Learning Life’s second video about our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative is now out! This video is 4 minutes and 41 seconds long, and features our founder, Paul Lachelier, explaining Learning Life and the Citizen Diplomacy Initiative.
This video was put together by Andrew Jorgensen, a talented senior in film and video studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Andrew interned with Learning Life this spring semester, and this video is one of four he produced. Here is the first video Andrew produced. Stay tuned for the third and fourth videos!
Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative engages lower-income American families in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with families in other nations to nurture informed, skilled, connected and caring global citizens. Learn more here.
Get Notice of DC Live International Virtual Exchange Meetings
Are you using or interested in using live international virtual exchange (LIVE) to advance education, development, or civil society engagement? Learning Life, an educational nonprofit based in DC, is working to establish periodic meetings of live, international, virtual exchange practitioners and other interested parties in the Washington DC metro area. Details about the planned meetings follow below.
If you would like to be notified of these meetings, contact Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info with your name and email address.
Name: DC LIVE Dialogues, or DC LIVE
Purpose: To facilitate communication, sharing and collaboration between LIVE practitioners, researchers, teachers, participants, funders, journalists, and others working in international education, development or civil society arenas in metro Washington DC.
Proposed Structure: (1) networking for first 15-20 minutes to allow everyone to arrive, (2) 2-3 minute updates (news, what’s going well, challenges, resources, collaboration opportunities) from a representative of each participating organization, (3) open discussion, (4) announcements.
Day & Time: First meeting will be on Thursday, July 20, 4:30-6pm. Contact Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info for location details.
How Do We Build Peace in a Divided World? Three Ways in One Day
Last Sunday was the busiest day yet for Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI): two live international dialogues, and one international potluck. All three events exemplified how Learning Life is building peace through dialogue and collaboration across divides of race, class and nation.
The day began with a live dialogue between Learning Life staff and a Jordanian family in the city of Jerash, Jordan, home to extensive Roman era ruins. Learning Life’s Director, Paul Lachelier, and former U.S. foreign service employee and volunteer Arabic interpreter, Jamila Attaoui, discussed a photography guide with the Mustafa family in Jordan.
The guide provides families participating in CDI some training in photography as part of our first international collaboration, a “photovoice” project now ongoing. That project will culminate in an electronic photo album comparing the answers of families in the USA, Senegal and Jordan in answer to the question “what is the past, present and future of your community?”
Next, we organized an international potluck bringing together people who normally don’t meet, let alone eat and talk together: African American families east of Washington DC’s Anacostia River, George Washington University students west of the River, and experienced U.S. foreign service officers.
Those who came to the potluck with a dish explained its contents and cultural origins, pointing to the country of origin on a world map when the dishes were foreign.
The potluck then moved to this discussion question: “Why is there so much social division (racial, religious, national, etc.), and what can we do to help overcome these divisions?” The participants focused mostly on how to overcome those divisions, and their answers underscored the need for dialogue, friendship, even marriage, across social divides. It helped, coincidentally, that one of the parents participating in the potluck had just given birth to bi-racial twins, who came along for the fun.
The potluck, organized by Learning Life and its affiliated CDI student chapter at GWU, featured:
Israeli tomato & cucumber salad
Peruvian lomo saltado (grilled beef & onions)
American roasted chicken wings
Moroccan flat bread and beef kebab
Middle Eastern baklava (filo dough filled with nuts and honey)
Chinese sweetened mango rice
Japanese mochi (ice cream covered in rice cake)
European nougat (a sweet made with almonds, sugar and whipped egg whites)
The day finished with a live internet dialogue between two American families in Washington D.C. and a Senegalese family in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The families discussed photos the Senegalese family recently shared as part of their first international collaboration, the photovoice project. A growing number of photos from our CDI participants in the USA, Senegal and Jordan are gathering at our new Facebook page, which allows our international families to see each other and comment on their own and others’ project contributions. We look forward to seeing our CDI Facebook page come alive as more and more families join from across the world.
Building world peace takes sustained, conscious effort. That’s why we at Learning Life are developing a novel model for building peace, based on (a) live internet dialogues and (b) project collaborations between (c) lower-income families rooted in (d) particular neighborhoods across the world. Stay tuned for more as we develop and test this model through international dialogues, projects and activities like the ones above.
Intern Spotlight: Jo Moley
This is the fifth in a series of spotlights on our spring 2017 student interns. Learning Life’s students this spring are translating documents, conducting research, fundraising, doing outreach locally and internationally for our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI), and other work. Jo Moley, interviewed below, is helping with fundraising, outreach to Salvadoran organizations, and social media communications and strategy, among other things.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Alexandria, Virginia and raised in Darien, Connecticut.
What school do you attend, and what is your year and major there?
I am a junior in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service majoring in Regional Studies of Latin America and minoring in Spanish.
What do you like to do in your free time?
In my free time, I enjoy reading, working out, and watching/listening to Spanish movies and music. I also really enjoy knitting! I learned how to knit when I was working at an elderly care facility in the Córdoba region of Argentina last summer, and it’s surprisingly relaxing.
Is there a life experience you have had that has particularly shaped you as a person thus far? If so, what is it, and how has it shaped you?
The life experience that I have had that has particularly shaped me thus far was a three-day solo trip that I took during my time abroad in Argentina. While I speak Spanish at an advanced level, I am by no means fluent. Even if I were fluent in Spanish, my sense of direction is so terrible that a solo trip would be a challenge regardless of the lack of a language barrier. Despite, these obstacles, I decided to plan a three-day trip to four different towns/cities in Córdoba during a weekend off from work.
First I went to the largest city in the region, Córdoba, then I traveled to Alta Gracia, a small town where Che Guevara lived as a child, and finally I took a bus up into the Andes Mountains to visit two European-style villages nestled in the mountains. I traveled by bus and stayed in hostels, planning activities and figuring out the next leg of my journey on the fly.
As someone with limited travel experience, this was challenging but extremely rewarding. I was proud of my language abilities and my capacity to find my way from place to place. I also found the experience of traveling solo to be extremely liberating. I was able to plan my days based completely on my own interests, and it felt as though time passed in a different manner when I did not have to work within the constraints of other peoples’ schedules. I listened to and observed the people and places that surrounded me, which I think allowed me to experience things at a higher level.
This trip increased my confidence as a traveler and an individual. I had no choice but to rely on my own skills in a completely foreign region in a country to which I was not a native, which was empowering and exciting. I further developed my love for traveling, and I realized how much I am capable of handling.
What are your career plans?
I do not currently have specific career plans, but I am very interested in conflict resolution, and I am considering pursuing a graduate degree and/or working in that field. I am writing my senior thesis on the politics of memory in Argentina, and the preliminary research for this project has allowed me to explore theories of transitional justice and conflict resolution as they apply to Latin America. After college, I would love to work abroad in Latin America or within the Latin American policy community in Washington, DC.
Why did you choose to intern with Learning Life?
I chose to intern with Learning Life because I genuinely support the Citizen Diplomacy Initiative‘s goals to diversify the voices in foreign affairs and to encourage the growth of global citizens. Additionally, I was excited by the opportunity to become more familiar with Washington, DC and its residents through Learning Life. As a Georgetown student, I found that I rarely left my neighborhood, but Learning Life has given me the opportunity to work in Wards 7 & 8 in DC. Because of my major, I spend most of my time studying foreign countries and trying to understand the culture of groups of people thousands of miles away. Working for Learning Life has shown me that the first step to become a global citizen can be to better understand your own community.
What is the most beautiful place you have seen on Earth, and why is it so beautiful?
The most beautiful place that I have seen on earth is Lake Winnepesaukee in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. I think that I find it so amazing because I spent summers there when I was a child, and my grandparents live in Wolfeboro. Even without the nostalgia factor, Lake Winnepesaukee is an extremely special place. It is very large, so it is possible to drive a boat into the middle of the lake and just be surrounded by water and pine trees. Because of these pine trees, the air always has a distinctive, fresh smell that I strongly associate with summer. In the early evening, the sun filters through the trees as it sets and everything appears golden as the sky turns pink, orange, and red. Everything about the lake is peaceful and beautiful.
