Global Nomads Group Newsletter
Global Nomads Group Newsletter
The bell is about to ring! September is right around the corner and school will soon be back in session! We here at GNG are busily preparing to launch our largest and most exciting program to date, CURRENTS: HIV/AIDS around the World, but thought we'd take a moment to update you on some of the exciting stuff happening at GNG.
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Contents
Update on CURRENTS
GNG in the News
Rwanda Alive in Film Festivals
Celebrate Peace Workshops
GNG Summer Interns
Recent Testimonial
Support GNG
Update on CURRENTS
In just under 2 weeks, GNG will launch CURRENTS, a 3-month voyage around the world with Semester at Sea.
CURRENTS is an international education program that unites young Americans with their peers around the world via videoconferencing and the internet to discuss the most pressing global issues of our time and work together to help solve them.
In the Fall 2005 semester, the issue participants will explore is the HIV/AIDS epidemic as it is unfolding in countries around the world. To find out more, log on to the CURRENTS website(folow the link below) - there you can access a schedule of broadcasts, team blogs, and follow this program.
Do you know anyone in the port cities we will be working in? Please bear in mind when you respond that we will only have 5 days in each country and will not be venturing far from the port. That said, if you do have contacts in the following cities, please send them to info@gng.org:
- La Guiara, Venezuela
- Salvador, Brazil
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Mombasa, Kenya
- Chennai, India
- Yangon, Myanmar
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Hong Kong, China
- Kobe, Japan
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GNG in the News
GNG was featured in the July issue of Urbanology and the July/August issue of Flaunt magazine. If you are on our snail mail list, you should be receiving a copy of the articles shortly.
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Rwanda Alive in Film Festivals
In other exciting news, GNG's latest documentary Rwanda Alive: Those Who Listen has been picked up for review at FOUR Film Festivals.
In Michigan, it was shown at the Waterfront Film Festival. In Los Angeles, it will be shown at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival.
In Hot Springs, Arkansas, it will be shown at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.
In Montreal, it will be shown at the World Film Festival.
If you live in the area and want to support GNG by attending the screening of our film, or bringing friends and family, please do so! Click the name of the film festival above for the festival's website and details.
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Celebrate Peace Workshops
Celebrate Peace, an initiative of Peace Cereal, Peace x Peace, Spirit Voyage, Breathe magazine, and Utne magazine, is a nationwide series of weekend workshops to spread a hopeful message, and cultivate the practice of peace in daily life through music, meditation, lectures and workshops on how to become a peace builder. GNG is working with Celebrate Peace to create a PULSE program for this Fall. Stay tuned…
Clink for more information
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GNG Summer Interns
GNG would like to thank our tremendous summer interns who worked so hard this past summer, and accomplished so much on behalf of GNG and CURRENTS. Without them, a lot of this Fall's work would not have been possible, so THANK YOU!
Gene Tsenter- Media Production
Loria Wilson - Development
Elizabeth Mohan - Education
Grace Converse - Sustainability
Jessica Longoria - Education
Olivia Slavin - General Office Support
Alida Jay - General Office Support
Kate Mauer - Accounting
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Recent Testimonial
We recently received the following email from a teacher whose class participated as a "view-only" school for our Iraq program – she sent it in response to a query from us regarding whether or not her students took action following participation in a GNG conference. We were humbled by her response and we wanted to share it with you:
"Here at suburban, private Cincinnati Country Day School, our student population largely comes from conservative, upper-class families. In our academically edenic setting, the teenage bent for self-oriented, non-global awareness is heightened to some degree. Nearly four years ago, just a few weeks before the outbreak of the US war with Iraq, the GNG offered the chance to witness via videoconference a dialogue between Iraqi students in Baghdad and students in the US. Serendipitously, my ninth grade humanities students were studying Islam, so I thought the experience might serve as tangential food for thought. Who knew it would, rather, become a banquet--a veritable intellectual feast?
As a viewing and not participating school, we were only going to watch for 45 or 50 minutes, the length of a class bell. My students, as the videoconference progressed, became absolute riveted, remarking, throughout the hour and a half for which we stayed, at the similarities between "us and them," at the humbling English language prowess of the Iraqi students, and at the sophisticated level at which those students seemed to understand the world.
We headed back to my classroom, a little awestruck, when the students positively stunned me: they asked if I would be willing to clear our class plans for the next two or three weeks so that they could research the cause of the heightening US/Iraq tensions. Delighted to oblige, I asked what they wanted to learn. They broke themselves into groups, each focusing on something they had heard in the videoconference or in the news. "What's the UN?" "What are these resolutions that Saddam Hussein has broken?" "What's a weapon of mass destruction? A ballistic weapon?" "Is this about oil?" "Wasn't there a war there before?"
They spent the next few weeks absorbed in conversation, researching, sharing information, and internalizing forces at work on a global level. They had made an emotional connection to the Iraqi kids half-way around the globe, and wanted to understand what could possibly be so big that they might be put in harm's way. In short, they learned how to care, and how to use that emotional prompt to learn. They spoke more frequently and more knowledgeably about the news and became angry that so many of their peers didn't seem to know much.
As the war continued, the students understandably grew increasingly concerned that the kids they had "met" had died. That fall, GNG sent the follow-up video, wherein my students got to see and hear from the very faces of the students they had seen before the war. They were reassured that all were safe, that the conflict had not been in vain, but that there was much work to be done on the part of the US if the war was to be worth it to the people of Iraq. We await, eagerly, our next opportunity to have the GNG facilitate another miracle. This time, I'll be prepared to carve out the time and space to turn interest into action."
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Support GNG
None of the exciting activity described above would be possible without the support of our donors and friends. Please consider donating to GNG today!
Donate to GNG
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Global Nomads Group
381 Broadway, 4th floor
New York, New York 10013
