Lucy Hoffman `12

By: Lucy Hoffman `12

Brazil is one of the fastest growing, as well as rapidly urbanizing and economically booming nations in the developing world.  However, despite the astounding developments Brazil has made in recent decades, this growth has not been accompanied by an increasingly equal distribution of educational opportunity. The inequities of student achievement based on socioeconomic status are staggering.  A significant share of the urban population now live in favelas, shantytowns that border Brazilian cities, where the educational opportunities are scarce due to a variety of social, economic, and cultural factors. Twenty percent of Rio’s population live in favelas, although favela settlements are technically illegal and thus the more than one million people that live there are not actually citizens. As a result, favela residents are denied many opportunities that are intrinsic for wealthier families. Student achievement in favelas has been the center of my research, and I have been studying the disparities in enrollment (years of schooling) and attainment (how students do in school) between students from favelas versus students from wealthier families.

I landed on this topic as the focus of my Global Thesis research because after reading Raising Student Learning in Latin America, a World Bank analysis on the education systems in Latin American countries, I was struck by how far behind Brazil was in terms of scores on standardized tests.  Every country has their eyes on Brazil, as its economy continues to grow and it rises to becoming a dominant world power. I didn’t understand, then, how Brazil was enjoying so much economic and political growth when nearly 50% of students that took an international standardized test didn’t score high enough to be qualified as literate.  These overarching questions have guided my research: what is the current condition of educational inequity in Rio de Janeiro and what are the causes? To what extent to students from favelas have access to high quality education, and what can the government do to increase that access?

I have really enjoyed this experience so far and I’ve become really passionate about my topic. Brazil has shown they have endless promise to be a global power, but they risk not reaching their full potential by failing to provide high quality education regardless of socioeconomic background.

Taylor Schendel `12

By: Taylor Schendel `12

In 1999, boats were left ‘high and dry in the mud’ as residents downstream of the Hongze Lake witnessed ‘the ghostly walls of Sizhou, a city submerged by floods some 300 years ago, emerge into the light’.  The Huai River was drying up, and it would continue to do the same in 2000.  It is hard to imagine this happening in some parts of the world, since most of the time water just pours out from the twist of a tap. On top of that, every coastline is surrounded by water as far as the eye can see.  In fact, 95.5% of the world’s water is salty, leaving only a mere 2.5% to be fresh.  Unfortunately, 70% of this freshwater is trapped in snow and ice.  Under these circumstances, water scarcity now affects more than two fifths of the people on Earth.

These are just a few of the statistics that provoked me to focus my Global Thesis on water.  Ever since my sophomore year Builders Beyond Borders trip to Peru, and my Human Ecology research project at The Island School, I have had an interest in this issue.  I began to understand that this was something that has already begun to cause conflicts across the world, and will continue to become one of the biggest issues that we face in the next 20 years.

It wasn’t very hard to narrow my topic down to Southeast Asia, and even further, to China.  With the Tibetan Plateau as the third largest freshwater depository in the world, it seemed to be overflowing with resources.  However, somehow, one in five Asians is still left without access to safe drinking water.  Controlled by China, but surrounded by countries like Nepal, India, Burma, and Thailand, the Tibetan Plateau and its intricate system of rivers and mountains, is the main source of water for all of Southeast Asia. In my opinion, this makes it one of the most interesting and unique places in the world to study water conflict on the environmental, political, economical, cultural, and social levels.

With so many different factors and dimensions involved in just my research and analysis of this problem, I am still trying to develop my possible solutions.  Recently, I, along with some of the other global thesis and 20/20 students had the chance to hear Steven Solomon, the author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, speak at a World Affairs Forum.  When I asked him how he would propose to solve the issue of some of China’s downstream neighbors in Thailand and Burma not receiving adequate water resources, he replied, “I wish I could say I have an answer, but I don’t”.  It was definitely disheartening to hear an expert on my topic admit that he was just as dumbfounded as me, but I’m hoping that one way or another, I’ll be able to come to some conclusions by April.

By: Jason Cummings

As many in the community will already know, GFA has set aside April 24, 2012 for our first annual World Perspectives Symposium, an opportunity for the entire community to step back from our daily activities and engage with a series of important global issues. For Middle  and Upper School students, the day will be a celebration of the student research including formal presentations and seminar-style discussions with our fourteen Global Thesis students. In addition, students have the opportunity to hear from our Challenge 20/20 students, three seniors who have spent the year studying geopolitics and water allocation in the Nile River valley.  Furthermore, as our Foundations of World History and Biology students (mostly 9th graders) will be in the midst of an interdisciplinary comparative study of the bubonic plague and the AIDS/HIV epidemic, those students will have the opportunity to interact with a global health professional  who is working to combat AIDS/HIV.    Lower School students will take the opportunity to learn more about the young people  that they have been sponsoring through Save the Children.  Lower School students are helping to provide for one child in Mali and nearer to home a child in a difficult situation in Kentucky. This will prove an excellent avenue for learning about the rights of children both in this country and around the world.

First thing in the morning, however, the entire community will have the benefit of hearing from Mr. Michael Singh, the managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.  Additionally, Mr. Singh served as a special assistant to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.  Mr. Singh’s writings have appeared in many prominent publications including The Economist and Foreign Policy on whose feature blog “Shadow Government” he is a frequent contributor.  We look forward to hearing him address the entire GFA community on April 24, 2012 at 8am and to having our International Relations students interact with him later that day in a small-group setting.

Both Mr. Singh’s presentation and our students’ formal presentations will be open to the public as space permits.  A couple of short updates about our students’ Global Thesis project  are being published each week on this blog. Click here to read the Global Thesis updates that we have posted thus far. 

More information on how to RSVP to this event will be available on this blog in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

Will Pavlis `12

By: Will Pavlis `12

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the embargo against Cuba, making it the longest and most strict in modern history.  The economic embargo restricts Cuba’s contact and trade with the outside world.  The Untied States, with strong support from the Cuban-American population, claim the embargo is in place to restore democracy and aid the Cuban people.  However, after fifty years, the embargo has caused little political change in the island.  Rather, it has caused unneeded suffering to the citizens of the island nation.
Cuba is known for its impressive dedication to public health.  Since the communist revolution in 1959, their constitution has promised to provide free and accessible health care to all their citizens.  Cuba has made impressive strides to keep this promise; however, promises are rising.  The embargo leaves the island nation without access to modern and reasonably priced medical products.  The international community, including the United Nations, has understood these malicious effects and subsequently condemned the embargo since it began.  Fifty years have passed, and the embargo has caused little political change on the island.  If the United States was to turn to alternative foreign policy strategies with Cuba, both countries could immensely benefit socially, politically, and economically. While Cuba’s government remains flawed, it is clear now that the embargo is not a fitting foreign policy answer. The time has come for the United States to end the embargo, and completely change the fortunes of Americans and Cubans.

Kate Tomlinson `12

By: Kate Tomlinson 2012

A growing population, increased pollution, and a rise in per capita water consumption have led to a formidable global water crisis.  Countries across the world are struggling to obtain the necessary fresh water for domestic, industrial, and agricultural usage.  The Middle East, however, is especially sensitive to this growing water scarcity.  Already an arid region, the Middle East has been utilizing the full capacity of its water resources for decades.  The Middle East contains 3% of the world’s population but only 1% of the global water resources.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a constant source of tension and instability in the Middle East.  Large issues such as Israeli settlements, access and control over Jerusalem, and permanent borders are frequently discussed as the major obstacles to reaching a sustainable, stable peace treaty.  Water allocation, however, is often overlooked.

Water allocation remains a key obstacle in negotiations for a peace treaty and needs to be addressed.  The Palestinians receive only a fraction of the water that the Israelis consume and the future of their freshwater resources are severely threatened by pollution.  The Palestinians do not even have the necessary water to reach the World Health Organization’s minimum standard for Daily Domestic Water Consumption.  The current allocation structure is simply not sustainable. Although the water crisis in Israel and the Palestinian Territories certainly embodies the complexity, paranoia, and hostility that characterize Israeli-Arab relations, it can be overcome if both sides take a few logical, rational steps.

A large poster showing a group of newly arrived immigrants huddled on the dock of Ellis Island stared down at the rows of people seated in government issue, metal, folding chairs. A security officer sat behind a broken, three-legged desk, handing out numbers to anyone who entered.  It was a bleak room–peeling paintwork, worn linoleum floors, no visible telephones or computers–nothing beyond chairs, and a desk, the very basic requirements for an office, and even those seemed grudgingly given; shades of an Orwellian world, with an overwhelmingly powerful bureaucracy,  and people identified  only as numbers; and this was just to have my fingerprints taken. After 15 years in America, it was the first step of my journey towards United States citizenship.

Several months later I was in a different room. There were the same folding metal chairs, but this room had two televisions, both showing CNN, and two American flags flanking doors on either side of an imposing desk. This was a kind of latter day Ellis Island, and a potent blend of expectation and anxiety hung in the air. The woman in front of me talked quietly to someone who was clearly a lawyer, voicing fears of rejection, of not being admitted into the “brave new world,” the same fears that surly went through the minds of everyone who shuffled through the great hall of Ellis Island.  We were all awaiting our examination-–the final step of the citizenship journey.

Every so often an immigration officer appeared at one of the two doors and called out names whose Chinese, Slavic or Arabic sounds sat awkwardly on the Bostonian tongue. I did wonder if some people actually failed to recognize their names and spent days waiting to be called. There were whispered conversations all around me  – where do you come from? How long have you been here? Do you have family here? Children? We were interested in each other’s stories and journeys to this point, when from across the room a voice announced Janet Hartwell- I jumped up and presented myself to the immigration officer at the door, and as I did so, another woman also answered to the name. What to do? A moment of confusion, panic? My double? However, I was directed one way and she another. I’d love to know what became of the other Janet Hartwell.

So, you’re a teacher, my examiner queried when I entered his room.  You get the hard questions. Who said: “Give me liberty or give me death?” Blind panic struck – Henry V-I blurted out, no, no,  wait, Charles De Gaulle, no, it must be an American, George Washington. No, I don’t know, I practically sobbed, my hopes of citizenship diminishing by the second. That one wasn’t in my book, I whined, referring to the SAT type prep book Everything you need to know to pass the test;100 questions towards citizenship, which I had practically learned by heart.  I did, however, survive and pass the exam, wondering, not for the first time, how knowing who the 15^th president was would make me a better citizen.

Brian Moore, the author, in his last essay “Going Home” wrote,” There are those who choose to leave home, vowing never to return, and those who, forced to leave for economic reasons, remain in thrall to a dream of a land they left behind. And then there are the stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled, vast, varied, and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home.”  I was one of those wanderers; I grew up in England, went to graduate school and taught in Scotland and then lived in Iran, and  Saudi Arabia before coming to live in America.  America to my new eyes was a land of giddying choice,  opportunity,  excitement,  infinite variety, and where ice in drinks was not a luxury but part of daily life. However, for many of the years I had lived in this country, I did not feel that America was my home. I was always happy here in the US, but I never stopped thinking of England as my home, in the fundamental sense of the word.  England is where I come from, what I really understand, the base against which all else is measured. In an ironic way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live in a country where everyone else is not. For over 20 years, overseas and here in America, being English was my defining quality; it was often how I identified and differentiated.

So here I was, well along on the road to becoming an American, finally ready to commit to my adopted country. It had been a relatively easy journey; the fingerprints, endless paper work, long lines, and annoying bureaucracy were nothing compared to the hardships, fears and profound uncertainties experienced by thousands of immigrants who had also left all that was familiar, to undertake the long, difficult journey with no certain knowledge of success at the end.

What finally made me decide to become an American citizen was the feeling of not belonging to either one country or another. I lived in America, but as a resident alien, I had a British passport, but no longer lived there. To belong, one needs to be productive, useful, and to feel that one has a voice in how things are done and how decisions are made, to participate in public affairs, to be an active, engaged citizen, recognizing the importance of his or her personal contribution to the public good. In the tradition of the great philosophers Hobbes and Locke, who were interested in man as a thinking, moral being embedded in his society and reacting to its demands out of his human nature, I wanted to vote, to be a participant in the political system and to exercise the responsibilities that come with citizenship.  The reason I am talking about this now, of course, is because we are in an election year, and I want to stress to all of you the importance of exercising your right to vote, now if you are old enough or when you can. This was one of the fundamental issues of the Arab spring – the right to hold free and open elections where every vote counts and everyone has a vote. It is something we must never take for granted.

The final step in my citizenship odyssey was the swearing in ceremony in Faneuil Hall in Boston. On a snowy day in late January 1999, 397 new citizens were called upon to foreswear allegiance to “foreign potentates” and to take the oath of allegiance to the United States of America. For Patrick Henry- yes, I later learned the real author of the quote, it was an either or scenario – liberty or death, but I have to admit that for a while, I had a profound sense of ambivalence, a strong sense of loss and an equally strong sense of gain. Thankfully, I can admit at this point in the journey, an increasing sense of this is where I belong.

Andrew Costello `12

Poverty is a problem that is often marginalized into absolute terms when, as a rule, it’s an entirely personal experience.  Poverty exists for a slew of different reasons; therefore, it is only right that there be a number of different approaches for alleviating it.  It is for this reason, among many others, that the UN has recently recommended that GDP and other generalized nominal figures be shelved in favor of other, more comprehensive measurements of a country’s prosperity.  For over half a century, the approach to easing poverty in areas of the world, namely Africa, has been in the form of gross economic aid.  This aid, however, is often grossly mishandled by the officials to whom it is given, usually never reaching its targeted goal.  I am focusing on rural poverty, the overlooked and more intense form as compared to urban poverty.  This is the issue that I have set forth to change, looking at Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, using a bottom-up approach to account for a wide range of poverty inducing factors.

More often than not, initiatives to address poverty alleviation have come in the form of top-down measures, a process that has provided little reduction in the equity gap that exists in extremely impoverished nations.  This will be accomplished through a three-step system I’ve devised that I call the “3 R’s.:” Reconstitute, Reconnect, and Reengage.  The idea behind the 3 R’s is that more areas of community life will be addressed.  Through Reconstitution, members of the community are made healthy at a local level using a single clinic with a minimal staff.  Reconnecting brings isolated communities, either geographically or economically, together with their nation through the building of infrastructure, mainly funded by the public sector.  The final stage, Reengagement, sends the community back to work, largely in agriculture.  It is through these comprehensive reforms and adjustments to daily life that the equity gap that we call poverty can be lessened, and poverty, at least in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe can become a curable disease.

Kiera Wood '12

I have spent the last two summers interning at Danbury Hospital’s development fund working on small projects.  My focus has been to reach out to the local community of schools, kids, parents, and patrons to raise money for the new neonatal intensive care unit.  The fundraising that was done at the hospital is the traditional way by which invitations to charity events and galas are sent out through the mail.  I began thinking about ways that fundraising and awareness could be modernized online for instant communications on the issue.

During the summer of 2010 I visited the township of Kayamandi in South Africa.  I was shocked by the lack of sanitation, education, and medical facilities.  On the other hand, I was also shocked by the fact that nearly everyone living in the township had a cell phone, granted not a smart phone, almost every home I visited had a television, and many of the children who attended school had a Facebook account.

I was inspired by these observations and GFA’s World Prospective Program to investigate my interests in the global healthcare crisis through modern technology and social media.  With the help of my advisor, Mrs. Freeland, I have been able to research and discuss the powers and impact of mobile communications and social networking on both high-income and low-income nations.

After reading books such as Shift and Reset by GFA alumnus Brian Reich and The Future of Nonprofits by David Neff and Randal Moss, I have been able to get a clear view into what the future may hold for solutions to the crisis.   I believe the future of health care delivery has shifted into the hands of entrepreneurs and innovators.  For example, innovators are creating strong online communities and support systems for doctors and patients by linking them together by similar ideas or diagnosis.

Like any major project, my global thesis has taken a lot of time and energy. However, I have enjoyed studying and researching a topic that I am very passionate about.  Although it is only the beginning of the second semester, I look forward to wrapping up my project and conclusions and most importantly giving my presentation at the World Perspectives Symposium on April 24.

In total, art students from the USA, UK, Canada and Korea have now created more than 30,000 portraits for kids from 33 countries.

GFA is proud to have our students and faculty participating in such an outstanding program.

“[...] to deliver effective HIV prevention, care, treatment and support to youth worldwide through the medium of football.”

This past December, the GFA community was able to help sponsor the Whizzkids United Health Academy’s annual staff holiday gathering.  We are thrilled to have been able to help honor such a dedicated and hardworking group of young people.  Several GFA Upper School students will travel to South Africa this June along with Mrs. Janet Hartwell in order to work alongside Whizzkids United (See Janet’s blog).  We are looking forward to continuing to develop this relationship as we know that, even though they are half a world  the outstanding work that Marcus and his organization are doing can teach volumes to us all.