other and may belong to different religions and cultures, they will realize through this project that they all have the same rights, same capabilities and common goals.” -Project Ambassador, Prishtina, Kosovo

“It would be an amazing experience to communicate with people around the world, and this is an original way. I am keen on taking part in anything that is international and allows us to connect with others that we wouldn’t ordinarily meet.” -Project Ambassador, Istanbul, Turkey

All of these reasons and motivations have a common thread: a desire for a connection. A student’s connection with his/her surrounding community, and a connection with peers from other countries. We’re seeing university students from the U.S., Kosovo, Turkey, Guyana and Pakistan eagerly apply for the Project Ambassador position with the same fundamental goal: to impact lives by connecting people. The opportunity for technology-facilitated international exchange wasn’t there for their parents and the generation before them, but it is available for them now and they are taking advantage of it.

“Many of our university students sign up for our program because they want to bring the world to students and youth in their community,” said Cady Voge, Program Director. “It’s been really inspiring hearing university students all around the world say they really think students in their community need an international experience for their next steps in life, and how they came to this common mission from such different places.”

Every layer of One World Youth Project, from the international network of universities, to the collaborative platforms for university students, to participating university students connecting with the local community, down to the technology-facilitated international exchange between our secondary school participants, is saturated with human-to-human interactions. And this year One World Youth Project will be connecting 60 university students and over 200 secondary school students globally in international exchange.

Groups of university students from six universities around the world have been recruited and are now undergoing a six-week Online Training Course to build the knowledge base and skill-sets needed for their roles as global education facilitators. Through the online course and upcoming in-person trainings, OWYP student leaders will learn how to instruct a global competence curriculum in local secondary schools, facilitate cross-cultural dialogue among their students and and inspire global citizenship in their communities. Stay tuned.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch this short video to learn more about the OWYP program

And that’s the crux these TED Talks and op-eds are getting at: our new technological world enables connections in an unprecedented way, and at an unprecedented rate, but the mere availability of such connections does not guarantee any substantial connections or meaningful exchanges. In fact, these superficial connections can actually work against meaningful human-to-human interactions, distracting youth from the sometimes messy, but necessary entanglements of human relationships, which is what Sherry Turkle argues in the above TED Talk.

It can often seem, and may very well be likely, that technological progression is inevitable and unstoppable, kind of like globalization itself. So, with that, we can again turn to Sherry Turkle who during the TED Talk said, “I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them and with ourselves.”

Currently, at OWYP, we are working on developing a robust curriculum to support each and every one of our connections between participating classrooms. Ossob Mohamud is our staff member working hard researching and developing this curriculum. She faces the challenge of creating lesson plans that simultaneously put those classroom connections front-and-center, imbue them with deeper meaning and reflection and make them culturally relevant and adaptable to ministry-set standards in a wide variety of countries and cultures. Structuring these exchanges around reflections and questions that are applicable at both the local community level and the international level help transform otherwise vapid, ad hoc digital encounters into moments of real learning and reflection.

As Ross Douthat points out in the above-mentioned NYT op-ed, there is a “sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He meets a friend for coffee, but the video cuts away from this live interaction, leaping ahead to the moment when he snaps a photo of some ‘cool’ graffiti and shares it online.”
This makes Turkle’s call to action even more urgent: “We all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet — they need us. Let’s talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life, the life we can love.”

Turkle is calling us to build relationship. And that is essentially what we at OWYP, a group of young, social entrepreneurs obsessed with cultures and countries, traveling and technology, are trying to do with the technology we have at hand, everyday.

One afternoon, four months into the academic year, I returned from class to find my roommate in a frantic state. She was concerned that because our two countries were engaged in active war, our friendship was now in jeopardy. She did not want “politics to come between us”. The gesture came from a good place, however, I am not from Libya, I am in fact from Namibia. “But it is all the same thing isn’t it, one country with different states, just like here?” I smiled at the 20-year-old in awe and proceeded to give her a detailed geography lesson from which she learned that Egypt was in Africa while Haiti was not. Four months into our relationship, she wanted to know about where I was from because she already knew who I was. It was not the other way around. Today my roommate is one of my closest friends and I have since learnt so much from her, but that incident left me concerned about the undercurrent of a greater global issue that I believe we must begin to address.

I joined OWYP in December 2011 with this very mission of global paradigm shifting. The OWYP mission of globalizing education in the global world is a simple concept. The premise is this; the world we live in is changing. We are becoming more technologically, economically and scientifically integrated with one another, so we must equip ourselves with the capacity to culturally integrate. I do not conclude that not many people know that Africa is a continent of many independent nations, but with the low level of global empathy and understanding of others in many areas, this may as well be the case.

Since Woodrow Wilson’s ‘jaw jaw jaw’ analogy in 1945, the trend has leaned toward talking about global issues using intense spurts of dialogues in the form of summits and conferences. However, if we do not know who we are talking to and see the commonalities between us then we talk in vain. It is not enough to just care about the issues we are trying to solve. Be it global hunger, global warming or even global dialogue, we must care about the characters with whom we are dealing with in problem solving in order to come up with sustainable and effective solutions.

From pioneer armchair anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan to contemporary outlooks on inter-cultural relations, it is clear to see that there has been progress. We no longer just read books about pristine “tribes” afar. Instead we leave the comforts of our cultures to explore others. The world has done a relatively good job of creating a type of global museum in which we can do tours and cruises and complete the check list of things to see in different countries, ranging from Eiffel tower to the Gaza pyramids. This is not enough. While this curiosity has its merits, without applying and even adopting the lessons of others to our own nations and communities, we may as well go to Vegas to complete the checklist in one location at a lower cost. Even if we know who we are as individual actors in our world, we must also understand who we are as a global cast, an ensemble.

I have few recollections about elementary school. I remember Mrs Hill’s bright yellow flowery dress that she seemed to wear daily, always accompanied by a big smile. I often wondered if she had many of the same dress stashed in her wardrobe. I do not remember much about Pythagoras’ theorem or even the songs we learnt to memorize the different countries in the world. What I do remember is my friend from Iran who was Baha’i. I don’t recall very much of my 6th grade syllabus but today if you asked me, I could tell you quite a bit about what it was like for a Baha’i girl in a Catholic school in Namibia. School is a fantastic place to learn about others. Not simply because the environment is centered around learning but also because as a student, your prejudices have not yet been fully fortified by society’s historical experiences. You like those who are nice to you, you eat that which taste good and you spend time with those you have fun with. If differences are inherent then finding similarities in spite of them is learned and we cannot allow the next generation to be unqualified in the valuable field.

Movements like OWYP are trying to shift basic anthropological rhetoric from questions like “how different are we?” to questions like “how similar are our differences and how can we contribute to our similar goals?” The basic answer in my opinion is relationships. All seven billion of us cannot be friends but we can each build well informed and empathetic relationship with the people we interact with and especially those who we learn with. Relationships are the most powerful resources we have to change our world. I will not forget Mrs Hill’s bright dress and matching smile, my friend from sixth grade and my roommate. Because I identified with their stories, I am inclined to consider the impact of my actions on the next Baha’i sixth grader in Namibia, or the next college student whose world map is distorted. I have been lucky to go to school in quite a few different countries where I could identify these stories and build these relationships. If we can create a space where these relationships can be created without the financial and even environmental cost of constant travel, then we have created a space for relationships that can change the trajectory of cultural relationships.

One of the main goals of One World Youth Project is to set students up for success in the 21^st century – both secondary school students and university students. Over time I’ve learned that if university students are actually going to be agents of change among their generation, then the knowledge that they gain during their undergraduate years needs to be fused with practical application. Students need to pursue avenues of leadership and innovation during college in order to be successful in the career world post-college.

In the 2011/2012 class of One World Youth Project alumni, two of our former Project Ambassadors are going to continue to work in education – in June 2011, Kim Fernandes started working for Teach for India as a 4^th grade teacher in Mumbai, India, and Deven Comen will be a special education teacher in Washington D.C. starting August 2012. Interested in how being a One World Youth Project facilitator in secondary schools influenced their career path in education, I asked them a few questions to better understand their experiences.

ANJALI DARYANANI: In what ways did working for OWYP prepare you for your next steps in education?

KIM FERNANDES: Being an OWYP Project Ambassador in Washington D.C. schools and a Project Manager Fellow in schools in Doha [Qatar] gave me the confidence to stand up in front of a class and actually talk to students – just talk to them and engage them in two-way dialogue, instead of teaching at them. One of the main things I learned from OWYP was the importance of making your class interactive, making it interesting, making it a space where kids wanted to be. Once I established that, I learned about the impact that educational opportunities could have on students and the experience made me want to continue working in the field of education.

DEVEN COMEN:  So, right after I finished working with OWYP, I studied abroad in Pune, India, and I definitely think that One World Youth Project gave me a vocabulary to describe some of the inequities that I was seeing there. Also, working in Washington D.C. secondary school classrooms was a major confidence-builder, and because of that, I took the initiative to volunteer for different social organizations while in India. Because of the positive experiences I had working in D.C. schools through OWYP, I was motivated to apply for Teach for America and will be staying in D.C. to teach secondary school math next year.

Also, I think OWYP is really what helped me define myself more as a global citizen and that’s why I started to see myself as one of these empathetic, discerning people that we try to make our students into through the program.

ANJALI DARYANANI: Thank you both. Deven, in what ways was OWYP a confidence-builder and how did it help you define yourself as a global citizen?

DEVEN COMEN: When I became a campus coordinator, I developed management skills that I didn’t anticipate, because I had to support my OWYP campus team to the best of my abilities and take leadership over the movement on the Georgetown University campus. I think it was the best undergraduate leadership opportunity that I’ve ever had, in how it helped me work with others and create an organizational culture around an innovative movement.

Regarding being a global citizen, OWYP gave me the opportunity to engage with a completely different world – that of Southeast D.C. – and escape the bubble around me. I was able to connect with 7^th graders in Ward 8 and learn about their perspectives on the world, and they learned about mine.  Connecting across difference gave me an attitude of openness that I took with me when I studied abroad, and I was able to better handle myself abroad because I had been trained with the values of empathy and understanding that OWYP tries to emphasize.

ANJALI DARYANANI: Thanks, Deven. How about you, Kim, can you tell us a little bit about your work with Teach for India? What’s a typical day in your classroom like?

KIM FERNANDES: I work at a government school in Mumbai from 12-6pm, and it is difficult sometimes but I love my job and it is a humbling experience. I have connected with my kids on such a deep level – here, the teachers become very involved in their students’ lives and the students’ families become the teachers’ families too. I think there is something invaluable about this experience because it gives you the chance to be a part of everyone’s family and honestly make the learning a two-way street between the teacher and student. The students are so bright and eager to learn; every day they come running into the classroom, excited, and I want to stay for longer because I know there is so much more that I can do.

To be very honest, before OWYP I wasn’t even considering a career in teaching; I thought I would apply for a corporate job or graduate school. But OWYP helped me recognize the importance of education, especially students who really need a quality education, such as the students I was working with in DC public schools and now here in a Mumbai government school. I had a really good time working as an OWYP Project Ambassador in the classroom and I realized that this was something I wanted to do for more than a few hours each day; after that, I applied for Teach for India.

DEVEN COMEN: That is so great, Kim! Just wanted to chime in on the community link and say that working for OWYP was the first time I had even stepped into a D.C. public school classroom. That exposure got me much more interested in domestic issues, specifically domestic urban poverty in Washington D.C. and just witnessing the differences between Wards. It was one thing seeing those differences, and it was another thing to actually commit to doing something about those differences. I had to work with students in a DC public school classroom and commit to being there every week, addressing inequities by engaging these students in dialogue that related to their own lives. That got me more interested in urban, American education and that was what got me seriously interested in Teach for America.

Kim and Deven show us the full circle of impact in leadership and global citizenry. They illustrate that university students can become powerful leaders if they had experience combining knowledge and skills – skills in innovation, mentorship, management and professionalism – to generate social change. In Kim, Deven and several other OWYP alumni, we are seeing the cycle of leadership and success that is breeding more success in the global community, and that is sustainable change.

That is the case with the classroom my fellow Project Ambassador and I are working in this semester. Columbia Heights Education Campus (CHEC) is a high minority school, with Hispanic, African American, Asian, and East African students. Our class in particular has a fair number of English Language Learners (ELL). We immediately noticed the divisions in the classroom that unfortunately and undeniably formed along racial and linguistic lines. We tried rearranging seating but that did not create the collaboration nor communication we wanted to see between the newly mixed tables.

But something changed, even for a brief, fleeting moment, during the lesson about identifying injustice. Each group chose to speak about an injustice in their community that bothered them. We had to repeatedly encourage Isabella* to present for her group. She was shy and understandably so. But when she came to the front of the classroom and spoke, you could hear a pin drop. Isabella passionately talked about the discrimination and exclusion that ELL and Immigrant populations feel in the DC community. She talked about illegal deportations and the constant fear of having everything you worked for being taken away, which she related to her own life.

The class then voted on one community injustice to focus on for the rest of the semester. It came as a surprise to us that almost every single hand went up for Isabella’s group idea on immigration issues. But it was a pleasant surprise. More than anything, we saw it as a breakthrough. We noticed students recognizing one another’s humanity. We witnessed students empathizing with one another’s experiences with injustice, and possibly realizing their own role in perpetuating it. I could see students possibly for the first time, realizing “it must be tough being you, and it’s just not fair.”

This is very much still a tentative beginning, to what we hope will be genuine respect and empathy between our students. Giving them a space to connect with their peers abroad, laid the equally important groundwork, for the CHEC students to connect amongst themselves here at home.

Learn more about the OWYP program in Washington D.C. public schools by watching the short video below: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

*The name of the student has been changed for privacy reasons.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I interviewed OWYP Alumni Fellow Ossob Mohamud, who currently works on staff at our headquarters in Washington D.C. She was a Project Manager Fellow at School of Foreign Service in Education City, Qatar during the 2010-2011 academic year.

An Alumni Fellow is a paid professional position based out of Washington D.C. that we offer to OWYP alumni.

Why did you originally want to join OWYP?

A friend was excited about it and told me about her experience as a past participant in OWYP at the Washington, D.C. Hub at Georgetown. I took my time to look into it, and I was impressed by the organization and what it was trying to do, and I also saw a need for it in our own community.

How was it like to participate in the international Summer Training Conference?

It was something very different from what I’ve ever done. I got to know my counterpart Project Manager Fellows really well—we bonded. [STC] was in a cabin in West Virginia, and we had a lot of activities about educational theories and ideologies, things that I liked so much that I looked into them after the training. We also got to plan how we would structure our Hub at Qatar. We kept asking ourselves questions like, ‘Who are we going to target for recruitment?’ and ‘How are we going to advise our peers?’ It was great to be in a space that allowed us to think innovatively about how we could run this program.

How was it like to manage the Hub in Qatar?

At first, it was extremely tough because there were logistical problems. Our small student body meant we faced challenges with recruitment, and it forced us to be really creative about how we recruited our peers. There were times when we wondered, “Is this possible?” But eventually we got our group of PAs (Project Ambassadors) recruited, and it was great, and such a good feeling to feel that sense of success. You know, before OWYP, I was a timid person and didn’t want to bother anyone, but being a PMF (Project Manager Fellow) in Qatar taught me to be determined and to make sure any initiative I believed in became successful. It gave me courage.

What kind of skills do you feel you gained?

I gained lots of professional development with leading meetings. I had never led a meeting in my life. I also gained lots of leadership skills…mediating conflict and helping others work through problems. I gained professionalism, how I was perceived and how I worked with others. I really appreciated all of the people skills I gained…through this program I worked with a lot of different individuals, of different backgrounds, it was really diverse…As a student leader, we had to navigate all of those identities while building team morale and respecting their boundaries at the same time.

Why did you decide to become an Alumni Fellow?

Jess Rimington (Founder and Executive Director) approached me with the opportunity, and I thought it over…I felt that it was a good place to me because [the fellowship] would give me the opportunity to explore and learn more about myself and what I’m passionate about. Plus it was with something I already had experience with and the mission is something I align with.

What did you gain as an Alumni Fellow?

I developed trainings, led trainings, created and managed content creation. Working on things professionally, with things that I am so interested in, was a great opportunity. I did a lot of research, and had my eyes opened to many different issues. I figured out what I am passionate about, such as making things inclusive and ensuring accessibility to education in different countries and cultures. I think about thought leadership almost every day.

The experience of OWYP as a whole…what’s the takeaway?

That’s a huge, loaded question. There’s just so much I appreciate. (sigh) There’s been so much learning and so much development. I’ve learned so much about what I’m interested in, and these are actual things I want to pursue later in life. It made me critically think about topics I normally would have never thought about. But above all, I developed so many different relationships…friendships, colleagues, and meeting many different people and learning from them. The takeaway is a lot of changes in my approach, my interests and myself. I’m never going to forget this.

In a post 9/11 world the word “cell” has come to have a negative and ominous connotation; it often implies terrorist or criminal sleeper cells and are poised for activation and destructive activity.

Precisely 30 years before 9/11 in 9/81, I was a college student and I ran a cell. And I even wrote an article about it entitled “Cell Yourselves”.

The University of San Francisco where I went to college had a large and diverse international student population. However, studies had shown that foreign students tend to congregate amongst themselves once they arrived at a university in the US for all the predictable reasons – they were homesick, they needed to speak a language that was familiar, they had common friends and family back home.

So USF came up with a wonderful concept called “cells”.

These cells were clusters of 8 to 10 students plus a cell leader.

The student clusters were diverse and only one person from a representative country was permitted to join the cell. And for the entire first week of college these cells engaged in common activities: sports, putting on small theatrical skits, doing community service and so on. I was a cell leader and it was just a delight to see the “paradigm shift” of cultures that were unfamiliar with each other to commune and clash and create a new sense of community. It was not always easy but it was worthwhile because by the end of that week each student had found about 7 or 8 or 9 new friends to launch into their college career with. Friends from far flung countries whom they may never have befriended otherwise – or even noticed.

There was also the impact of the USF Jesuit tradition of community service – a tradition that extends to other Jesuit colleges such as Georgetown, which Jess Rimington attended.

These foreign students got to serve food to homeless Americans, serve people in hospices, comfort runaway children in shelters in the San Francisco city areas and to witness Americans who lived in real pain and had real challenges.

And taken as a whole these multiple cells reconfigured into a more vibrant living and breathing student body where the life cells were stronger, healthier and more integrated. There was so much more warmth – both intra-cell and inter-cell – it was like ice cubes melting together. The former boundaries and walls had been dismantled and cultural stereotypes had begun to evaporate.

My concern after this cell-building week was for the value of cell integration to remain intact and to not disintegrate. And so in that same September month that school had just started, I wrote an article to encourage the student body to make the vision of cell-building a sustainable activity that travels far beyond that first introductory week of school.

Below is that article reprinted from over 30 years ago in the USF Foghorn.

Meeting Erik Visser

How I came by the article is a story in itself. A couple of months ago I went into Peet’s Coffee in my neighborhood and bumped into a guy I had not see for over 30 years – a Dutchman by the name Erik Visser. Erik and I shared a dorm at USF in 1980 and had not seen each other since then!!

We had… coffee. And have met regularly for coffee since then, catching up on the years – we both have college-aged kids – his son Brian and my daughter Davina are both USF college students today!

As fellow parents Erik and I have often discussed the need for our kids to embrace a multi-cultural and global world. And in that context I mentioned the long-lost article I wrote as an Editor of the USF Foghorn all those years ago…

I told Erik I had no idea how to find the article “Cell Yourselves” and so he contacted his friend Father Kotlanger at the Foghorn Archives. And that is how I managed to get my hands on this article after over 30 years.

Erik then read the article and shared the ideas with his son Brian and then Erik and Brian met with me at… Peet’s Coffee – the very same Peet’s where Erik and I bumped into each other!

I decided to interview Erik about his take on “Cell Yourselves”:

Karim:

Erik, this is just like being back at USF – you were on the soccer team back then and now your son Brian is on the soccer team. And you run the soccer program! And here I am interviewing you just like I used to back when I was on the USF Foghorn editorial team!

Erik:

It’s surreal! It feels like we are just picking up where we left off after over 30 years.

Karim:

What were your thoughts after you read my article “Cell Yourselves”?

Erik:

Well first of all… my apologies for not getting to it sooner…

Karim

.. That’s okay Erik – people often wait over 30 years before they finally get to read one of my articles…

Erik:

I was fascinated by that idea of the cells being clusters of diverse cultures of 7 or 8 or 9 college students. And I was thinking that you know – that is exactly what I do today: I manage a cell of 32 students – from all social and cultural backgrounds. There are Hispanic students from very low-income sections of the state, there are Australians, Norwegians, you name it. And I have been doing this for 30 years now so I have managed cells with students from many, many countries.

Karim:

You remember all the Nigerian and Ghanaian soccer players we had back then Erik? Well I was talking to my friend Emmanuel who is from Ghana and is a student at Johns Hopkins and loves soccer. And one of the things we both felt is that soccer is such a “democratic” game – anyone anywhere can play it.

Erik:

It is the most democratic game because you can be in the poorest part of Ghana or Kenya or Brazil and you can either buy a ball or make a ball…

But the main point of your article Karim, which is relevant today is that we all must learn to get along no matter what part of the world we are from. In a global world we need cultural understanding to build moral and productivity.

I see this all the time in my business – the sports management business. You need to be able to navigate your way through all the cultural divides and find a way to build bridges between cultures – that is the only way to build moral and thereby implement productive and fruitful team work.

As people who love good writing – as you and I do – I am a little disappointed in the prevalence of low quality journalism today. But as you know – since we have a cup of coffee now and then in the morning – I always read the New York Times and he one guy I will always read and respect as a journalist is Tom Friedman – I read all his articles and I have read all his books.

The point that Friedman makes over and over, is the point you make in Cell Yourselves about the USF policy to integrate students – it must all begin at the Educational level. Education is key. I have a couple of masters degrees and have always strived to improve and learn by taking college classes from the time you and I were in our 20’s to well into my 30’s and my 40’s.

And the key attribute of the “cells” is that it is a community effort. That is what my own “cell building” is – a community effort involving students, faculty and parents to make sure we not only win soccer matches but that we keep the grade point average up.

Education is the key to the global world as Friedman said in a recent article [Pass the Books: Hold the Oil – New York Times, March 10]:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/friedman-pass-the-books-hold-the-oil.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman

Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Karim:

… Are you saying you can actually make a soccer ball?

Erik:

I have seen people make soccer balls out of all sorts of eco-friendly available materials. There are places in Africa where kids make balls out of plastic bags like in this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0GQZFlO4tM] and there are kids in Hondurus who make balls out of used clothes and old rags like in this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQMhvujnpAo&feature=fvwrel]

Brian (Erik’s son):

Dad – tell Karim about One World Futbal Project!

Erik:

Ya okay – now this is something very special indeed! One World Futbal Project [http://www.oneworldfutbol.com] was actually inspired by Darfur refugees. And I actually have one of these balls at home – it is the most durable ball in the world – doesn’t need a pump – it can outlast any regular ball. And it can make a difference in the lives of kids in places where they cannot afford a soccer ball. One World Futbal Project is an amazing concept.

Karim:

Recommending the One World Futbal Project concept to the One World Youth Project! Now that seems like a perfect way to pause this interview.

Thank you Brian and Erik.

And Erik, I look forward to our follow-up interview 30 years from now.