“It never deterred my father.  His pride in this county remained strong,” my colleague said.  “It showed me that I, too, could work for equality and stand up for change in the world,” he added, referring to his own long and growing history, leadership and world-renown for his ideas and activism.

 I, white and Jewish, am listening, and all I can see is a vision of Horshak from Welcome Back Carter, raising hand and saying “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh…”  When finally called upon, I say, “Um, when I was 10, I got two pet fish, one gold and one black, and I named them Golda My-Fish and Martin Luther Fish.”

 Depth, substance, power of real life experience that feeds a credibility to teach others and lead major corporations on international inclusion campaigns, versus…what did you say?

 Because of my own work and interest in interculturalism and speaking other languages, people often ask what inspired my interest.  I always feel obligated to provide an epiphany or event that set me on my path.

 For the most part it’s just always been there.  In fact, the only two anti-Semitic things that happened in my life didn’t actually happen to me, but to two non-Jewish family members:  My Brazilian husband was ostracized at a job once after they discovered his wife was Jewish; my Catholic nephew ended a budding relationship after the woman in question said she hated Jews.

 My question is, does there need to be a why/how, a life-changing event for someone to strive to be anti-racist?  Shouldn’t that actually be the norm?

 It’s just that USAmerican culture likes when people overcome adversity to achieve fame and fortune.  It’s the American Dream.  We celebrate actors who are recovering addicts, victims of crimes spurred on to help others; the more profound the original pain or injustice, the better.

 When I start to get anxious about this, I like to think of my hero in this area…Shakespeare.  Not because he is an enduring, insightful, amazing writer, but because from what I understand, he led a pretty boring life, middle class, mostly suffering from a boring marriage.

 In that sense, maybe I’m not overdue a life-changing tragedy.  Maybe it’s innate.  You play the flute.  I have a sixth sense for unconscious bias.

What inspires you to do what you do?  Was it an event…or an essence?

My husband and I were at an event last month and a woman who was very proud to have presented at the UN in support of aid for children in Central America (which is important) kept referring them as “those people” as in “you can’t imagine how poor those people are.”  “You can’t imagine how miserable those people are.” All the while we were thinking they aren’t “those people,” they’re…people…individuals each with his or her own story.

Nothing drives that home more than “O Contador de Histórias,” a film by director Luiz Villaça that we saw as part of MOSTRA 2010, a Brazilian Film Festival presented by the Illinois-Sao Paulo Partners of the Americas along with Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago this past weekend.

Villaça, who was in Chicago for the opening, said he was reading a book of children’s stories by world-renowned story-teller and teacher Roberto Carlos Ramos to his sons, and realized the last story in the book was the story of Ramos’ own life.  It was so compelling he called Ramos about wanting to turn that story into a movie.

In a nutshell, Ramos, the youngest of 10 children living in poverty in a one-room home in Belo Horizonte, was sent by his mom to FEBEM in 1978.

FEBEM stands for the Fundação Estadual para o Bem-Estar do Menor (State Foundation For The Well-Being of Minors).  Per the TV commercial she believed he would have the chance at a better life, with the promise of food, housing, and the opportunity to become a doctor or engineer.

When he arrived, nothing could have been farther from the truth–the place was rife with gangs and abuse.  After running away over 100 times (Ramos cites the representation of his fleeing and recapture in the film as one of the most poignant, in terms of the lightness with which it is told) and always being caught and sent back, he is declared by school administrators to be beyond help.

“Sometimes they just go bad.  We lose them.  There’s nothing we can do.”

Enter French educator/researcher Margherit Duvas, who wants to know his story, refusing to believe that “you can throw someone away at 13.  But that last phrasing is more my own USAmerican representation, placing the importance on the “savior,” not the “saved.”

And the point of the movie is just the opposite.  For director Villaça (who was asked at the opening if anyone had criticized him for the racial balance–although it’s based on a true story and is what it is) he said “She did not save him.  He saved her.” Indeed she was completely alone, having separated from her husband years before when it was discovered she couldn’t have children.

She truly loved Roberto.  She ends up adopting him and bringing him back to France with her to educate him, although those years are intentionally not included in the movie. “It’s when he returns home to his mother,” Villaça says, “and returns to FEBEM as a teacher, that’s more meaningful.”

Many cry as soon as the film opens.  And the brutal attack by gang members as an “initiation” is devastating.

But for Ramos, in telling his story it’s one of optimism, a Brazil where “above all we need not only to do for others but for ourselves, to have confidence in one another.”  (If you read Portuguese, or don’t mind the “loose” translations you can find on-line, this is a wonderful interview with him about turning his story over to the filmmakers.)  And while Ramos denies the point of the movie is to encourage others to adopt “street children” in Brazil, he himself is now father to 13 boys he has taken into his care.

It seems that Ramos found the power of story and found release and power in telling his own story.   A line in the movie I love is when Margherit and Roberto stumble upon a story-teller in the park.  He tells a brilliant story about a pen he is holding, one that was used to sign an important document by the Queen of Spain centuries ago.  “Who will buy this pen for 20 Reais” he asks.  “Me” offers Margherit.

When the storyteller opens his briefcase to get her change, Roberto notices six other pens inside.  “Ohh,” he cries, “the pen’s not real!”

“But the story was wonderful,” Margherit says.  “We are buying the story.  The pen is like…a free gift that comes with it.”

Hopefully the film might be available in the Foreign Films Section at your local video store (it’s in Portuguese, with English subtitles).  At a bare minimum, if you are in Chicago, stay tuned to the Illinois-Sao Paulo Partners of the Americas website for a viewing in December.

So next time someone says “what’s your story?” Own it, live it, be inspired by it.  After all, it’s you.

What’s your story?

Photo credit Roberto Carlos Ramos

This was supposed to be a cute post about how the Youth Ambassadors from Ecuador (8 high school students and one adult mentor) ended up having to stay two extra days in Chicago because on the day of their departure (9/30) the military closed the airports in Ecuador after a rebellion by the police, in response to rumors that year-end bonuses were to be cut.

The idea was that as “typical” Americans we tend to gloss over world events unless something connects us personally…or really unless we are inconvenienced.  In the case of recent terror threats in Europe, the news angle was to interview USAmerican tourists in London and France to see if they still planned to visit the London Eye and the Eiffel Tower, respectively.  “Yes, they answered, otherwise the terrorists win” was the trite answer.

In this case, after two weeks of scheduling, homestays, parties, school shadowing, presentations, meetings, museum visits and other assorted planning, the Youth Ambassadors showed up at the airport only to find that they couldn’t travel.

The urgent call came to me as a planner for this program locally in Chicago (via the Illinois-Sao Paulo Chapter of Partners of the Americas–the program was implemented nationally by Partners of the Americas, funded by the US State Department).  “The kids are still here.  We have to find places for them to stay at least until Saturday…possibly indefinitely.”

For me it became a funny anecdote as relates to my realm of responsibility…not a “real event” affecting “real people.”

For 15-year-old Dayana, it was deep concern for  her family’s safety in Ecuador; or for 17-year-old Andres it was wondering when he would see his family, as he already was expecting a two day delay to get to his home on the Galapagos Islands after the group returned to Ecuador.  And for the President of Ecuador it was a threat to his life, and for Ecuadorians a fear for national stability.

Even with a program designed to foster intercultural understanding, appreciation and global leadership (and it does, I don’t want to discount that), it’s still hard to step outside of one’s frame of reference to empathize with the position of others.

Perhaps the person who got it the most right was the Consul General of Ecuador, who was at the airport to say goodbye to the youth when the announcement came through.  He and his wife invited two of the students to stay in their home until they were able to travel (two other volunteers with the program also immediately stepped-up to host the other students for the additional days).

If the role of the Consulate is to protect and serve nationals from their country when on US soil, he certainly aligned his ideas with his actions.

How do your ideas and actions align?

This may look like I accidentally posted a private e-mail to my blog.

I won’t deny it, I really do want to introduce artist Chris Jordan, author of Running the Numbers to Brenda at Kinship Circle  (and to Janet at SHARK).

But it’s really about Intercultural Communications.

Intercultural communications looks at our similarities and differences, evaluating both style and content. 

For Chris, Brenda and Janet, all are powerful activists who have put their passions into action.  Brenda and Janet started with the animals, Chris has touched there through his explorations of what he calls “Intolerable Beauty:  Portraits of American Mass Consumption. 

While Chris was in New Orleans photographing the devastation on a personal scale, Brenda was there making sure the companion animals, left behind, lonely and starving were cared for and reunited with family.

Their  issues are different, but they overlap.  As interculturalists, we bring people and cultures together.

But it’s really about engagement and inclusion. 

Compound that by engagement and inclusion, where a variety of styles are recognized and rewarded, and you have what research shows to be the most powerful teams. 

Chris communicates visually, creating powerful images that encapsulate devastating statistics, like photographing 3200 toy tigers, equal to the estimated number of tigers remaining on Earth, leaving empty space in the middle to hold 40,000 of these tigers, equal to the global tiger population in 1970. (Detail below of border in picture above.)

There’s no one better in the world who’s a better writer or more thorough in creating advocacy and letter writing campaigns on behalf of animals than Brenda, and Janet is equally committed and active in moving forward animal issues.

They use different media to convey their power and story.  As interculturalists we teach organizations to value what all forms of communication can contribute.

But it’s really about improvisation. 

That’s the “yes, and…”  I heard Chris speak at the SIETAR conference (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) last week (you can see a truncated version that he delivered for TED, here).  He takes human consumption starting with one, as in one tin soda can, and explodes it into the massive statistics, and then culls back to a single photographic image that conveys the scale of impact we are having on the earth.  

Intercultural Communications + Inclusion + Improvisaion =Action

Yes, and…here’s what we can do. 

Please watch this 6 minute film by Chris Jordan about the Pacific Garbage Patch, and how it is killing the albatross chicks on Midway Island (warning—it’s hard to watch—even Chris, who filmed it, was crying as we watched it at the conference.)

Chris is hoping to go back to Midway a few times next year to film the full cycle of the birds lives, from birth to mating and everything before the death.

 I thought Chris’ images were a great bridge to communicate the scale of animal suffering to “non-animal people.”

I thought Brenda and/or Janet might have connections or ideas about avenues for funding Chris efforts to document the plight.  Since Chris has documented other animal issues (he’s become vegetarian along his journey) I also thought he might be interested in some of the other statistics you work with.

And, for all…what do you do when you hear a new theory—when your eyes are opened to something for which your hands might be dirty…Do you deny it exists, or do you try to understand it?  What can you do?

US business culture norms today are all about action and the bottom line.  “Show me the money!”

Think about it.   If Socrates were working at a corporation in the US today, with all of his thinking and pontificating, his boss might say “he’s full of baloney…what has he actually DONE?” (or more likely, “Socrates, stop blowing hot air and get back to work!”)

What started me thinking about how time period and culture change our view of things, was the NY Times article on Sunday, “A Charlie Chan Film Stirs an Old Controversy,” about sreenings of a 1968 long lost documentary “The Great Charlie Chan,” in New York in February, and scheduled again for March 16.

My first reaction?  “I loved Charlie Chan detective movies when I was a kid.”

So I was a little uneasy when I read the author’s, Pradnya Joshi, thoughts:

“For many activists, Charlie Chan remains a symbol of Hollywood’s failure to accurately portray Asians and Asian-Americans. The character was usually played by white actors who were made up to seem Asian and who spoke English with an exaggerated accent.”

On the flipside, an earlier article from a 2006 release of a Charlie Chan collection, author Dave Kehr proffers that the films were not racist, “by the standards of their time.” 

That phrase, “standards of their time” rings to me of majority privilege, as in nobody got mad because it was okay in that time.  But okay to whom?  Or, was it actually offensive then too, but there was no power or place to voice that offense?

Beyond Chan’s character (and his son who talks like a typical American teenager of the time, for some fun generational contrast), more uncomfortable to me, from this clip from “Shadows Over Chinatown” (below) is the exaggerated personification of the African American butler, played by Mantan Moreland. (Indeed after years of success as a comedic actor Moreland was ostracized for demeaning representations as the civil rights movement grew in the 1950’s.)

What do Socrates, Charlie Chan and intercultural communications have in common?  

We are who we are, where we are, when we are.  Feeling guilty about how we reacted to things in the past is useless. Knew knowledge and exposure to multiple perspectives allows us to integrate new insights, reconceptualize our ideas, and apply them to future interactions.

For Socrates, I’m sticking to the “great man” theory.  For Charlie Chan, I think I’ll take a deeper look, particularly at how the representations reflect the society at the time, and changes that have evolved since then.

Anything unsettling popping up from your childhood?  How do you reconcile incongruities between your former and current self?

photo credit, Raphael’s Socrates, via University of Florida Philosophy Department .  Thanks to @prpc on Twitter for link to original article.

Have you ever been in a position at work where you are working your tail off and all you hear is criticism from those around you?  As explained by a sympathetic friend to me once, “it’s like the idea of a moving target.  If everyone else is sitting around doing nothing, you running by gives everyone something to talk about.”

 I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation here, but I was surprised by the intensity and vitriol in the conversation surrounding Robin Wiszowaty and her book My Maasai Life in a disucssion on Sociological Images.  Wiszowaty left her US privileged life and was adopted by a village family in Kenya, where she lived for a year or so, wrote a book about the experience and now is on the speaking circuit.

The criticism has to do with a sense that she has romanticized the culture and avoided acknowledging the real hardships of the country (that the privileged framework of her travel allowed) and thereby ultimately did a disservice to the local culture and its people.

For a full disclaimer regarding my willingness to state an opinion about that of which I know not, I never heard of Robin Wiszowaty until my fried updated her Facebook page yesterday with a link to the discussion on Sociological Images (and suggested that it might make good fodder for Intercultural Talk.)

That said, here goes.  The power of being a multiculturalist is the hypersensitivity to multiple perspectives.  You begin to imagine how your words will be received or interpreted by others.

On the good side, it’s accepting that your orientation is not the norm but an option, and using that lens to frame thinking before you speak…thinking through the implications and power of your words.

One the flip side, if there’s a fear of always offending or belying your own privilege with your words and actions you can become paralyzed into inaction.

Immersing yourself in another culture is a fantastic first step of becoming attuned to your own biases, particularly if you are of the majority culture.   It’s the idea of being “the other”…moving yourself into a situation that allows you to see yourself through the eyes of others.  

What’s wrong this time?  Maybe a naivety—it’s true that you probably need a certain degree of privilege to make the choices Robin is talking about.  And, no matter how long you live in another culture (or even your own) I’m always wary of anyone who tries to describe “a people” as being a certain way.

My friend frames it this way:

YES, step out of our individual lives to a greater world community… but how do we white folks do this in a way that results in the greatest good, and acknowledges that access to opportunity is not equal to all peoples. How do we affect the world AT HOME? We don’t have to travel although there is much to LEARN FROM THESE WORLDS AWAY.  How do we explore cultures different from our own without limiting the richness of these cultures by romanticizing? Turn up the sensitivity of your vision to see and share the complexity , not “the simple life” as it fits it into a box of your limited perception.

But I say you have to start by acting.  Robin’s language and depth of understanding hopefully will evolve overtime.  At a bare minimum, her actions have inspired the discussion and that alone brings value.

What do you think?

Thanks to Ingrid of Earthly Sites for the link.

My college roommate used to love to start conversations at parties by asking “Do you think good and evil are objective or subjective? (This was the same roommate whose favorite Charades word was Dostoevsky’s “Gulag Archipelago,” but that’s another story…)

A lively conversation always ensued. Is murder always bad? What if the person is terminally ill? What about cultures that allow children to be forced into marriage. Is that bad?

Well, in short. Yes. Surprising from a multiculturalist? Shouldn’t be, because 1.) all cultural sensitivity aside, there are certain universal human rights that transcend cultural traditions, and 2.) to be a great multiculuralist, it’s important to have a strong core identity. To know who you are is the best platfrom from which to understand and know others.

When I first read about Beyonce’s refusal to alter her costumes to perform in Malaysia, I was curious.   To what extent do you alter your “brand” for access to other cultures? (Gwen Stefani did go forward with a performance there in 2007 by agreeing to cover up).  What is integral to your identity or product?  What values do you convey by your choice of where, when and how to interact with international fans?

But the more recent performance makes me wonder if rather than a core of values, her decisions are based on a lack thereof,  as reported in the Daily Beast

Beyoncé had a busy New Year’s Eve: Not only did the R&B superstar perform at Roman Abramovich’s $5 million party, she also did a five-song set at the Nikki Beach club on St. Barts, in front of a crowd that included Jay-Z, Usher, and Lindsay Lohan. The only problem? The party was thrown by Moammar Qaddafi’s son Hannibal, alleged to be a wife-beater and violent criminal. Beyoncé reportedly was paid more than $1 million for the performance. “Jigga, Beyonce and Usher were @ Nikki Beach performing for Khadafy family, WTF?” tweeted DJ Sam Young

There are two lessons for intercultural communications:

1.  You never know who you will have someting in common with (even DJ Sam Young says “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover,” in reference to Prince William’s cool music selection at Boujis in London)

and 2.  Even in knowing and learning, interacting and accepting cultures from around the world, it’s important to operate from a core of integrity, and from a core identity that guides your actions and decisions.

Do you have a clear set of core values that guide you?  How have you responded when they’ve been challenged?

Photo credits:  Beyonce, NYPost ; Qadaffi, BBC ; DJ Sam Young, Daily Mail

I’ve seen “Blood Diamond.”  I’ve seen the “Migrations:  History in Transition” photography exhibit by Brazilian photojournalist Sabastião Salgado.  I’ve walked through the “Doctors without Borders” traveling “model” refugee camp.  

I’ve even cried looking at the static images of suffering of those poor, poor people displaced and ravaged in far away lands by war and famine.

Leila Chirayath Janah must have seen them too, but instead of going back to her daily routine, she founded Samasource, “a non-profit organization (based in San Francisco) reminiscent of a tech startup that outsources web-based jobs to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty in third world countries.”

“Shortly after launching Samasource, she read an Oxfam report that mentioned a Dutch non-profit had set up a computer lab in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. “I thought, how crazy would it be if I can get these refugees to do real work for clients in San Francisco? What if we could prove to the world that these people who have been written off completely as only good for receiving handouts, who are stuck in this camp receiving food rations, can be productive to the global economy?” (Read the full article here by Lisa Katayama on boingboing here)

Indeed, Paul, in the video above is “a former Lost Boy who was seized from his home at age nine and survived by walking through the scorching desert with no food for days before arriving at a refugee camp in Kenya, where he was shot in the leg by a guy from a rival tribe.”

While I’m still struggling to reconcile this program with my (outright-not even unconscious) assumptions about refugees and refugee camps (Aren’t ‘they’ all uneducated? Where do they get electricity?), it does draw a parallel to a concept in sales…time slicing.

American Family Insurance has been running a free Small Business Accelerator program to help small businesses grow.  One of the strategies shared is the idea of time slicing…using the time “between” work to get work done.  It’s making a quick sales call between meetings, or sending quick follow-up emails to set meetings in between writing reports.  It’s about making every minute of the day count.

There’s a parallel here in terms of making every process of the day count.  It can be as simple as funding an after school mural project to beautify construction walls or using an institution like Miseracordia Home to attach candies to logo cards to giveaway on Customer Appreciation day. 

It’s looking at the goals, objectives and products of your business, and seeing how you might enrich the process of achieving them by creating opportunities for others along the way.    

Samasource is just doing it exponentially.  It’s no wonder Leila was awarded the Templeton Freedom Award 2009 for Social Entrepreneurship. 

What can you (er, I mean I) do?

(Thanks, @weirdchina for the source)