America Looks Beyond is the name of a visionary new project jointly funded by the PEW Charitable Trusts and the Gates Foundation. Armed with a budget of over $1 billion a year, this is what they plan to do:
"Starting in 2005, every high school student in America is going to be offered a six-week trip to a third world country. To broaden their horizons. To gain a more intimate understanding of the world. And to fight the global War on Terror in a positive way, through education and first-hand knowledge of how so much of the world struggles to survive." That would be great, if it were real. But, of course, it isn't real. As
Glassdog points out, the site isn't registered to either the Gates Foundation or the PEW Charitable Trusts. It's registered to the media activist group AdBusters. So in other words, the site is a spoof... showing what people could be doing, but aren't.
Comments
I guess it's similar to a camping trip, but you also get a crash course in building animal pens, repairing mud-hut roofs...& other little projects you might help out with if you were going on a mission trip. They also do a sort of psych-help. They show you pictures of what people will look like, so you're not freaked out when you get there...health problems you may encounter...etc.
1) How are they all going to get there? That's a lot of jet fuel making holes in the ozone layer.
2) You might be able to feed them easily if they are flicking through old magazines while lying on bunkbeds in an airconditioned dormitory in somewhere like Gaborone, say, but how welcome do you think hungry mouths, attached to unskilled bodies and with no language skills, are going to be when a big Landcruiser dumps them in a dry village in the back of beyond in Mali? It would certainly teach the kids a lot about the world outside the USA, but I'm not sure it would please the villagers.