Becoming World Wise

A Guide to Global Learning

Richard Slimbach

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781579224981
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

As world travel is growing exponentially, "alternative" travel has grown apace: from ecotourism, gap years, short-term mission trips, cultural travel-study tours, and foreign language study, to college-level study abroad, "voluntourism", and international service-learning. This book is intended to help the new generation of ethical and educational travelers make the most of their international experience, and show them how to broaden their cultural horizons while also making a contribution to their host community.This book guides independent and purposeful learners considering destinations off the "beaten path" on connecting with a wider world. Whether traveling on their own, or as part of a group arranged by an educational institution, humanitarian organization, or congregation, this book will enable them to make their international encounter rewarding, authentic, enriching, and learning-oriented. This book draws on the author's extensive travel and many years of guiding college students' global learning. Richard Slimbach offers a comprehensive framework for pre-field preparation that includes, but goes beyond, discussions of packing lists and assorted "do's and don'ts" to consider the ultimate purposes and practical learning strategies needed to enter deeply into a host culture. It also features an in-depth look at the post-sojourn process, helping the reader integrate the experiences and insights from the field into her or his studies and personal life. This book constitutes a vital road map for anyone intent on having their whole being—body, mind, and heart—stretched through the intercultural experience. Becoming World Wise offers an integrated approach to cross-cultural learning aimed at transforming our consciousness while also contributing to the flourishing of the communities that host us. While primarily intended for foreign study and service situations, the ideas are just as relevant to intercultural learning within domestic settings. In a "globalized" world, diverse cultures intermingle near and far, at home and abroad.

1
WISE FOR THE WORLD

Wisdom lies in the awakening of the entire soul from the
slumber of its private wants and opinions to awareness
of the common world order.

—HERACLITUS

IN AN ATTEMPT to help college students think about their responsibility toward others, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer (1997) asks them to imagine that their route to school takes them past a shallow pond.

I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

I then ask the students: Do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.

Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: Would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost—and absolutely no danger—to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation.

At that point Singer points out to his students that we’re all very much like that person passing the shallow pond. It’s within our power to save lives or reduce great suffering at minimal cost to ourselves. For the cost of a new CD, a week of lattes, or a concert ticket, we can make a life-or-death difference for someone, somewhere in the world.

There may once have been a time when a desire to aid others on the other side of the world could not easily be translated into action. Our sense of involvement with the fate of others was in inverse proportion to the physical distance that separated us. Not anymore. The Internet and television have brought images of suffering in distant lands into our immediate consciousness. Jet transport and the on-the-ground presence of citizens associations and official aid agencies now make it possible to deliver and distribute emergency help within a matter of days. In many cases, all we have to do is pull out a credit card and phone in a donation to Tearfund or the International Red Cross, who will fly in everything from emergency food and medicines to leguminous trees.

If we were students in that class, our initial response to Singer’s challenge might be to sound off numerous objections: How can we be certain that our donation will actually get to the people who need it most? Doesn’t most aid get distributed on political grounds, not according to need, and then get swallowed up in administrative waste and corruption? In any case, aren’t the effects of charity less than a drop in the ocean of humanity? How can it hope to offset geographic handicaps, exploding populations, and unfair terms of trade as the primary drivers of poverty? What point is there in trying to save lives until these root problems are solved? In fact, what assurance do we have that our giving of money, and even voluntary service, won’t worsen the situation, making the victims more dependent on outside handouts instead of helping them to help themselves?

There are undoubtedly many good reasons why, given all the available talent and treasure, we have yet to make poverty history. But even if a substantial percentage of our donation were wasted by irresponsible bureaucrats or crooked governments, the cost to us is so slight and the potential benefits so great that we would seem to be obliged to give it.

A Drowning Creation

Our awareness of humanity’s “shallow ponds” has never been greater, nor has the challenge to our moral intuitions. In part, we have global media networks to thank. A constant flow of information on a drowning creation reaches those of us securely placed on the “high ground” of the global economy. This is a world of walled and gated subdivisions, information highways, corporate careers, and almost endless opportunity to roam a world of difference in a cocoon of sameness 30,000 feet above the ground. Outside are the “other” nomads—the poor nomads—who cross borders as economic or environmental refugees. Living as they do in villages or shantytowns, their attempts to rise out of poverty are doomed by an absence of viable livelihoods, cultivatable soil, clean water, and legitimate government.

In 1976 Mahbub ul Haq, a Pakistani official with the World Bank, detailed the cruel divide splitting an affluent North from an impoverished South. “A poverty curtain has descended right across the face of our world,” he said, “dividing it materially and philosophically into two different worlds, two separate planets, two unequal humanities—one embarrassingly rich and the other desperately poor” (p. xv). Thankfully, much has changed since ul Haq penned these words. The curtain has been steadily lifting. Virtually all so-called developing countries have adopted market-oriented policies and, in varying degrees, benefited from advancements in telecommunications, information technology, health, and infrastructure. By 2006, the global poverty rate had been cut by nearly 75 percent from 1970 levels (even though, because of population growth over this same period, the actual numbers of the absolutely poor grew). Meanwhile, the offshoring and outsourcing of business functions to manufacturers and service providers abroad has served, in author Thomas Friedman’s words, to “flatten” the competitive playing fields between Northern and Southern countries (Friedman, 2006).

But what happens if you are the kind of person, culture, or nation that doesn’t “flatten” so easily? Instead of being swift and agile, you move slowly. Instead of networking electronically across borders you live your life largely unplugged. Instead of staying continuously updated with strategic information in order to compete and innovate, you can barely read or find a decent-paying job. For about two billion of humanity, information security, job security, food security, and political security are distant dreams.

In a winner-take-all world, the “losers” get stuck in history. Robert Kaplan (1994), in his prescient The Atlantic essay “The Coming Anarchy,” quotes Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, a global security expert. “Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live,” writes Dixon. “Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction.” In travels at home and abroad, we traverse this radically bifurcated world—one part well off, well fed, and pampered by technology; the other, larger part condemned to a life that Thomas Hobbes described as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Economic inequality. So, the good news is that the third world has shrunk. Four of the six billion people on the planet live in countries that are developing—some, like China and Brazil, at amazing speed. The bad news is that the gap between the global rich and the global poor continues to widen, both between and within countries. In 1960, the average income in the 10 richest countries was 30 times the average income in the 10 poorest countries. By 1990, it had doubled to 60 times, and by 2000 it was 80 times. The capital income differential is not only increasing but increasingly increasing. Our world has reached the point where, according to the World Development Report 2007, “There are around 1 billion people living at the margins of survival on less than US$1 a day, with 2.6 billion—40 percent of the world’s population—living on less than US$2 a day” (World Bank, 2006, p. 25). That’s half the world living on less than the price of a Starbucks Frappuccino.

Life expectancy. Radical differences in quality of life among the world’s peoples are nowhere more shockingly revealed than in life expectancy. Here is where health, job security, income, and environmental risks are all weighed in the balance. What we find is that in the 10 richest countries people live to be, on average, about 80 years old. But in the 10 poorest countries, people can expect to live only about 45 years. And in the most hungry and AIDS-afflicted areas of Africa, the divide is even wider. While the average person born today in Japan and Sweden will live 82 years or more, those born today in Malawi, Botswana, and Swaziland will live fewer than 40 years. Is it right that some children are able to live twice as long as others simply because of an accident of birth?¹

Nutrition. Or consider levels of nutrition. While 1.6 million people—mostly in advanced industrialized nations—constantly worry about eating too much, over one billion people worry about whether they will be able to eat at all (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2009). This is more than the population of the United States, Canada, and the European Union combined. Contrary to what one might expect, this is not because of food shortages. The problem is one of access, not only to food, due to uneven distribution and reduced incomes, but also to nonfood benefits like education, health care, and a healthy living environment. For instance, diarrhea, one of the leading causes of death among the developing world’s children, is usually the result of an unclean water supply. A child with diarrhea will be unable to absorb available nutrients and unable to learn well in school. A poor education will ultimately mean poor job prospects and low income, which in turn, predicts poor nutrition.

By contrast, the West has long been associated with the so-called diseases of affluence—obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In the United States alone, over 65 percent of adults are overweight by international standards, and 26 percent are considered obese. But because of mass urbanization and the globalization of modern food processing and marketing techniques, high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles are sweeping the developing world. Fresh (open-air) markets, once the major source of food, are disappearing. In their place are large supermarkets peddling foods high in fat and sugar. Developing nations must now confront not only growing numbers of hungry people, but also epidemic rates of obesity.

Gender inequality. Similarly, gender inequality extends across the globe and often takes wanton and brutal forms. Forced marriage and bride burning are still prevalent throughout the Asian subcontinent. In India, where boys are often considered more valuable than girls, genetic testing of unborn children results in the abortion of an estimated half-million female fetuses each year. Similarly, throughout rural China millions of female infants go unregistered and remain “missing.” The resulting imbalance between the sexes has become so severe that over 100 million Chinese men are not able to find a wife. This has spurred the kidnapping and slave trading of poor, mostly young, women for forced “marriages.” In fact, the U.S. State Department estimates that upward of 600,000 women are trafficked across national borders worldwide, 70 percent of them for sexual exploitation. And this number doesn’t account for the millions of women, some as young as five years old, who are part of the ever-expanding commercial sex trade.

Education. Educationally, the North–South divide only widens. Being able to read, think critically, and make informed choices is not only a key part of mental development; it is also a prerequisite for participating in democratic life. The top billion benefit in both ways as a result of high rates of secondary school graduation and college enrolment. By contrast, the bottom billion entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names. Additionally, upwards of 100 million children throughout the developing world do not regularly attend primary school, the majority of these girls. In a world of enormous wealth, these children are locked out of a basic education by an inherited cycle of disadvantage. Some of the children are needed by their families to fetch water, farm, or care for younger siblings. Others are bonded to labor in some local industry to pay off a family debt. Still others live or make a living on the streets of third world cities, and have little or no access to the formal education system.

Technology. Cell phone and wireless networks may offer some “technological leapfrogging” opportunities for overcoming handicaps in land-line infrastructure and reducing the digital divide. But the rapid growth of telecommunications throughout the world masks large regional disparities. Many developing countries have computer and Internet penetration rates that are one hundredth of the rates found in North America and Europe. Although 6 out of 10 people in the United States own a computer, there are fewer than 6 personal computers per 1,000 people in India and only 18 per 100 people in Europe and Central Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, the divide only widens: U.S. computer use is 550 times that of Ethiopia, for example.

A similar pattern is evident in Internet use. Whereas roughly half of the North American population uses the Internet, only about one half of 1 percent of those living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa do so (Chin & Fairlie, 2004). It takes money to buy, use, and repair communications technologies, making per capita income differences an important factor in explaining the global digital divide. But so too are factors like telephone-line density, access to electricity, years of schooling, and illiteracy rates.

Environment. In addition to the human toll, conditions of poverty exact a terrible cost to the environment. Poor people are forced to exploit their natural resources beyond the point of long-term sustainability just to survive in the present. This results in the destruction of millions of acres of forests, grasslands, and wetlands each year, along with the life that moves within them. According to the National Research Council (2008), an average of 100 animal and plant species are driven extinct every 24 hours. Steven Sanderson (2002) of the Wildlife Conservation Society predicts that “within a few decades, orangutans, Asian elephants, Sumatran tigers, Chilean flamingos, Amur leopards, and many other well-known species will likely disappear.” However humble, each of these species is a masterpiece of biology, uniquely fitted to its environment. Their loss, along with native habitats, not only will impoverish the entire creation; it will make the world a much more dangerous place. Experts like Homer-Dixon predict that environmental scarcity will be the national-security issue of the early 21st century. Unless it is checked and reversed, we can expect to see diseases spread and group conflicts intensify, prompting mass migrations (Homer-Dixon, 2001).

Urban shelter. Under the pressure of urbanization, habitats lost for species of plants and animals become habitats occupied by millions of new city dwellers. By 2025 the earth’s population will swell to 8 billion. Some 95 percent of this increase will occur in the poorest regions of the world (Africa and South Asia), and overwhelmingly in their cities. The locus of poverty has irreversibly moved from the countryside to the cities.

Though we’ve been slow to acknowledge this new demographic fact, the 2003 U.N. Habitat report The Challenge of Slums provided something of a wake-up call. In the world it describes, masses of poor people are packing their meagre belongings, abandoning their ancestral lands, and moving to the cities—over 70 million people every year, 1.5 million people per week, 130 peo...