Mentoring can change lives. Learning Life’s mentoring program is different from a typical mentoring program in two ways. First, we mentor Learning Life’s kids wherever their families live in the world. Second, our mentors, all based in the United States, focus on opening our kids to the world through conversation, discussing videos, articles, photos or other content, and in Washington DC, where our mentors can meet face-to-face with their local mentees, through visits to museums, libraries, embassies, cultural festivals, foreign restaurants and other venues. Suzanne Lachelier has been mentoring Baileigh Walker since May 2018. Learn more about each of them below. Learn more about our mentoring program here.
Mentee: Baileigh Walker
Where were you born and where have you lived so far?
I was born in Washington DC, and have lived in DC all my life.
Where do you go to school, and what grade are you in?
I go to school at Friendship Chamberlain Elementary School. I am in third grade.
What is/are your favorite subject(s) in school?
My favorite subject in school is math.
What are your hobbies?
I like to watch Youtube videos about slime and squishy stuff. I also like to dance.
What do you like about your mentor?
She’s nice and she teaches me a whole bunch of things.
What has been your favorite experience so far with your mentor?
I like going to Miss Suzanne’s house to explore the world using maps and phones.
Mentor: Suzanne Lachelier
Where were you born and raised?
I was born on Long Island in New York, and was raised in France until I was 16, when my family moved to Connecticut.
What’s your current and/or past line of work?
I am an attorney, and specialize in criminal defense litigation.
What are your hobbies?
I run, do yoga, and cycle. I also try to take one good overseas trip every year or two.
Why did you choose to volunteer with Learning Life?
I liked the idea of mentoring a child, and especially having a chance to share my interest in foreign countries, languages and cultures.
What do you like about your mentee?
Baileigh has so much personality for an eight-year old, and she is very outgoing. I enjoy how her willingness to talk to anyone contrasts with my relative shyness when we hang out around town.
What’s one rewarding experience you’ve had thus far with your mentee, and what made it rewarding?
It’s genuinely difficult to pick just one, so I’ll give two. First, we went to a Hirshhorn Museum (in Washington DC) exhibit recently that involved using technology. Baileigh independently remembered a National Geographic Museum virtual reality exhibit we had seen at least six months earlier, and articulated why she liked the latter better. It was gratifying to know she not only remembered and retained the earlier experience, but also had thoughts about what she liked regarding the two exhibits.
Second, recently as we walked into an exhibit about Senegalese women and gold jewelry at the Smithsonian African Art Museum in Washington DC, I asked her rotely “what’s the capital of Sénégal?” Baileigh answered equally rotely, correctly, and with a perfect French accent, “Dakar,” and kept walking through like she’d known the answer since she was born. It was funny to me at least, as our very first day together in May 2018, we had focused on Senegal and worked on memorizing the capital.
Food Culture Project Complete!
Learning Life is happy to report that we completed our food culture project today!
Launched in January 2018, the project engaged fifteen lower-income families in Washington DC, USA, San Salvador, El Salvador, and Dakar, Senegal in learning from each other and our project curriculum about food culture and nutrition.
The food project follows on Learning Life’s first international project, completed in 2017, which involved lower-income families in the USA, Senegal and Jordan in learning about community through photos they took, shared and discussed, culminating in a photo album featuring selected photos from their different vantage points in the world. Click here for results of that project.
This second international project, part of Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative(FDI), was completed in collaboration with the Georgetown University School of Medicine’s Community Health Division. That collaboration has thus far resulted in three research conference presentations about the food cultures of some of Learning Life’s families in the USA, El Salvador and Senegal, based on interviews, field observations, and surveys we conducted with them. You can learn more about that research here and here.
By June, we will issue a project report based on pre- and post-project surveys with a subset of eight of the fifteen Learning Life families engaged. The report will detail the project’s impact on the participating families’ interest in international affairs, tolerance for difference, and knowledge of food culture and nutrition. Stay tuned for the report! Also, in the coming months, FDI will be scaling up to engage more families, starting in Spanish, French and English-speaking countries, in world learning from each other plus educational content we provide via Learning Life’s CDI Facebook Group.
Mentor-Mentee Spotlight: Jadyn & Denis
Mentoring can change lives. Learning Life’s mentoring program is different from a typical mentoring program in two ways. First, we mentor Learning Life’s kids wherever their families live in the world. Second, our mentors, all based in the United States, focus on opening our kids to the world through conversation, discussing videos, articles, photos or other content, and in Washington DC, where our mentors can meet face-to-face with their local mentees, through visits to museums, libraries, embassies, cultural festivals, foreign restaurants and other venues. Denis Chazelle has been mentoring Jadyn Walker since September 2018. Learn more about each of them below. Learn more about our mentoring program here.
Mentee: Jadyn Walker
Where were you born and where have you lived so far?
I was born in Washington, DC, and have lived here all my life.
Where do you go to school, and what grade are you in?
I go to school at Friendship Chamberlain Elementary School. I am in fourth grade.
What is/are your favorite subject(s) in school?
My favorite subjects in school is math and social studies.
What are your hobbies?
I like to play on the playground and play drums.
What do you like about your mentor?
He takes me to a lot of places, and he’s really nice.
What’s one rewarding experience you’ve had thus far with your mentor, and what made it rewarding?
Going with him to his house to play board games and learn about the world.
Mentor: Denis Chazelle
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in Troyes, the historic capital of the Champagne region of France.
What’s your current and/or past line of work?
I am the Executive Director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC. In the past, I have been a teacher at the French International School and then an entrepreneur: co-owner of an indoor soccer facility, owner of a computer training company with 4 different centers, and an IT (information technology) consultant.
What are your hobbies?
I enjoy mountain biking throughout the world. I have done long distance races such as the Tour Divide, going from the Mexican border to Banff, Canada, the French Divide going from the Belgian border to the Spanish one, and I have crossed the French Alps three times. I also enjoy watching professional basketball (the NBA), dining at new restaurants in DC, and I’m a bit of a political junkie (lots of CNN and MSNBC).
Why did you choose to volunteer with Learning Life?
I think it fits my skills and international background. I like kids, and I think it’s important to give back and to help those who may not have the same opportunities I have had. Learning Life teaches kids by exposing them to the world, and I can help do that a little bit.
What do you like about your mentee?
Jadyn is smart, curious, very friendly, and eager and quick to learn. He’s also fun to be with, and I can spend time with him without feeling like I’m baby-sitting him. It’s enjoyable.
What’s one rewarding experience you’ve had thus far with your mentee, and what made it rewarding?
I think our visit to the French Embassy in Washington DC, where I have my office, was special. Jadyn was very quick to make friends with everyone he met there, from the Chef, to the server at the Cafe, to the guards at the gate, to the Embassy Police, to the IT specialist, to military attaches and even to the General, with whom he had lunch!
Seven Ways of Being in the World
Given globalization — in short, countries’ growing economic, political and environmental interconnection driven in part by advancements in communications and transport — it behooves those interested in the wider world to consider the ways that people live in or engage with the world. Why? Because some of those ways are good, some are problematic, and all together reveal sharp inequalities. I see seven ways that people cross (or do not cross) national borders and live in the world, for better or worse.
It is worth stressing that the following seven ways describe not types of people but ways of being, that some (usually more privileged) individuals can shift from one way to another sometimes in the same week or day, and over a lifetime any person may engage with the world in more than one of these ways. Also, my definitions of these seven ways are overall more encompassing and in many cases different than those of other organizations, like the United Nations and Amnesty International. Further, I do not provide estimates on the numbers of people engaged in these seven ways of being in the world since others provide estimates, these numbers change constantly, and my purpose here is to paint a bigger picture.
1. The disengaged: It is probably best to start with the largest group, who are not engaged with the world outside their country much if at all. Whether due to ideology, geographic isolation, institutional disconnection, insufficient resources, or some combination thereof, the disengaged know little about the world and have traveled little if at all outside their country. Because the world outside their country, or even their community, is far and foreign in their minds, some (not all) of the disengaged are wary of foreigners and of traveling abroad.
2. Non-exploited workers: These workers move out of their native country, with or without their family, to find or take work in other countries. They typically have had relatively privileged upbringings, have more education and social status, have legal right to work in a foreign country, and make more money from their work. They may be government foreign affairs officers, transnational business executives and employees, or nonprofit workers. Like exploited workers, non-exploited workers more commonly live and work in richer countries, where there are more economic opportunities, and life is more stable and prosperous.
3. Exploited workers: Like non-exploited workers, exploited workers leave their native country to find or take work, with or often without their families. However, they tend to have unprivileged upbringings, less education and social status, may not have the legal right to work, and take jobs that do not pay well by the host country’s standards. Furthermore, their employers or managers often overwork or otherwise abuse them (yell at them, hit them, sexually harass or assault them, expose them to dangerous working conditions, etc.) yet the workers voluntarily endure the exploitation because they are able to work and earn more money than they would in their home communities. Many work in construction, farms, factories, or domestic service. Many exploited workers do not see their families for long periods of time, yet they receive enough in wages to send home money (“remittances”), which can constitute a significant portion of their families’ and countries’ income.
4. Slaves: Millions of people in the world are enslaved, despite the fact that laws in most countries prohibit slavery. Unlike exploited workers, slaves do not voluntarily submit to their exploitation; they work and are confined against their will, often in their own countries. Most are poor, and come from poorer and highly unequal countries. Some get tricked with promises of better lives and trafficked into richer countries, where they commonly do sex, factory, farm and/or domestic work.
5. Refugees: Unlike exploited workers who leave their home country for better economic opportunities, refugees flee their country due to war, persecution or natural disaster. More conflict, authoritarian government and climate change usually mean more refugees. Some refugees are legally accepted in foreign countries. Others — called “asylum seekers” if they’re escaping war or persecution — are not, and live insecure lives as they seek legal permission to live in the country they fled to, working whatever undocumented jobs they can find to make ends meet.
6. Vacationers: As incomes rise across the world, more people have the disposable income to be able to travel abroad. The standard vacationer visits a foreign country to consume its food, sites and experiences, and to have a good time. Some travel companies create all-inclusive resorts so that vacationers never have to leave the resort to see the country and people around it. Vacationers understandably tend to flock to politically and economically more stable countries, but all countries welcome foreign vacationers with open arms because they have more money than most of the world’s people, and they usually spend more money on vacation than they do at home.
7. Global citizens: Global citizens are typically as privileged as vacationers, but unlike vacationers they travel abroad primarily to learn and/or volunteer rather than consume and have a good time. Whether they take classes, volunteer as teachers, community developers or religious missioners, they tend to engage more deeply than vacationers with the people of the foreign countries they live in or visit. As more people across the world get more income and education, global citizens, like vacationers, will likely become more common (assuming relative peace and economic stability among nations). Among these seven ways of being, global citizens may also be the best grassroots agents for nurturing goodwill among nations.
Mentee: Baileigh Walker
What are your hobbies?
