America Looks Beyond

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.

Exploration/Travel Websites

Posted on Tue Nov 23, 2004



Comments

Indeed, this is obviously not true, but it should be. It would do a lot more to promote peace, stability, and democracy, and be many, many times cheaper, than the whole U.S. military budget, which is now somewhere around a trillion dollars a year if you include all the hidden costs.
Posted by Big Gary C  on  Tue Nov 23, 2004  at  10:51 AM
There is a camp in Florida where kids can train to live in a 3rd world country. It is mostly used by missionary groups to help train people they will be taking with them for mission trips. You learn to cook food over a fire, go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground, sleep in a tent on the ground, purify water...

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.
Posted by Maegan  on  Tue Nov 23, 2004  at  12:33 PM
I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is a spoof. It seems to me that this is a prod to try to get the PEW Center and Bill "I am the Borg" Gates to actually do this. Not a bad idea, really.
Posted by BugbearSloth  on  Tue Nov 23, 2004  at  06:59 PM
I'm in high school! Sounds like a great idea to me!
Posted by John  on  Tue Nov 23, 2004  at  08:27 PM
If it waws real, I hope the 1 billion budget would be enough. Our copies of George Orwell's "1984" are held together with scotch tape!
Posted by John  on  Tue Nov 23, 2004  at  08:30 PM
while this idea has not yet been accepted by pew charitable trusts or the gates foundation, the idea of the site is to get both foundations to consider the idea. the site encourages you to write to both foundations, as do i. consider it
Posted by Anthony  on  Thu Nov 25, 2004  at  10:03 PM
I thought it was a good idea at first, too, but then it struck me:
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.
Posted by helen  on  Fri Nov 26, 2004  at  07:26 AM
Shame on Adbusters. Why not promote a real peace keeping effort that could then be supported by readers.
Posted by Kymme  on  Wed Aug 23, 2006  at  08:35 PM
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