« Tarawa Basecamp. Update #4 | Main | Viewers of Linford’s Record Breakers - Welcome to the Expedition! »
November 1, 1999
Current news…
Pedal boat Moksha is keeping an expedition presence in dry storage on the island atoll of Tarawa. I (Jason) am in San Francisco working with Maurice and Skip from Video Free America - a San Francisco based independent production company – on a cutting edge enhanced web/television prototype sponsored by the American Film Institute and Intel* that could revolutionize how followers experience the expedition from April onwards. Parallel to this we are concentrating our efforts on securing funding for the next leg, acquiring commissions with television broadcasters using the 150 hours of film footage shot to date, visiting schools in Europe and the US, updating the website and reworking some of the on-line educational curricula. Somewhere in amongst this hectic schedule and before heading back to Tarawa in March, I’ll be having a follow up operation to my rollerblading accident in Colorado four years ago to remove surgical hardware from my left leg.
What’s happening next?
With less than half of the world left to complete, the expedition is now ‘homeward bound’ for the point we left from over five years ago – the Greenwich Meridian line in the UK. The next leg is due to commence in April of 2000 after the typhoon season in the Southwest Pacific has passed. I’ll be joined by one of pedal boat Moksha’s original builders, Chris Tipper, for a five week, 1200-mile voyage from Tarawa (where the expedition is now) to the Solomon Islands. After a short layover of about a month spent connecting with youngsters in and around Honiara, the expedition will continue onto Cairns on the Northeast Australian coast; a voyage of around another 1200 miles. This will see the completion of the first ever crossing of the Pacific Ocean by pedal power and the second and last major ocean crossing of the expedition. From Cairns we intend in-line skating down the coast toward Sydney in time for the 2000 Olympic Games.
European schools’ visits
“To be aware that each individual is different and to outline the uniqueness of everybody in the human race. To contact other cultures around the world and see how they live.” - Mission statement for ‘Global Lives’ –a new pupil-generated cultural exchange club in the UK.
Recently I had the opportunity of visiting a school in the UK and one in France that expressed interest in becoming involved with some of Global Learning Exchange’s* (GLE) cultural exchange activities. The ‘Lycee Agricole d’Aix Valabre’ is an agricultural high school near Aix en Provence in southern France. With the language assistance of my French friend Carole – who biked with the expedition on the Central American leg two and a half years ago* – we showed slides of the trip as a lead-in to handing out a video camera to pupils interesting in making a film about their lives for GLE’s World Video Exchange project*. Fortified with slices of freshly baked apple flan that were presented to us immediately upon our arrival, we swiftly demolished these unexpected but welcome gifts under the envious scrutiny of the class before going onto deliver our presentation.
Language is a strange thing: beautiful in it’s diversity, but potentially the source of so much misunderstanding. I remember giving a presentation three years ago to the students and staff of the Thomas Garrique Mazaryk secondary school in Mexico City. It was the first time I had given a public talk in Spanish. Reading verbatim from a script that a friend had translated from my original slide-show notes, I needless to say made a complete pig’s ear of the whole thing. My audience sat with impeccable politeness throughout the ordeal, to their credit never giving even a hint of the extent to which I was butchering their language. It was only afterwards when I was informed in confidence by my translator friend quite how diabolical was my pronunciation that I realised how much of an idiot I had made myself. After that day I vowed to either learn enough of the language of the country I was visiting to make myself understood, or keep my mouth shut as far as speaking in public.
It was for this reason that relief swept through me when Madame Zuca – our contact at the Lycee Agricole d’Aix Valabre - informed me that her students were learning English and that it was preferred for me to speak in my native tongue. I am ashamed to admit that after having French drilled into me for almost six years at school in the UK, I can still hardly speak a word. And now being able to speak a little Spanish from having spent six months in Central America, as soon as I open my mouth to utter something in French, the only words that fall out are Spanish. Very depressing. However, being blessed with an English speaking class, Carole and I slowly navigated our way through the forty or so slides, stopping at intervals for Carole to bring some of the slower students up to speed as to what I was talking about. As is the case with nearly any group of youngsters from any country we’ve visited, there are those who look disinterested after the first five minutes (pedaling a boat across an ocean just seems too ridiculous to them - and in many ways they’re probably right) and then there are the few whose eyes grow wider and expressions more incredulous the further into the presentation we go. I can almost hear the sound of rubber bands twanging away in the heads of these children as their imaginations start to kick in as to what they themselves might one day do in life. It is these people – and the seed that is planting it their minds for future germination – that make visiting classrooms around the world worthwhile: opening the possibility for them at some point in the future to take the plunge and commit to doing something really special with their lives.
Insert Pic: “French video exchange kids”
These are the pupils who volunteered after the slide show to use a video camera to record their world for exchange with teens in other countries. Click here for more information about this program.
The Budmouth College in Weymouth, Dorset in the UK has been connected to the expedition for a few years now, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of Kirsty Legg, a Design and Technology teacher there. While I was over in the UK recently, Kirsty shared with me the idea of some of her pupils starting their own cultural exchange club affiliated to the expedition’s Global Learning Exchange*. The children would be in charge of their own club with adults acting only as facilitators. Incorporating cutting edge technology would be a key element to the club’s activities: such as building a website (linked to other student initiated culture exchange clubs around the world), using digital still and video cameras to make ‘culturebites’ – short videos and photo albums to post on the website for other clubs to access, video conferencing and taking part in keypal exchanges (email version of penpals). The students participating would then visit other UK schools and act as a catalyst for them to start their own culture link club by passing on their acquired knowledge.
Insert Pic: “Global Lives - pizza break”
We all need an incentive before launching into something unfamiliar, and the promise of pizza proved a key hook for the first meeting of the Budmouth group!
Insert Pic: “Global Lives - ideas for title”
The first item on the agenda – after giving the pizza a good seeing-to of course – was to agree upon an identity for the group in the form of a name and a mission statement.
Insert Pic: “Global Lives - name title 1”
The group brainstormed for names, everyone scribbling their ideas down on a jotterpad and then voting on the favourite. “Global Lives” was subsequently picked as the club’s title.
Insert Pic: “Global Lives - brain storming on mission statement”
A similar procedure was used to condense a mutually agreed upon core philosophy into a mission statement.
Global Lives’ mission statement is therefore as follows:
“To be aware that each individual is different and to outline the uniqueness of everybody in the human race. To contact other cultures around the world and see how they live.”
If you would like to start your own culture link club from wherever you are in the world, contact our Global Learning Exchange* via the ‘contact us’* button on the homepage. We’ll put you in a creative loop of other groups doing the same thing.
Jason
November 1, 1999
Posted on November 1, 1999 1:16 PM