Step by Step to a better world. One person at a time. WE CAN DO IT.

I have a rock on my desk from the Kennebec River in Maine. It weighs about 5 pounds (~2kg), and I carried it all the way from America in my carry on luggage. I really didn't want to lose it. I look at it to remind me why I am here, and why I am a teacher. It is especially helpful when I am dealing with the daily aggravations that crop up here all the time. It never has failed to calm me down and help my find strength when I have reached for it. It is perhaps the most significant gift I have ever received. It was given to me when I finished my master's degree and earned my teaching certificate by a friend who had decided to become a teacher, mainly because of my encouragement. It has the word "inspire" engraved on it. I take it to be the imperative tense--a command--my mission here in Japan and everywhere. It is my touchstone.

In March, I went on a homestay to Maine with 12 students and 5 adults from the Onoe Junior High School community. It was a powerful experience for everyone, two hours after the plane had left Maine, some of my students were still sobbing. Now, I am preparing for the return visit by students and teachers from Mt. Ararat Middle School in Maine. Before we left in March, many parents of the Maine students were saying they would not be able to make the return trip to Japan. Before I left Maine, I wrote letters of support to many of the Maine parents at the request of the homestay host students. They wanted to convince their parents it was a good idea to go to Japan, and I was happy to support their requests. I also had the unique pleasure of giving the closing speech at the farewell party in Maine, and I emphasized my views about what this trip was about.

I am gratified that all 12 of the students and 7 adults are coming to Onoe in July, the largest group to participate in the 7 years of the program. I have been told by the school principal and the participants that this is due in no small part to my words and efforts during the homestay; it is a good feeling. Inspire: Mission Accomplished.

I have been doing a great deal of thinking about this experience and I would like to share some of my thoughts with you. I admit to being a bit of a zealot, but I hope people will see the potential while we are here.

In America, I teach history. One of the beliefs I have about history is that a great many problems could have been avoided or solved if people could relate to one another as individuals and feel their common bonds and common needs. It is easier to hurt a stranger than it is a friend. All too often in societies past and present "people from somewhere else" are seen as not equal in importance to our own group. It is when people are dismissed in importance because they are not "one of us" that it becomes all too easy to inflict unimaginable horror upon them. I know of very few groups on earth that have not been guilty of this at one time or another. It is a vicious cycle that is perpetuated to this very day in different parts of the globe.

So how do we break the cycle? What is the answer?

Jonathan Swift, an English author, made famous for his book "Gulliver’s Travels," once wrote that, "The cure for prejudice is travel." When I first read this it made a great impression on me. In my own life, I have come to know that this is a fact. Nothing I have done in my life has affected me as profoundly as the experience of meeting people in their own land, and looking with my own eyes at their lives.

I am a trained soldier and officer. For the first five years of my military training in America, I was taught that the Soviet Union was "the bad guy." We trained--always--with them firmly in mind as our enemy. In 1988, when I was in university, I traveled to what was then the Soviet Union, and what is now Russia and the Ukraine. In the short two weeks I spent in that country, my view of the Russian people was forever changed for the better. I talked, traveled, laughed, sang, and danced with people who lived in the USSR and the multi-national youth group I was traveling with (I still want to go to Iceland one day because of two of the people I met on that tour). We shared our views and ideas about the world and everyday life. I began to understand their perspective. I found that, for all the differences, we shared similar hopes, goals, and dreams. I could not envision these people as an enemy, or an adversary any longer.

I present this example as the most dramatic, but I have had similar experiences in the many nations I have visited, in Europe, the Middle East, Central America, and now Japan. Even where I already had very positive feelings and beliefs about a place, contact with people has always allowed me to gain a deeper and more meaningful perspective than I have been able to gain from, school, books, newspapers, television, movies, and the internet. As a teacher, I hope to bring this perspective to my students as well.

I am so truly impressed to witness the commitment of the people of Onoe-machi and the Mt. Ararat Community to the homestay program. I am proud to be able to participate in the process of extending the "global family" halfway around the world to include homestay brothers and sisters. It is only one of many efforts around the world to bring people together one at a time. Every new meeting brings us one step away from a world of strangers and one step closer to a world of friends.