March 17, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Global Nomads Group, in New York, is harnessing the power of video and satellite technology to bring American students together with their peers in hot spots around the world.
This month the organization is linking students in New York with students in Columbo, Sri Lanka, for a series of three videoconferences to discuss the earthquake and tsunamis that devastated South Asia at the end of December.
During the second session, one New York student asked her Sri Lankan counterparts, “How has your faith and religion changed? Is it weaker or stronger since the tsunami?” Another wanted to know whether the students thought the sense of unity after the disaster would continue, and whether it would help solve the civil strife that has plagued Sri Lanka for so long.
The students in Columbo had questions as well. “What ran through your mind when you heard about the disaster, when you saw it on TV?” asked one of the students. Another wondered whether the American students, given the chance, would visit her country, or if they would be too worried that another tsunami would hit.
Mark von Sponeck and Jonathan Giesen founded the organization in 1997, largely out of frustration at how little young people in the United States knew about the rest of the world. When Mr. von Sponeck was a child, his father worked for the United Nations, and his family lived in Africa and Asia, moving to a new country every three or four years.
On visits to the United States, he was amazed that his cousins and their friends didn’t know anything about the places where he lived. “I would actually make up stories about fighting lions in my garden, and they would believe me,” he says.
Bringing students together with people their own age humanizes world events in a way that reading about them in a newspaper or hearing about them on television does not, says Mr. von Sponeck. He points to a teleconference in which the organization connected American and Iraqi students a few weeks before the war, saying it helped the U.S. students think beyond Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and see “the young people there and their dreams and aspirations.”
Other broadcasts have linked American students to their peers in Rwanda, a Sudanese refugee camp in eastern Chad, and Jordan. In addition to the students who participate in the discussions, other classrooms are able to watch the exchange through view-only feeds.
“Regardless of what topic we introduce, the underlying goal is that these young people from different parts of the world are creating a friendship,” says Mr. von Sponeck. “They’re learning to respect each other’s differences and appreciate each other’s similarities.”
For more information: Go to http://www.gng.org.
