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World Cultural Preservation: A Growing Imperative

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:36:28 -0400

Richard Kurin, under secretary for history, art, and culture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, sat down with the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs for a discussion on protecting cultural heritage. Kurin overseas numerous museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Latino Center and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.

Question: How would you define culture and why is it important that the United States play a role in its preservation globally?

Kurin: As an anthropologist by trade who has worked in many countries around the world, I’m proud to represent not only the cultures of the United States, but indeed the cultures of peoples and regions around the world.

I define culture really as a way of life, as the things that are important to us, the values and beliefs that make life meaningful. Culture is expressed through song and dance, through architecture, through literature, through our aspirations, through our religions, through our craftsmanship and artistry. Culture is obviously important because it defines who we are in respect to our fellow human beings, to our neighbors, and indeed to people around the world.

We have a tremendous ability to learn each other’s cultures, to learn them the same way we learn languages. Now that said, we do speak a lot of different languages — some 6,000 on the planet right now. And, as we know, the planet has become a lot smaller. Our cultures are in much greater contact every day with each other. So it’s imperative that we, as citizens of a planet, understand each other. Maybe we do not need to speak each other’s languages, eat each other’s foods or sing everybody else’s songs, but we do need to taste them and experience them. And I think that this experience makes us rich as human beings and it increases our understanding of each other.

Q: Can protecting culture play a role in advancing human rights, particularly for minorities and indigenous populations?

A: There is a long history of confrontation between cultures, and this confrontation continues in the present as well. In some cases, we see a lot of intolerance, where people look at other human beings and think, “Well, we don’t really understand their culture, we don’t believe in what they do and therefore they’re inferior.” But when anthropologists, historians and others look at the achievements of other cultures, they find not ignorance but often insight, understanding that brings benefit to their own culture as well.

At one time, everybody’s culture was innovative. It’s hard to say where the next insight will come from, where we’ll solve the problem of cancer, for example. It may happen in the medical laboratories of the United States, it may happen in the laboratories of China or India, but it also may be in the folk knowledge, of a healer, a practitioner from the Amazon rain forest or central Africa. So I think we have a great deal to gain from each other’s cultures. I look at culture like a living library — an archive of the past, but also a living laboratory for the exploration of creativity and innovation. It can be of tremendous benefit to all of us.

Sometimes we think that heritage is something that belongs only to specific peoples living in specific countries. But the whole world mourned when the Bamiyan Buddhas were blown up. At the time, the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, and they regarded these Buddhas as valueless or indeed as a desecration of their own beliefs. This was quite tragic because these Bamiyan Buddhas stood for the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people. They were poised on the historic Silk Road that united people. They were a treasure and a part of the cultural heritage of all human beings, not just the heritage of the people who lived in Afghanistan, and certainly not of the Taliban. We have to do more in terms of inculcating the idea that heritage transcends any one regime or any one government.

Look, you may not like my song, you may not like my statues, you may not care for my art, but at least you should respect it. That’s the biggest thing that the United States stands for, actually.

In order to have a civil society, we’ve learned over the period of a few hundred years that respecting people’s beliefs and cultures is incredibly important. Sometimes we’ve learned that lesson in a hard way, as we have grappled with our own issues of cultural intolerance, of not respecting the views and cultures of certain people, such as in the case of Native Americans. Earlier in our history, the government was trying to wipe out and destroy their culture. Now we have the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. So I think the U.S. has learned a lesson about the respect for culture, respect for minority and majority and diverse groups. And I think that it is a lesson that is well-respected by the rest of the world and could be emulated by the rest of the world.

Q: Cultural preservation is expensive. Is there an economic incentive for a country to preserve its culture?

A: When we think about culture, we think primarily about two aspects of it. One is the creative aspect of culture, the living culture that is ongoing and innovative. The other is the heritage aspect of culture — the architectural sites, the artifacts, the things in our museums that remind us of our past. While it is very expensive to preserve artifacts and architecture, it is an investment in one’s cultural capital. Those sites, monuments and artifacts give people a sense of continuity of their identity. History has a way of both legitimating the present and giving it meaning. How did we get here? What did our ancestors do to make life meaningful? What’s important to us?

As we look at the preservation of architectural sites, the preservation of artifacts in museums, of great artworks of the past, we find that those things are alluring. They’re alluring to tourists; they are a part of the ongoing cultural economy, which draws one’s own citizens. They’re very important for the educational mission of a country. I think of our museums in Washington, where we get millions of schoolchildren, where they learn not just about the past but also educate themselves for the future. We have to look at the involvement in cultural heritage as an investment. It’s an investment in the sense of purpose and pride that citizens will have in who they are as a people.

Q: Has technology changed the way we approach cultural preservation?

A: There has always been an interesting relationship between the preservation of cultural heritage and technology. In the late 1870s, Thomas Edison developed the first sound recording machine. What was it used for immediately? Anthropologists from the Smithsonian went out to various Indian tribes and communities across the United States and Canada and recorded songs and stories because the new technology was viewed as a way of preserving that past and that heritage that would be important for people to know.

Similarly, when video, and film, and other technologies get developed, while they spur us on to create new industries that are regarded as avant-garde or technologically sophisticated, they are almost always applied to cultural heritage preservation work. I think of the great work in the Middle East, where sensing aerial photography has been able to unearth ancient archeological sites, ancient roads and ancient trading routes. It gives us an explanation of the relationship between different societies. New technology will always be used in that way because we’re always looking to coax out more meaning from our past.

The Internet, for example, is a fantastic tool for people around the world to communicate about their culture. The interesting thing about the Internet is that you don’t need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to build magnificent museums. You can share your culture with people around the world in a matter of seconds. I think the Internet provides a way in which different minority populations, different small populations, can have their voice heard and can communicate with much larger populations. The Internet is developing means of translation so that we can move from one language to another more easily, and that’s a marvelous innovation for cross-cultural collaboration.

A few years ago, many countries got together and did a Silk Road project, working pan-nationally across the breadth of Asia, Europe, even North Africa and the Americas because it was those trade routes that really connected the whole world. The Silk Road was one of those trade routes that brought together music, culture, ideas and foods, and really connected people around the world. I look at the Internet as a modern-day version of the Silk Road.

Q: What can the United States and other countries do to stop the illegal trade of stolen artifacts?

A: Most nations in the world have signed on to treaties which recognize the value of artifacts and cultural property to the very people who nurtured them and that draw meaning from them. Those treaties require governments and various other organizations to guarantee that those cultural properties will not be traded, will not go across boundaries and will not be sold surreptitiously. Many museums and organizations are participating in a number of ways that help people protect against that.

The Smithsonian Museum and the American Association of Museums are very involved in doing what we call “provenance research,” that is tracing the biography of various objects that might have been produced, traded or acquired, for example, during the Nazi era. We trace these biographies of literally thousands and thousands of objects. Where did they come from? When were they traded? Was that trading legitimate or was it indeed something that violated one of the treaties and was done illegitimately? I think it’s important to make citizens aware of the importance of these objects and the ethical obligation to preserve them.

Q: What do you think we have to lose if we fail to protect our cultural heritage?

A: I believe that when people lose their cultural heritage they lose their moral grounding, their connection to their own past. If you look at populations that have been displaced by war, or refugee populations, or people that have been subjected to all kinds of intolerance and persecution, very often you see a draw to something that is theirs and that no one can take away from them, and that is their sense of history and a sense of who they are. People die over that. People have gone to the gallows and concentration camps over the issue of who they are. It’s very hard to take away their culture. But if you lose that, I think you lose a whole sense of self — individually, as a community and as a nation.

There are also political and economic consequences of a people losing its culture. Culture is a resource, a distinctly human invention that has enabled us to survive. Culture has a practical, utilitarian value. When you look around the world today, you look at the vast cultural economy. The cultural economy has grown extraordinarily in the last several decades, and I think nowadays it is actually the largest part of the international economy. When you think of people writing books, or producing television programs, or producing things on the Internet, if you think of everything from video games to song, if you think of theater and movies, if you think of tourism and people going to observe cultural sites, it is the largest industry in the world. So imagine that we take all that away. Take Angkor Wat out of Cambodia, take Machu Picchu out of Peru, take the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, and probably most of New York City and Washington out of the United States, and you lose millions and millions of visitors. I think France gets tens of millions of visitors every year that contribute to that economy. If you lose or wipe away a culture, I think you not only lose a sense of meaning, both individual and national, but you have vast swaths of the economy just totally gone.

Therefore, it is very important to invest in culture, give it value, give it a place, and nurture it, not just for its intangible qualities — the aspects that give meaning to life — but also for its very tangible benefits, which are sometimes economic, sometimes political, sometimes even medical and scientific. We at the Smithsonian have an Air and Space Museum that has a moon rock and satellites that went up into space. We weren’t the first nation on Earth to contemplate the cosmos or think about the nature of the universe. That stirring to explore outer space is very deeply held and goes back to the roots of human beings when people were coming out of the savannah in Africa and looking up at the stars and trying to figure out the significance of all that up there for us down here. That’s culture. So it’s those musings that propel us on to greater heights and will continue to do so. If we lose cultural heritage, we lose meaning, we lose economy, but we also lose our imagination.

Institutes for Study of U.S. Offer Intensive Cultural Experiences

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:28:53 -0400

By Howard Cincotta
Special Correspondent

Washington — Each year, small groups of students, scholars and teachers come to the United States to encounter the country up close through short, intensive programs of study and travel sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

International scholars and academics who are active in some aspect of American studies are chosen to participate in one of eight Study of the United States Institutes:

• Contemporary American Literature
• Religious Pluralism in the United States
• American Politics and Political Thought
• Journalism and the Media
• U.S. Culture and Society
• U.S. Foreign Policy
• U.S. National Security Policymaking
• Study of the U.S. for Secondary School Educators

Each institute is hosted at a different U.S. university selected through an open competition. Sessions typically run for six weeks each summer, with about 18 participants per session. (The Institute on National Security Policymaking at the University of Delaware takes place in January and February.)

The university directors of the institutes acknowledge that they pack much reading and study into their programs. But they also try to give participants time to meet Americans outside the academic sphere.

“I never thought so much could be done in such a short period of time,” said Khalid Aludayli of Jordan, who attended the Contemporary American Literature Institute in 2006.

Most of the institutes are structured around four weeks of study at the home university, followed by a trip to three cities — one of which is always Washington — that offer very different social and cultural experiences.

Scholars and academics interested in the Study of the United States Institutes don’t apply directly, but through the U.S. Embassy in their home country.

The State Department also sponsors institutes for student leaders, which now number 23 summer sessions on nine college campuses, along with three winter institutes. Each student program focuses on a particular area of study — from environment and new media to religious diversity and social entrepreneurship — but all include sessions on leadership and community service. Several are conducted entirely in Spanish.

As with the scholar institutes, individuals apply for the student leader institutes through their local U.S. Embassy.

DEALING WITH DIVERSITY

A common thread linking all of the institutes is exposure to America’s social and cultural diversity. Take the Institute on Religious Pluralism in the United States, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The institute’s focus is not religious faith itself, but how a pluralist model works in a society like the United States, according to Wade Roof, professor of religious studies, who serves as the institute’s academic director.

“We want to expose them to the American religious and cultural experience,” Roof said. “Then we ask the question, Can this model offer something for you back in your home country?”

Along with a packed classroom schedule, the participants in 2009 — largely university professors of religion, philosophy and social science — explored America’s varied religious landscape.

Just in the Santa Barbara area, with a population of 400,000, they visited a Christian megachurch, an Islamic mosque, and a Buddhist center.

A trip to Los Angeles encompassed the Islamic Center of Southern California, Our Lady of Angels Catholic Cathedral and the Hare Krishna Temple. They explored Mormonism and the landmark Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. worshipped, as well as the Hindu Temple of Atlanta in Georgia.

Their trip concluded in Washington with a visit to the National Cathedral and a meeting with the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

In last year’s Contemporary American Literature Institute, members observed San Francisco through the lens of the modernist novel The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, and the Asian-American memoir of storytelling and family The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston.

A trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened doors to the nation’s Latino and American Indian literary traditions.

Director Byers has also increased representation by Arab-American and South Asian writers with authors like Naomi Shihab Nye and Jhumpa Lahiri. One underlying message in all the readings, he observed, “is how stories create identities.”

STUDENT LEADERS

The student leader institutes seek to provide an in-depth view of U.S. society, according to Mark Protti of the Institute on Training and Development in Amherst, Massachusetts. They also offer a variety of leadership training exercises.

Protti manages the six student leader institutes for the Western Hemisphere. He is conducting a program at Amherst while overseeing two other winter institutes, one at the University of Tennessee, the other entirely in Spanish at the University of Arizona.

A typical day begins with two 90-minute lectures and discussions, followed by afternoon visits to local state agencies or nonprofit organizations. Among them: a session of the state Supreme Court, a senior assisted-living facility and an animal shelter for abandoned pets.

All the institutes conduct study tours. The Amherst students travel to Tucson, Arizona, and the Tennessee students to Atlanta, Georgia.

The Arizona students, whose program focuses heavily on American Indians in the southwest, visit Boston and New York. All three institutes then rendezvous in Washington for tours and group presentations of their experiences to the Department of State.

As important as the formal programs are, the participants invariably cite the personal encounters and friendships as their most memorable experiences.

“Staying with American host families was one of the most amazing parts in the program, where we really related to American culture and daily life,” said student-leader participant Ahmed Omar Afifi of Egypt. “[We] had a full chance to really discuss our religious and political views — and even favorite food, music and sports on both sides.”

Asked what he learned in his 2008 student leader program, Ummar Zia of Pakistan said, “Rather than going for imagined uniformities, we ought to celebrate diversities.”

THE EXCHANGE EFFECT

Many participants find that among the most memorable aspects of the program are the peers they encounter from elsewhere around the world.

“When I met 17 other participants from 17 other countries, I was fascinated,” said Yukio Wang of China, who attended the Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. “We would respond quite differently from different perspectives, but there still are so many things in common.”

Thomas Byers, professor of English and director of Louisville’s American literature program, sees the same pattern. “They can really bond through the cross-cultural experience of encountering a foreign U.S. culture together,” he said.

Many participants carry new approaches to the teaching of American studies when they return home.

Aludayli said that he had designed and taught a new course on African-American literature in Jordan. The institute, he said, “enhanced our confidence to be ourselves in the midst of these diverse cultural differences. ... I returned home a more confident professor of languages and literature.”

The Institute on U.S. Foreign Policy, held at the University of Florida in Gainesville, takes an unconventional approach by focusing less on traditional topics like NATO or U.S.-China relations, and more on the often-misunderstood domestic factors that influence policy — whether Congress, states, lobby groups, or diaspora communities like that of Cuban Americans.

“I’ve changed my syllabus completely and moved toward domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy,” said Pawel Frankowski, who teaches political science in Lublin, Poland. “My students are surprised when I focus on the military and lobbies instead of great strategy.”

Abdullah Al-Asmary, who teaches languages and literature at King Saud University, recalled a saying from a professor who addressed their institute for secondary-school educators in 2008.

The professor’s adage: “The goal of education is not to fill students up with information, but rather to enable them to become fully engaged in the subject matter.”

Al-Asmary said, “Whenever I stand in front of my students, I ask myself — how engaging will this task be?”

Shahbaz Israr Khan of Pakistan, who studied at a 2008 student leader institute in Vermont, said, “When I came to America, I was Pakistani, but when I left, I found myself a human being, a citizen of the world.”

For more information see these pages:

• Study of the United States Institutes for Scholars
• Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders
• Study of the U.S. Institutes for Student Leaders/Western Hemisphere
• Institute on U.S. Foreign Policy
• Institute on Religious Pluralism in the United States
• Institute on Contemporary American Literature
• Institute of U.S. National Security Policy Making
• Institute of American Politics and Political Thought
• Institute on Journalism and Media
• Institute on U.S. Culture and Society
• Study of the U.S. for Secondary School Educators

In the Middle East, Modest Progress Made on Women’s Rights

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:13:18 -0400

“In several areas, women’s rights have actually improved, and nowhere is this more evident than in education,” says Sanja Kelly.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — A new report on women’s rights finds progress in almost all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

The report by Freedom House, an independent, nonprofit organization that studies and advocates for human rights worldwide, shows “notable progress, particularly in terms of economic opportunities, educational attainment, and political participation.”

The good news, it said, is that “important steps have been made to improve the status of women over the last five years, and 15 out of 18 countries have recorded some gains.” Yet women continue to face unequal treatment, the report said, and in the MENA region, “the gap between the rights of men and those of women has been the most visible and severe.”

This is Freedom House’s second effort to analyze the restrictions on women, country by country, in 17 Arab nations and territories; this report also includes Iran. Kuwait, Algeria and Jordan offered the most progress since the release of the first report in 2005. The only countries where women lost ground in their freedoms were those that have faced violent internal conflicts and a rise in religious extremism.

The report “charts progress as well as remaining challenges, giving countries a compass for the way forward,” said Dalia Mogahed, a Freedom House trustee and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Mogahed said the report offers people in the region the chance to compare the status of women in their countries with that of their neighbors. By the standards used in the study, Tunisian women enjoy the greatest degree of freedom in the region.

Ronald Schlicher, the U.S. principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, welcomed progress in the economic, educational and political lives of women in the Middle East, “and for the broader society as well.” Still, he said he was struck by the “substantial deficit in human rights” in many countries.

Schlicher noted that the greatest gains came in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which had scored the lowest in the report five years ago. In 2005, Kuwait gave women the same political rights as men, and four years later, Kuwaitis elected women to parliament for the first time. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates appointed women to judgeships for the first time. And women in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar gained the right to travel without the permission of a guardian.

The report also points to “notable reforms” in Algeria and Jordan. As Morocco did earlier, Algeria “made sweeping amendments to its personal status code in 2005, vastly improving women’s power and autonomy within the family,” the report said.

Jordan’s changes include protections against gender-based violence. Its new law, only the second of its kind in the region, after Tunisia’s, “specifies the procedures that police, the courts, and medical authorities must follow when dealing with victims of domestic abuse.”

The study evaluated each country on the extent to which women who live there enjoy the principles included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On a scale of 1 to 5 — with 5 meaning that the government and others almost never prevent women from exercising their rights and that women almost never face gender-based discrimination — no country in the report scored higher than 3.6 in any of the five categories on which they were rated:

• Nondiscrimination and access to justice.
• Autonomy, security and freedom of the person.
• Equal rights and equal opportunity.
• Political rights and civic voice.
• Social and cultural rights.

Ten of the 18 countries and territories did not score as high as 3 in any of the five categories; a score of 3 means that women sometimes are not free to exercise their human rights, that they have “adequate human rights protections but they are poorly implemented” and that they “occasionally face gender-based discrimination.”

Sanja Kelly, who directed the Freedom House project, said the trend is in the right direction for the region’s women. “In several areas, women’s rights have actually improved, and nowhere is this more evident than in education,” she said. Female literacy rates are up, and in many countries, women far outnumber men on college campuses. The report found that women in every country studied had gained in “access to education, literacy, university enrollment, and the variety of academic fields available to them.”

They also are making more money. “Women are more represented in the workforce than ever before,” Kelly said. On average, the report says, 28 percent of women in the Middle East are “economically active,” the lowest rate in the world. But the rate is rising, and women are playing a more prominent role in the workplace.

Among the problems that Kelly said are common in most countries of the region: laws that set the status of women below that of men in court and on family matters; laws that prevent women from conveying citizenship to their spouses and children; the acceptance of harassment and violence against women; and laws that promise equality but are ignored.

Rana Husseini, a journalist and author of the report’s section on Jordan, said her country had made important improvements in the lives of women. One problem she has covered is “honor killings.” Such killings have sometimes gone unpunished, but Jordan has set up a special tribunal to deal with them and handed down stiff prison terms. “We need to eliminate and erase any law that excuses the murder of women,” Husseini said.

Huda Ahmed, who wrote the Iraq report, said women there, like women in other countries going through violent unrest, have far more rights on paper than in reality. “The problem is, for every step forward, we take 10 steps backward, and always related to violence,” she said.

Those involved in the study said women in many countries face a large gap between what the law says and what some in society permit. “We have very strict laws against sexual harassment, but women are being harassed in the streets, in the workplace, even in their homes,” said Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian activist and head of the North Africa Bureau of the American Islamic Congress.

“The solution is not about working on laws. The solution is about working on the mentality,” she added.

Ziada said Egyptian women can vote and hold office but that they “are usually used as decoration” by political parties.

One area that Ziada said offers promise for women: the spread of the Internet. Online, she said, women and men are equal because they cannot be distinguished from one another, and women can use that experience to look for equality in the rest of their lives.

“We all know that once we empower women, we empower all of society,” she said.

The report is available in English at the Freedom House website, including a chart and graphs (PDF, 68KB) showing and comparing the countries’ scores in each category of women’s rights. The group is posting Arabic translations of the report and the country-by-country sections. The Freedom House program that focuses on rights in Iran, Gozaar, has posted a Persian translation of the report on women’s rights in Iran.

The report was funded in part by the State Department but was produced independently, and its findings and recommendations are those of its authors.

Afro-Brazilian Students to Discuss Issues with Clinton

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:00:51 -0400

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (right) walks with Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Luiz Nunes Amorim in February 2009.

By Erica Marrero
Staff Writer

Washington — The United States and many Western Hemisphere nations have similar goals and histories and will seek “common solutions to common problems” during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s March 1–5 visit to Latin America, said Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

Among the issues that Clinton will address during her five-nation visit are efforts by the United States and Latin American countries to address social equality and social justice.

“These societies are very similar in many ways … countries with indigenous societies, with forced migration of slavery, with a narrative of emancipation, with a search to try to strengthen the concept of democratic governance, based on the notion of social justice and equal opportunity to everyone,” Valenzuela said.

Brazil, for example, with the world’s second largest population of African descent, has become a proving ground for public policies to promote equality. Together, the United States and Brazil have the largest population of African descendents in the Western Hemisphere, with African Americans making up more than 14 percent of the U.S. population and Afro-Brazilians making up more than 45 percent of the Brazilian population.

ASK SECRETARY CLINTON

In addition to bilateral meetings with the presidents of several Latin American countries and the Pathways to Prosperity meeting in Costa Rica, Clinton will host a town hall meeting March 3 at Zumbi dos Palmares University in Sao Paulo, the only university in Brazil with a majority African-descendent student body.

Clinton will answer questions from students at the university and throughout Brazil about social inclusion and equality, and other bilateral issues that face the United States and Brazil. People not attending the meeting can submit their questions for Clinton via SMS or Twitter.

SUPPORTING MARGINALIZED GROUPS

Throughout the region, the United States supports policies that broaden social opportunity and mobility, create a wider foundation for growth and ensure the benefits of growth and trade are more widely distributed, particularly among traditionally marginalized groups.

The United States has signed agreements with both Brazil and Colombia that call for the public and private sectors in all three countries to address racial inequality and discrimination.

“We are committed to working with you to keep our people safe and secure, to protect and harness our natural resources and to widen opportunity and prosperity,” Clinton said in a digital town hall meeting from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in April 2009. “To achieve the shared prosperity we seek, we must integrate our commitment to democracy and open markets with an equal commitment to social justice.”

For more information on race in America see “A Patchwork Culture” and “10 Ways to Talk Openly About Race.”

Persian Literature Lands on U.S. Reading Lists

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:35:33 -0400

Nasrin Rahimieh says there is growing interest in Persian literature in the United States.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — The Shahnameh is a thousand years old, but it’s new to American students. In fact, the poet Firdawsi’s epic, an essential part of Persian literature, is only one of the Persian classics, along with contemporary Iranian works, that are reaching U.S. classrooms.

Nasrin Rahimieh, a professor of comparative literature and director of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California at Irvine, said Iranian literature in translation is working its way into university and even secondary school courses to an unprecedented extent. It’s being helped along by better translations and the growing number of Iranian-American students, she said, as well as by the success of some contemporary writers who have left Iran.

About 15 American universities have programs, such as Irvine’s, that focus on Persian studies, but thousands of colleges and universities teach general courses in literature. These traditionally have focused on British and American writers, plus works in translation from a few other European countries. Courses in comparative literature have helped broaden the reach of the curriculum in recent decades.

For more than a century, the Persian literary work most familiar to Americans has been the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but only through the translation by Edward FitzGerald, a British writer of the Victorian era whose version is not particularly close to the original. Rahimieh said many old translations of Persian classics use stilted and “highfalutin’” language that discourages modern readers and is nothing like the style of the originals. “What we have now are many accessible translations” that give students unfamiliar with Persian a good taste of the works, she said.

So a few classic works are gaining attention. Rahimieh said the Shahnameh, which has 100,000 lines of verse, is far too long for inclusion in most courses, but she teaches a section of it in a course on epic poetry.

More attention is going to the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi. “It’s dazzling to see how much people read Rumi these days,” Rahimieh said, though she added that the best-selling versions, by the American poet Coleman Barks, lack the playfulness of the original. “I don’t get a sense of Rumi the poet in it,” she said.

Two other classical poets have gained a foothold in the American classroom, she said: Hafez, who lived in the 14th century, and Attar, from the 12th century. Rahimieh praised a translation of Attar’s Conference of the Birds by British-born poet Dick Davis.

Even in good translations, though, classic Persian literature can be a challenge for American students. One reason is a cultural difference: Poetry is essential to Persian expression, Rahimieh said, and that is “a difficult adjustment” for Americans. The classic works also follow traditional forms that can be difficult for readers who are not used to them: “The form itself is very complicated, and sometimes because of the constraints of the form, the poetry is not as accessible,” she said. And American students stumble over the historical and cultural details — a name, a common practice, even the name of a dish — that Iranian readers would know but that must be explained in footnotes in an English translation.

Modern Iranian works, though, can grab the attention of modern American students much more easily.

So the poetry of 1960s feminist Forugh Farrokhzad, Rahimieh said, is readily appealing to college students. “The message is so much about finding yourself, and these young people are going through that,” she said.

Iranian novels that Rahimieh said succeed in the American classroom include Sadeq Hedayat’s powerful work The Blind Owl; Simin Daneshvar’s tale of a woman’s struggles after World War II, A Persian Requiem; Women Without Men, by Shahrnush Parsipur (“The students really connect with it,” Rahimieh said); and My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad. “It gives students just a view of Iran’s modern culture,” Rahimieh said. “That’s one that students love. It’s hilarious.”

Best-selling works by expatriate Iranians, such as Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and humorist Firoozeh DuMas’s Funny in Farsi have also landed on literature courses and opened the way for other writers inside and outside Iran. Rahimieh said Iranian literature is being taught increasingly by non-Iranians, which she said is a healthy change: “You don’t want it to be in a ghetto.”

Although Persian literature has made its greatest gains at the college level, Rahimieh said many secondary school teachers in California, which has a substantial Iranian-American community, are seeking to include it in their courses so more of their students can feel a personal connection to what they are learning.

Rahimieh said she expects only a greater interest in and awareness of Iranian literature.

“I’m very patient, and in the 34, 35 years I’ve been in North America, I’ve seen the interest grow tremendously,” she said.

Oprah Winfrey Still Loves School

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:05:03 -0400

Oprah Winfrey as a secondary school senior

By Phuong Ly
Special Correspondent

Chicago — When Oprah Winfrey was 3 years old, her grandmother taught her to read. When Winfrey walked into a radio station at age 16, she had never thought about becoming a broadcaster. But she was sure of one thing — she loved to read.

She had just won a beauty pageant and was at the station to pick up her prize when a man in the station’s newsroom said, “Hey, kid, do you want to hear your voice on tape?” He handed her a news article, and she took the microphone with confidence.

“I read like a champion,” Winfrey recalls. “Yes, because one thing I know I can do, ‘You want me to read something? I will read for you, sir.’”

After she read the news, right then, the station hired her. From there, the poor girl raised on a Mississippi farm won a college scholarship, worked television news jobs, landed her own talk show and became one of the richest and most influential celebrities in the world.

Reading changed the trajectory of Winfrey’s life, and she has never forgotten it. As her success grew, so did her philanthropic work to promote education, which she calls the “open door to anybody’s future.”

Winfrey long had thought of making the leap from writing checks for scholarships and literacy programs to creating her own school for disadvantaged girls. But she had never focused on that dream; it was something to do some day. Then, in December 2000, she met with former South African President Nelson Mandela and casually mentioned the idea. He jumped off the sofa and phoned the minister of education, Kader Asmal.

“I had just been thinking about it, you know, ‘It’d be nice to have a school one day.’ I wasn’t planning on doing it right then,” Winfrey told America.gov, smiling at the memory. “The next thing I know, Kader Asmal, who is on vacation, he’s being pulled off his boat someplace, and he is meeting me in Cape Town that evening to have a discussion about building a school.”

Seven years later, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy opened in Henley-on-Klip, a town south of Johannesburg, South Africa. The first class of 152 students represented every province in the country. Today, the academy is close to reaching capacity — about 450 girls in grades 7 through 12.

After the initial push from Mandela, the academy developed independently from the government. Winfrey’s foundation funds the boarding school, and she serves as its president. From the beginning, she has overseen even the smallest details, down to the pleats in the uniform skirts. She met and interviewed each of the 484 finalists for the first class. One girl described herself, apologetically, as a poor girl. Winfrey said that she herself had been a poor girl too.

Winfrey, born to an unwed teenage mother, spent the first few years of her life in a home without running water or electricity. But her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee, established such a strong educational foundation by teaching her to read the Bible that Winfrey skipped kindergarten, and later, second grade. When she was a teenager, a teacher noticed her constantly reading in the cafeteria and had her transferred to a better school.

Through a life of poverty and hardships, including sexual abuse, Winfrey held on to her love of reading. “My validation came from school,” Winfrey said. “My only sense of worth and value came from school. So I couldn’t wait to get to school.”

BACK TO SCHOOL

At the academy, students call Winfrey “Mama Oprah.” She says they are the children she never had, and she visits four times a year, staying from a week to up to a month. Her last visit was in November 2009, just before she flew to Washington to tape a Christmas television special featuring President Obama.

When visiting, Winfrey is there for the students — she attends class and hangs out in the dorm (eating pizza in pajamas or dancing). She also gives them a “Mama Bear talk” about sex and the importance of education. The girls usually giggle nervously. It’s the only time most of them have heard such frank talk. “I never leave without a big conversation about boys and maintaining, holding onto yourself even around boys,” Winfrey said.

Winfrey hasn’t had to instill in the students a love for books: they already love reading. She looks for terrific readers among applicants. Reading “gives you enormous confidence, and you don’t even know what it’s doing,” she said. “It’s improving your vocabulary, it’s expanding your view of the world, it’s introducing you to people you wouldn’t know. It’s all of that.” The academy’s library, with its thousands of books, is popular. But Winfrey has also wanted to start a personal library for each student; many students have had few items to call their own. Every Christmas, she gives them books.

One year, Winfrey gave I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir that traces U.S. poet Maya Angelou’s life as a poor black girl in the rural South. Winfrey read and reread the book as a teenager and says that it affirmed her own life. This year, the gift was the Twilight series of vampire romance novels by Stephenie Meyer — they were always checked out at the school’s library.

The academy takes Winfrey back to what it is like to be a teenager. She remembers the intense need at that age to feel validated. On her visits, she feels pulled in hundreds of directions and doesn’t have time to meet with each girl. But she hopes her interactions send this message: “I see who you are. I see what you are trying to do. I see your hopes. I see your dreams, your desires. I see your worth. I see you.”

In Educating Girls, Oprah Winfrey Works “to Get It Right”

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:07:04 -0400

The library at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls has thousands of books.

By Phuong Ly
Special Correspondent

Chicago — Nothing in Oprah Winfrey’s life has made her prouder than creating her school for girls in Henley-on-Klip, South Africa. And nothing, she says, has given her more headaches.

The scope of her vision is immense: to help students who grew up amid poverty, abuse and trauma not only to graduate from high school, but to go on to college and become South Africa’s leaders. Her donation was just as spectacular: $40 million went into building the 52-acre (21-hectare) campus of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.

But since the project was announced, critics have questioned the lavishness of the school’s yoga studio, original art works and dorm rooms with expensive sheets. Less than a year after the school opened in 2007, a dormitory matron was charged with sexually abusing students. Then there have been the day-to-day struggles of staffing the school and taking care of the girls, who still have real problems.

“It’s very easy to get caught up in the spirit of the emotionalism of philanthropy — ‘I want to help, I want to save, I want to change’ — and not be grounded in the structure and infrastructure that is required for the execution of your dream,” Winfrey said in an interview with America.gov. “I was starting with, ‘Ah, I want to build the school — I love the children!’”

Winfrey said she has learned from the experience of the academy. She has not downgraded her ambition; she has just realized the practical difficulties that dog even the best of intentions. “My goal,” she said, “is to get this right.”

Winfrey’s difficulties are not unusual, given the magnitude of her undertaking, said Brad Smith of the Foundation Center in New York, which collects research on organized philanthropy. He said nearly all aid projects undergo a “mid-course correction,” and donors have to be self-critical about the work and open to change. “Philanthropy is something you learn by doing,” he said.

For Winfrey, the easiest part of the endeavor has been finding girls in difficult circumstances who have potential. About 3,500 girls applied for the school’s first 152 slots. Some were orphaned by AIDS, others were abandoned by parents. Two sisters had watched their father kill their mother and then commit suicide.

Many lived in homes without electricity or running water and slept on dirt floors. Yet applicants yearned for education. One girl had braved the wait at a dangerous bus stop each morning so she could get to school. Winfrey wanted to make room for all of them. “I now know you can find great girls anywhere,” she said.

Finding great teachers has been harder. Winfrey assumed that recruiting teachers like the ones who had inspired her would be easy. But in South Africa, the system of apartheid had stunted the skills of black teachers. “Everybody’s still growing in that post-apartheid era, growing into who they can be and into what is possible,” Winfrey said.

The academy’s tree-lined campus, with its state-of-the-art science labs, 600-seat theater and spacious dorms, is a world away from the girls’ old neighborhoods. In a few cases, the students have escaped negative influences at home that have not been easy to close off. Two girls had wanted to spend their holiday break at a relative’s home that school counselors consider dangerous. Winfrey personally pleaded with the girls to go to an orphanage instead. “You’ve just got to be able to hold on, hold on to yourself until I can get you in college,” she recalled telling them. “We’re just trying to keep you safe, and keep you learning and keep you growing until I can get you to college.”

The school helps students navigate between their new and previous lives. Girls feel guilty that they have opportunities that their siblings and friends don’t. “We’ve worked on the guilt, we have worked a lot on the guilt,” Winfrey said. “Unless you can love and nurture and educate yourself, you won’t be able to do anything for anybody else. So it doesn’t make sense for everybody to be in the circumstance where nobody can do anything. You’re going to be the one who can do something.”

Dr. Bruce Perry of the Houston-based nonprofit ChildTrauma Academy said he never has seen a school in which the expectations of success for disadvantaged youngsters are so high.

Perhaps the biggest benefit that Winfrey brings is her life story, a story of someone who overcame the obstacles of poverty and racial prejudice. Her influence also has drawn inspiring visitors to the school, such as former South African President Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, and Gcina Mhlope, a South African freedom activist and well-known storyteller-poet.

“You can’t underestimate what it means to children when you see someone achieve excellence in an area and how they did it, how there was disappointment and how they got through it,” said Perry, who is a consultant to the school. The students see, he said, that it is not foolish to think, “‘I’m a poor little girl from South Africa, and … I can be an ambassador or anything else.’”

WINFREY STILL DREAMS BIG

Despite the challenges, Winfrey remains committed to giving an even greater number of disadvantaged girls an education. She doesn’t plan to replicate the academy exactly, but to use what she’s learned there for initiatives in other countries. While she doesn’t regret building a luxurious campus, she said she realizes now that “you don’t have to just have the bricks and mortar. There are a multitude of ways to educate girls without building.”

Her ultimate goal is to educate 100 million girls. The idea “seems like an impossible dream, but nothing’s impossible,” she said. Just look at daily life at the academy: Girls who once pumped and carried water are now playing violins. Girls who are orphans are running a community program to help other orphan children.

“The change is like the difference between living in a neighborhood where there is no hope,” Winfrey said, “to now creating a community where people feel, where all the girls feel like, ‘I’m going to college, and I will be successful for myself and my family, my community, my country.’”

More Children Are in School, but Still Not Enough

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:49:02 -0400

Shufiya Akter helps a student at a learning center in Bangladesh. The centers educate poor children unable to attend school.

By Burton Bollag
Special Correspondent

Washington — In 2000, most of the world's nations met in Dakar, Senegal, and renewed a pledge to ensure that all children will be in school by 2015. But the latest annual monitoring report finds that while there has been progress, the world is not on track to meet the goal.

The good news is that the number of children out of school has dropped: from 105 million in 1999 to 72 million in 2007. The bad news is that, if present trends continue, the report says, 56 million children still will not be getting an education in 2015. Most will be in the poorest countries of Africa and South and Southwest Asia.

These children without teachers and books will be the hardest to reach, the report says. “The closer you get to the target, the more difficult it becomes,” said Kevin Watkins, the report's chief author. “It’s harder to reach kids who are in acute poverty or the most remote regions of a country,” or members of neglected minority groups, he told a gathering of educators and journalists in Washington.

That issue is the focus of this year's monitoring report, entitled “Reaching the marginalized.” Ensuring all the world's children get at least a primary school education is one of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, first adopted by the world community in 1990 under the label “Education for All.” UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is leading efforts to reach the education goal. (The other goals include ending hunger, improving child and maternal health and ensuring environmental sustainability.)

Last year's global financial crisis has led to a 10 percent drop in education spending among sub-Saharan countries in Africa and is threatening the progress that has been achieved, according to the report. The document says that many governments are doing too little to reach educationally marginalized children in their countries, and rich countries are not providing enough financial support.

There have been some shining successes. Some of the world's poorest countries, including Benin, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nepal and Zambia, have made large gains in the numbers of children attending school by building new schools, training more teachers and abolishing school fees.

Ghana ended fees and introduced free daily meals at school. The measures succeeded in increasing public school enrollment from 59 percent of all children in the academic year ending in 2004, to 83 percent in the year ending in 2008, according to U.N. figures.

“I like to come to school to eat, learn and play,” said Princess Owusu, a second grader in the greater Accra region, and one of many students who are benefiting from the policy.

But other countries, including some developing countries with stronger economies, are way behind. The report singles out Turkey and the Philippines for neglecting the education of their minority populations: the Kurds in eastern Turkey and the Muslims of southern Philippines.

Desmond Bermingham, a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development, an independent research organization in Washington, said that of the eight Millennium Development Goals, the greatest progress probably has been made toward universal education, despite the millions of children still out of school. (The least progress has been made on the goal of preventing the high numbers of deaths among women during childbirth, he said.)

Bermingham said progress on the education goal depends on the “political will” of governments. This is evident, he added, when looking at what he called the “remarkable” progress made by some very poor countries.

Children with handicaps and girls have less access to an education than do other children in a number of countries, the report says. The greatest gender disparity is in Afghanistan, where less than two-thirds as many girls as boys go to school.

As countries struggle to meet the Millennium Development Goal of “Education for All,” a growing concern of educators is the quality of education. As more children are enrolled, cash-strapped governments may simply increase class sizes, reducing the quality of what often had not been a very good education to begin with.

Despite substantial international assistance, donor countries are not providing enough to help poor countries, the report says. The report calculates that after expected foreign assistance is taken into account, approximately $11 billion more will be needed, especially in Africa, to allow all children to attend school. “Donors are not living up to the pledges that were made at Dakar,” said Watkins. The report calls for convening an emergency donors' conference this year to fill the funding gap.

The United States makes significant contributions to “Education for All.” Most American help goes directly to individual countries as bilateral aid. The report calls for greater multilateral coordination of aid, a goal President Obama also cited when he was campaigning for the presidency.

Young Scholar Builds Bridges Between U.S. and Russian Orthodoxy

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:29:19 -0400

U.S. student Dimitry Doohovskoy rings a church bell in Irkutsk, Russia.

By Orly Keiner
Staff Writer

Washington — Dimitry Doohovskoy, born and raised in the United States, but of Russian, German and Costa Rican ancestry, is on a spiritual and academic journey that has taken him to Russia, and soon will take him to Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece.

Like many U.S. students, Doohovskoy is traveling abroad to study, but his goal is unique. With the help of a fellowship from Harvard University, he is seeking to re-establish connections and promote mutual understanding between Christian Orthodox communities that had gone their separate ways decades or even centuries earlier.

Doohovskoy said he seeks to impart to European Orthodox communities “a face to the diaspora Orthodox communities in the United States” and to begin to lay a foundation for future exchanges through the use of modern technologies like e-mail, Skype and blogs.

RELIGIOUS PEOPLE, SECULAR GOVERNMENT

According to a 2006 Gallup Poll, nearly 78 percent of young Americans like Doohovskoy, between the ages of 18 and 29, say that religion plays at least a fairly important role in their lives. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s landmark U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the typical American believes in God (92 percent), and prays at least weekly (75 percent). The U.S. Constitution guarantees the secular character of the U.S. government as well as freedom of religious practice. On January 16, the United States marked Religious Freedom Day to celebrate its history of religious freedom and diversity.

CREATING A WORLDWIDE ORTHODOX NETWORK

In 2009 Doohovskoy, who is from Massachusetts, established ties with Orthodox Christians in Massachusetts, Missouri, Colorado, Utah and California to work with him on his project to create a worldwide orthodox network. Although Orthodox Christians share a core religious tradition, there is often a lack of understanding about “how the other side lives,” he said.

He believes that youth connections are a way of overcoming barriers between Russian Orthodox communities that formed during the era of communism and the Cold War. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, many Russian believers fled the Soviet Union for the United States and established the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which for decades opposed the Moscow Patriarchy for its collaboration with the country’s communist regime. The two churches reconciled in 2007, but, Doohovskoy said, “many people on both sides still don’t see Orthodoxy’s global context.” He hopes to lay a strong foundation for future connections between communities, envisioning a worldwide network of Orthodox youth-exchange programs. “Youth are more open; they don’t have the same stereotypes,” he said. “Among youth, there’s a place where the future can be thought of.”

Doohovskoy said he finds that he and his Russian peers have much in common. “I’ve met a lot of talented young people who really care about their country. I see them visiting the elderly, people who don’t have others to care for them; they visit orphanages. They have the values of good citizenship, just like American young people.”

The Siberian city of Tomsk reminded Doohovskoy of the U.S. city of Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, which was established by Thomas Jefferson after his service as America’s third president. “Tomsk is a university town right out of the 19th century — it has a real campus, it’s filled with students, it’s so young and energetic,” he said. In towns of the Russian Far East he found hospitality and openness often seen in the American West. He says the area’s “history of conquering and pioneering a huge, expansive area and of surviving and growing there is similar to our American narratives.”

Since September 2009, Doohovskoy has lectured in universities, spoken to school and church youth groups, sung in choirs, rung church bells, celebrated holy days, and stayed in seminaries, monasteries, and host families’ homes all across Siberia. While in Kazan during a major Orthodox feast day, he said he observed firsthand the tolerance and mutual respect shown by the city’s Muslim and Christian communities.

He expressed admiration for the ethnic Chuvash Orthodox community that hosted him in Cheboksary, which simultaneously was engaged in preserving its Chuvash heritage and in strengthening their Orthodox faith.

Doohovskoy finds the role of informal representative of America’s values of tolerance and diversity, as well as of the country’s Orthodox communities, enriching. “I’m trying to learn things; I’m trying to share things. It’s in a way an ambassadorship for America, but it’s also a personal, spiritual pilgrimage, as well as a fascinating academic experience,” he said.

For more information on his trip, see Dimitry Doohovskoy’s blog.

Michelle Obama Greets Brazilian Youth Ambassadors

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:14:35 -0400

Brazilian Youth Ambassadors pose in front of the U.S. Capitol Building while touring Washington monuments January 10.

By Erica Marrero
Staff Writer

Washington — Thirty-five outstanding Brazilian teenagers participating in the 2010 Youth Ambassadors Program arrived in Washington on January 9 eager to represent their country abroad and interact with their U.S. peers.

Launched by the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia in 2002 to promote social responsibility, the Youth Ambassadors Program offers participants the chance to broaden their knowledge of U.S. culture, improve their English language skills, live with an American host family, exchange views with their U.S. counterparts and serve as “ambassadors” for Brazil.

The 35 participants in the 2010 program represent 23 of Brazil’s 26 states and were selected from among 4,000 applicants for their exemplary leadership, positive attitude, social consciousness, academic achievement and English language ability.

Lucas Penna, from Minas Gerais, said he hoped to “learn a lot about the U.S., improve [his] English and see a real U.S. family.” He said the U.S. is more complex and diverse than the Hollywood version that the world sees in movies. To capture their reactions, the participants will be blogging about their experiences (in Portuguese) throughout their trip to the United States.

MEETING THE FIRST LADY

During their first week in Washington, the students visited the White House and met with first lady Michelle Obama, who Nazareno Araújo of Ceará called “amazing and very friendly.”

The students presented Obama with traditional gifts from Brazil: a handicraft for the first lady and Havaiana flip-flop sandals for her daughters, Malia and Sasha. The first lady answered several questions from students on topics ranging from volunteerism to healthy eating and introduced them to the “first dog,” Bo.

The students began their program with a four-day immersion in the civic and cultural life of Washington complete with briefings on entrepreneurship, nongovernmental organizations and the workings of the U.S. government. They also visited Washington landmarks and attended a performance at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. At the World Bank, they tackled the complexities of the global financial crisis in a simulation exercise.

EXPERIENCING LOCAL HISTORY AND CULTURE

After their tour of Washington, the 35 young Brazilians will be divided into four groups, each traveling to a different American city — Charlotte, North Carolina; Bozeman, Montana; Seattle, Washington; and Tulsa, Oklahoma — to live for one week with a host family and attend a U.S. secondary school where they will give a presentation about Brazil and participate in community service. Alongside their U.S. peers, the Brazilian teens will participate in school activities, visit volunteer-based programs and learn about local history and culture.

Jennifer Phillips, the program officer for the Youth Ambassador Program at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, said the program allows students to “learn about themselves and life in the United States … and helps to build a hemispherewide network of exceptional young leaders.”

On January 26, the youth ambassadors will return to Washington to meet Thomas Shannon, the American ambassador to Brazil. The students will then re-group to discuss social justice and entrepreneurship projects that they can bring back to their home communities.

For profiles of the Youth Ambassadors in Portuguese, visit this blog.

The U.S. embassy in Brazil offers a video of the students’ experience in the United States (in Portuguese).

The Youth Ambassador Program is the U.S. State Department’s flagship youth exchange program for the Western Hemisphere. Pioneered by U.S. Embassy Brasilia in 2002, it is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

For more information, see:

Youth Ambassadors Program: Brazil

Youth Ambassadors Program: Central America

Youth Ambassadors Program: Colombia and Mexico

Youth Ambassadors Program: Southern Cone, Andean Region and Venezuela

Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:52:29 -0400

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle prepares a book for digital scanning at IA headquarters in San Francisco.

By Sarah Rouse
Special Correspondent

Washington — Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library. Anyone who wants to learn about the early history of the United States, or track the history of their own families, can read and download these books for free.

“The Library chose books that people wanted, but that were too old and fragile to serve to readers. They won’t stand up to handling,” said Michael Handy, who co-managed the project, which is called Digitizing American Imprints.

“Many of these books cover a period of Western settlement of the United States — 1865–1922 — and offer historians a trove of information that’s otherwise tough to locate,” he said. Books published before 1923 are in the public domain in the United States because their U.S. copyrights have expired.

The oldest work in the batch, dated 1707, covers the trial of two Presbyterian ministers in New York. The 25,000th book to be digitized was a 1902 children’s history book, The Heroic Life of Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator, in time for Lincoln’s bicentennial on February 12, 2009.

These and the other digitized books can be accessed through the Library’s catalog Web site and the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free online digital library.

“The Library’s collections are of unbelievable scope and depth,” said Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle. “Now, with an Internet connection, you can download, print or bind copies of all these books.”

In addition to the LOC collection, IA includes content from other institutions that are part of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of organizations around the world that seeks to build an archive of free, multilingual, digitized text and multimedia material.

HISTORY AND GENEALOGY

Many of the newly digitized LOC works contain hard-to-obtain Civil War regimental histories and county, state and regional information relating to specific people, their occupations and families, and other details that are important for historians and genealogists. Of an 1854 work by David Sutherland, titled Address delivered to the inhabitants of Bath, New Hampshire, one reader wrote, “I loved it. My two children are descendants of this gentle man. Very interesting first person accounts of early American life.”

Another reader commented on The Causes of the American Civil War by John Lothrop Motley, published in 1861 as the war began: “This is an amazing gift for humanity! We must be thankful with the people involved in this gigantic project, which is an open door to the treasures of our history. Thank you very much for doing this.”

The Library of Congress has digitized many of its other collections — more than 7 million photographs, maps, audio and video recordings, newspapers, letters and diaries can be found at the Library’s Digital Collections site, such as the popular American Memory and the multilingual Global Gateways collections — but “this is the first sustained book-digitization project on a high-volume basis,” Handy said.

The Internet Archive is the second-largest book-scanning project after Google Books. A subset of this project is the Google Books Library Project, which has agreements to scan collections of numerous research libraries worldwide. (Google Books remains the subject of legal challenges, particularly regarding copyright issues.)

DIGITIZATION CHALLENGES

A $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation inaugurated the LOC book digitization project. One of the grant’s objectives was “to address some of the issues that other book digitization projects had mainly avoided dealing with — for instance, the brittle book issue,” Handy said. “We established some procedures and preservation treatments to be able to scan books that otherwise couldn’t be scanned.” The library also worked with Internet Archive — which provided the scanning equipment — to develop a special station for scanning fold-out materials such as maps.

Before and after scanning, a librarian inspects each book for damage — what Handy calls “preservation triage.” Ten scanning specialists sit at “Scribe” scanning stations. In each Scribe, two digital cameras hover over the open book on a mechanized tabletop. The specialist positions the book for accurate scanning, snaps the digital photos with a foot pedal, then turns the page and scans the next pages. The teams can scan 1,000 volumes per week. Hours after scanning and inspection, the books are available on the Internet.

The Library of Congress is producing a report on best practices for dealing with brittle books and fold-out materials that it plans to post on its Web site and share with the Internet Archive and other members of the Open Content Alliance “so it’s available to anybody,” Handy added.

The scanned books are retired to an environmentally controlled storage facility at Fort Meade, Maryland, “where they will not be served again, they will be preserved,” he said.

Other federal agencies such as the Department of the Treasury and the Government Printing Office are sending books and documents through the Library of Congress scanning center (PDF, 90KB). It’s “an opportunity to demonstrate government transparency,” Kahle said.

The Internet Archive tracks downloads. “It’s great to know that a Library book has now been used dozens or hundreds of times via the Internet Archive,” Handy said. “More funding will be sought to keep this going after this year. This is just the beginning.”

More information is available in a Library of Congress video.

Public Diplomacy Web Contest Open to International, U.S. Students

iipcms@state.gov (iipcms) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:53:14 -0400

The top international team of students from Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia, created a Web project on preserving their Minangkabau culture.

By Melissa Quijada
Staff Writer

Washington — Young participants in an international online diplomacy competition are hopping on the social networking train to create and promote their projects, which help teach others about international issues and the value of diplomacy.

“In the last few years, students have promoted their projects via Web 2.0 [interactive] tools like Twitter and Facebook. They are putting their videos on YouTube,” says Yvonne Andrés, executive director of the Global SchoolNet Foundation, which co-sponsors and manages the Doors to Diplomacy online competition for the U.S. State Department.

The 2009 Doors to Diplomacy winners — students from the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the U.S. state of Georgia — use tools such as Twitter, videos, animation, comment forums and interactive games to help deliver their messages. The Sumatran students hope to motivate other students and community members to appreciate and preserve traditional arts and culture, while the Georgian students created a fictional character named Captain Water to teach about water conservation.

The winners were selected from Web sites created by 203 student teams from 34 countries.

For the eighth year in a row, the Doors to Diplomacy contest invites international and American students to promote positive online global relations. The deadline for entries is March 23, 2010. For the contest, teams of two to four students, ages 12–19, and up to two adult coaches create Web projects on international issues and propose diplomatic solutions.

Winners will be announced in May 2010. Each student member of the two winning teams receives a $2,000 scholarship, and their coaches’ schools earn a $500 cash award. Past international winners have hailed from Bulgaria, India, Macedonia, Mexico, Taiwan and Uzbekistan.

WEB SITE CONTENT VERSUS FLASHY DESIGN

While the use of social networking tools can be “a plus,” says Janice Clark of the State Department, the Doors to Diplomacy judges “look for informative content over interactivity and flashy design.”

“The real emphasis of the contest is on the quality of learning and understanding of diplomacy and international cooperation,” says Clark, who helps judge the contest. “Does the research seem thorough? Did the students serve as ‘ambassadors’ in their communities by reaching out to discuss and inform on the issue their project is addressing?”

Many teams must overcome challenges to complete their projects, she said. “For international team members such as the 2008 winners from Bulgaria, infrastructure was a major obstacle: they had one computer between the four team members and no car. Despite that, the Bulgarian team still visited a nuclear power plant, conducted a community survey, and created their Web site to win first prize.” (See “Web Site Contest Open to American, International Students.”)

An extra challenge for international entries is that the Web site has to be in English.

“Some of the teams have to carefully schedule their Internet time, and some [personal computers and connections] are slower. So they definitely face challenges,” says Clark. “That’s one of the reasons why we don’t put too much stock in the glitz of the end product.”

The students are required to help build an audience for their projects through publicity and community projects, and they also must evaluate four other teams’ entries, a task that usually turns out to be a great learning experience, says Clark.

2009 WINNERS

The 2009 winners from Sandy Creek High School in Tyrone, Georgia, created an animated, blue-hair superhero, Captain Water, who promotes water conservation. They created the site in response to Georgia’s drought last year, and Captain Water sends regular updates on the crisis via Twitter and e-mail. “It is vital for Georgians and others to realize that water is a limited precious resource and that people take it for granted,” the students wrote in their project summary.

“The Captain Water team became proactive ambassadors for their water conservation message by using social media to advertise their Web site,” says Andrés. “They also became spokespersons for their project by visiting local elementary schools and making presentations.”

The Indonesian winners from SMA 1 Padang, Sumatra, produced a Web site promoting art and cultural youth activities of the Minangkabau, an ethnic group of the West Sumatra highlands. The Web site features a blog and several YouTube videos that exhibit various aspects of Minangkabau culture, including traditional music and clothing.

“Our lives cannot be separated from arts and culture, because arts and culture represent the identities of a country or a society and can be the ‘door to diplomacy’,” wrote the Indonesian team in their project description.

In 2006, a group of young Ghanaian football (soccer) fans created what Andrés considers one of the most inspiring projects to date. The students utilized their limited resources by relying on a borrowed laptop and an Internet café nearly 20 kilometers from their high school to send their work to students in San Diego, California, who then created the Web site for them. (See “Students in Macedonia, Ghana Win State Department Award.”)

For a winning presentation, students need to concentrate on original research, incorporate diplomacy in all aspects and create a comprehensive step-by-step project narrative, documenting how they built the Web site, according to Andrés.

“A project needs to be interactive, so it’s not like a brochure,” she says. “These type of sites grow in value the more people use it.”

In addition to the top two prizes, this year Doors to Diplomacy gave special recognition to entries from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, India, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey and several U.S. states.

The winning 2009 Web sites are: Preserving Arts and Culture of Minangkabau Through Youth Activities and Captain Water Helps Teach Kids How To Conserve Water.

More information about the 2010 Doors to Diplomacy competition is available on the Web site of Global SchoolNet, a nonprofit group dedicated to collaborative online learning. Also see the State Department contest announcement and an article about the contest on the State Department Dipnote blog.