Malia in Oahu

Update 11/28/12: A few photos of our bon voyage Malia staff lunch are now posted on Facebook.

“If you come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” —Lilla Watson

In 1991 as a graduate student of International Relations, I signed up for a Global Exchange Reality Tour to Cuba. I wanted to learn about the impacts of the U.S. embargo on Cuba and understand what the current socioeconomic realities of the Special Period were on the nation. That trip dramatically expanded my understanding of the power of travel.

While I had backpacked to over 30 countries before that Reality Tour, I had never experienced that type of life sharing journey before. I engaged with grandparents, doctors, teachers, artists, musicians and politicians. In effect Reality Tours changed my life.  I experienced connection and insights, and returned to the United States committed to advocate for sane U.S. foreign policy. Once home, I promptly cut out and placed Lilla’s quote (see above) on my fridge. Little did I know that six years later I’d start working at Global Exchange, where Lilla’s quote found a new home on the Global Exchange office wall.

Visiting Art and Hope in Cuba, with Ethical Traveler

Today it is my bittersweet honor to announce that after almost 16 vibrant years I am transitioning out of Reality Tours. Being the Director has been a true vocation. I’ve had the unique opportunity to combine my skills as an educator, social justice activist and alternative travel business woman to build up Reality Tours’ travel destinations, themes and reach.

Looking back I sit and smile thinking of all the talented, opinionated and solidarity minded people that ebbed and flowed through the Reality Tours department in San Francisco. And I think of the everyday heroes in the U.S. and all around the world whose  generosity of spirit welcomed us, collaborated with us and compelled us to meet them as brothers and sisters. We learned about their struggles, successes and aspirations which inspired us to seek changes in U.S. foreign and economic policies.

Princeton University in Mostar, Bosnia, 2012

I know the model of socially responsible travel to educate and inspire advocacy works. In fact, I could fill volumes based on my personal experiences and those often brilliant, joyful and incredibly painful moments of learning.

From the jungles of the Amazon and the struggle of the Sarayuku nation, to the healing and rehabilitation efforts in IDP camps of Northern Uganda; from facilitating thousands through migration in Havana and sharing the incredible tenacity of spirit of Cuban’s through the “fruits” of their Revolution and in their models of sustainability post “peak oil” to learning about how poachers become conservationists in Tanzania; from the smiles and solemn survival stories of children saved from the sex tourism industry in Cambodia, Nepal, Peru & Thailand to the important organizing efforts of elders training the next generation of leaders in Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam… I leave Reality Tours personally and professionally enriched with memories and experiences, and breathtaking vistas.

Malia with Yury, Ecuador Reality Tours program officer

To each of the program officers who so diligently work to take care of every creature comfort, airport transit, hotel reservation, and days and days of program confirmations, thank you for your solidarity!  It is such necessary work, yet it is painstaking and not so glamorous. When Reality Tours runs a 100 departures a year and 98 go off perfectly, nobody knows how much work it takes to make that happen! You are all stars.

Reality Tours would not exist without our members and supporters. Sometimes I’ve called you strangers, then associates and later friends, collaborators, teachers and alumni. I’ve shared some of my deepest human connections beside you, and cultivated some of my closest friendships.

Some of you “serial trippers” know I will miss traveling with you! Again, I could write volumes on what I have seen as humans blossom, when we disconnect from the phones, computers and to-do lists and when we truly spend time to talk, share and push our comfort zones to be and to grow. How many times have I lead a group when each person typically required 1-2 feet around them to have their “zone” of comfort, only by the end of a tour to see everyone touching arms and hugging their new friends good-bye? There are so many surprising rewards on a group travel experience.

Suffolk Univeristy group visiting an orphanage in Busia, Uganda

For those of you I giggled with trying to find a bathroom to wash my fingers after blue ink was all over my face in Tehran, or scrambled to find  “relief” in the fields of Nagpur, India or tried out bartering in crafts markets in Amman knowing but a few words in Arabic, I thank you. To those I cried with, flooded by the power of the human spirit hiking through the Cu Chi and the Sarajevo tunnels; trying to get through check points from the Occupied Territories in Palestine into Israel; and being permeated by the horrific human costs of war in the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and in Pyong Yang, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg… I thank you. To those I just held hands with as we heard the testimonies of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and walking through the Killing Fields, I thank you. And, for those that I dragged out to teach salsa dancing to over and over, ya tu sabes, gracias.

Kevin and Reede being “Good Sports” as my sons dress up

Words cannot express my deepest appreciation to the Global Exchange founders Kevin Danaher, Kirsten Moller and Medea Benjamin to whom I  have been so blessed to work with. They each are hard working visionaries and phenomenal human beings, yet they are also friends, babysitters and cuddlers, and mentors. How I love and admire each of you!

Global Exchange has been a family to me. To all the members and staff, and especially to those that serve and have served on the Board of Directors, you are brothers and sisters and I thank you for your commitment to make this world a better place. Because of your tenacity and persistence, I know “another world is possible”.  I am who I am because of my years at Global Exchange, and I  look forward to moving forward pa’lante and continuing to using my life in service to humanity and to the planet, because its liberation is bound up with mine!

With Aloha,
Malia Everette

Sergio Ciancaglini de La Vaca

Today we continue an interview with Sergio Ciancaglini, from La Vaca cooperative.  For the past decade Global Exchange Reality Tours have included La Vaca on our rich educational itineraries. Learn about the work and mission of La Vaca during this interview conducted by our summer assistant Kathleen Reynolds.

Kathleen: What has been your experience with groups that have come from Global Exchange?

Sergio: My experience with the people who have come has been very exciting. I noted that there had been very good communication because Delia Marx was always there doing very good translation. This allowed me to explain things, that in English I could not. The experience has been very good. There have been many people with an attitude that is very interested in living new experiences and I think these experiences are very beautiful.

Group members enjoying the Iguazu Falls

In terms of improving the experiences, I think in these places and with these people, having these types of encounters provide a person with the key to understanding this very important phenomenon. It is like when you go to a museum and see a piece of fabric that has a particular color, but you don’t know it until you see it and read the explanations. You come to better understand what you are seeing and see the value in something as if it were new. These experiences are new and original experiences and that’s why the people of Global Exchange come. The travelers were interested in these types of experiences that we try to replicate as journalists. They are new, original experiences from the point of view of human rights, the problem with the environment, the problem with production, but also from the point of citizenship and democracy. For me these new expressions that are portals to the future. Where citizens assemble and meet and discuss how they as citizens can preserve the environment; to discuss their plan of action so that the mining or petroleum companies don’t bombard the mountains, so that they don’t cut down the forests, to defend their life – this is democracy in a different way. No longer is it democracy like the one we know as a representative system, but rather, people taking on the responsibility of their own destiny and peacefully so. At the same time, they are intervening to be heard, but also taking into account how they are expressing themselves in a concrete place where the things are happening. For me, this is a new phenomenon. Twenty years ago, Mr. Francis Fukuyama said, that, ‘we are in the end of history’ and today we are seeing we aren’t. History continues with the possibility to democratize democracy.

Visiting a School in Buenos Aires

After the economic recession happened here in the United Sates, social movements have been forming and people are mobilizing and coming together to reform society, to create a new system.

Kathleen: After the crisis happened in Argentina and people mobilized together to create a new system of work like the workers taking over the factories, what recommendations could you give the people here in the US to mobilize and promote real democracy from a grass roots level?

Sergio: Yes, we just published the latest version of the MU.  Claudia Acuña, is a member here in the cooperative and did a great report in the latest version MU, and she was in New York talking on exactly this topic you’re talking about. This new movement of people in the streets, the problems with people getting evicted from their homes…the report will talk about this. It is in the current edition of MU magazine.

Kathleen: In the line of work in defending human rights, how can International Solidarity groups support the social movements of Argentina and South America?

Sergio: I think that these movements or experiences that happen with La Vaca itself are experiences that have already existed for many years and are going to continue existing. There are people who do their work looking for resources, looking for money. We do what we do, because we love our work and it gives us much pleasure to do it. In terms of determining what help that could be utilized for the movements in terms of resources, etc,… it is always important that this be determined with the greater aim that the movements continue doing what they are doing. I want to tell you this, for example, I know there are many international campaigns on different topics. It seems like there is a lot of money floating around in foundations and different institutions to promote issues. In our case, we are going to continue working on the topics of the environment, human rights, citizenship, communication, freedom and equality. They are topics that to us are central for the present and future. Those who want to help us and/or support these types of processes can always help us, but at the same time understanding that the most important is that these projects and productions continue maintaining autonomy of work and diffusion.

As I am very old, I realize that we are in the presence of a birth of, it seems to me, a new type of paradigm of social intervention, of political intervention. It is a new paradigm of thinking and new paradigms of action. It is exciting to be seeing how this exists and it is very important that it be able to flourish and I would say grow. As I said before, it is my intuition that we are being shown the paths of what is to come in the future.

For us, these experiences, this moment are very beautiful. It is an opportunity to always feel that what one is doing is having impact and is creating networks of new concepts for thinking about situations in our world. For us, our door will always be open for you.
Thank you Sergio for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing La Vaca and welcoming our Reality Tours delegates to La Vaca and Argentina!  Next week we will delve further into the power of those exchanges.

TAKE ACTION!
Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip next March  and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.

Sergio Ciancaglini de La Vaca

Today we feature an interview with Sergio Ciancaglini, from La Vaca cooperative.  For the past decade Global Exchange Reality Tours have included La Vaca on our rich educational itineraries. Learn about the work and mission of La Vaca in this two part interview series conducted by our summer assistant Kathleen Reynolds.

Kathleen: Perhaps we can begin with a brief history of how La Vaca began and your work with La Vaca?

Sergio: La Vaca is a work cooperative that was born in the year 2001, which was a time of much crisis in Argentina where money disappeared and there were lots of social movements that had to take responsibility of their own life. They had to take on the responsibility to invent work and survival. In this year 2001, is when the La Vaca began as an information agency through Internet – it was one the first of its kind in Argentina that tried to reflect this new universe of actions we saw in large quantities of social experiences. From that moment, for example, we published on the Internet our reporting, our articles and later we began to work on books.

Our first book was, Sin Patron.  Sin Patron is about the recuperated factories in Argentina and it is available in the US. We presented it in Counter Union in New York with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. It is book that is written originally in Castellano Spanish by us, but later more versions were printed in English in the US, Italian and later in Portuguese in Brazil. We then wrote seven more books and the latest one is Argentina Originara. It is a book about native peoples of Argentina. With the passing of time, we started a newspaper, a monthly magazine called MU, which is a magazine published every month that we started five and half years ago. Out of the roots of the work we do, each piece of work gives us a new idea. From the work we had been doing, it occurred to us to do a radio program. You can listen to it via Internet at www.lavaca.org. It is a radio program that is broadcasted on 109 radios throughout Argentina. It is broadcasted through all university, community and local radio stations throughout the country.

It is a program created as an alternative form of social media and it is important to say that like many other commercial radio stations, this radio program also reaches all areas of the country. We do training courses for department chairs universities and high schools on social autonomy and we have a cultural center that is also a bar called MU Punto Encuentro Buenos Aires where there are conferences and sell leading independent editorial books. Here in Argentina, we drink el mate, our typical drink. Here it is made with herbs from cooperatives that are not sold in traditional supermarkets. The entire project of La Vaca is work of communication, of culture, of cooperativism and social economics.

Kathleen: What is the work you do in the cooperative and how did you begin to work with La Vaca?

Sergio: I have been a journalist for many years. I have always worked on the topics of human rights. For example, I covered the trials on the military junta in 1985, which was the first time in the democracy it was possible to try people who had raped, tortured and killed during the dictatorship. I have always worked with the most important media in Argentina for example, the newspaper Diaro Clarín, the newspaper la Razón and the newspaper Página Doce,… I worked as editor and reactor. In the year 2001, the experience of La Vaca began with all the people who were around me and so I joined. Now I work writing many articles of the monthly MU magazine. At the same time, I run the radio program that is broadcasted on 109 radios around the country and I am the President of the cooperative.

Thank you Sergio for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing La Vaca and welcoming our Reality Tours delegates to La Vaca and  Argentina!  Next week we will delve further into the power of those exchanges.

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.

Aung San Suu Kyi is now free, over 6,000 political prisoners have been released, and sociopolitical change is slowly engaging the nation.

Community organizations and businesses are encouraging travelers to support the democracy movement and the national economy now that the travel boycott has ended.

Finally Reality Tours can travel to Burma in good conscience and engage with people as citizen diplomats. We hope you will consider joining us in 2013.

Some of what you’ll experience on a Reality Tour trip to Burma:

• Journey to important historical and cultural sites (Shwedagon Pagoda, the pagodas of Pagan, the ancient cities around Mandalay, U Bein Bridge, etc.).
• Dialogue with opposition leaders and former political prisoners, human rights advocates and members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy.
• Engage with artists, craftspeople, farmers and educators to hear their hopes for the future.  Our local guides will offer unprecedented access to local people and groups.
• Explore how Burma will face a burgeoning tourism industry, and question who will reap the benefits of a vibrant tourist industry.

Ethical tourism can offer a much needed boost to Burma’s economy while contributing to community development. We will explore this issue by partnering with The Ethical Traveler on this trip, and one of its representatives will help facilitate these important relationship building tours.

Hope to experience Burma with you!

We hope you are able to join us on our first year of building people to people ties in Burma. A trip-of-a-lifetime just waiting to happen.

Delia and Delegates, 2003

In the second of a 2-part series, Reality Tours Argentina program officer Delia Marx shares with us in an interview conducted by our intern Kathleen Reynolds, her impressions on the enriching impacts of educational exchange. You can read Part 1 here.

 
Kathleen: Looking back, what inspired you to facilitate Reality Tours?

Delia: People are so willing to share, obviously their successes but also their struggles. The little things that are going on and there are many of them. After that first experience I was totally hooked. That was when I decided to do it as soon and as often as possible and I did!

Kathleen: If you were to highlight a particular moment as a RT Leader what would that be?

Delia: I think people worry about having different views on things. Somehow I pride myself on not telling people what’s going on. I’m just an intermediate. I’m just a translator. We go straight to the source. We talk to people. I think that the experience is very transformational. I don’t give my point of view, aside from the fact that I create the program. I select what we are doing based on what we can learn.

I remember one comment that I was really struck by. It was with an assembly organization that makes decisions by consensus, so you have to get everybody on board before you go ahead with anything.  A man said to me, yes it was a long process, people were forever discussing and never coming to an agreement. It took a long time to trust one another but once there was trust, everything went much more smoothly.

“Haciendo Caras” at a Community Arts Project, 2003

One of the highlights of our tours is a visit with the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, grandparents who are still looking for their ‘disappeared’ grandchildren. There are several stories of success in finding these children whose identities were stolen. Can you imagine? These children sometimes were ‘adopted’ by the torturers of their parents! The case of the Abuelas was instrumental in the successful research for identification of blood relationship with a missing generation in between. Normally you can establish fatherhood of a child through blood analysis, but here the parents were missing and the research needed to be done to ascertain relationship through the blood of the grandparents instead. Now the Abuelas are dying. They are mostly in their 80′s but they created a blood bank for the future! One ‘Abuela’ that has recovered her grandson fairly recently said: “I got a new grandson, only that he is 30 years old!”

Kathleen:  What does make the difference, why do people choose to travel to Argentina with Global Exchange Reality Tours?

The Beautiful Iguazu Falls

Delia: First of all a big portion of the cost of a Reality Tour program is airfare. Some people take advantage of being there already and they combine some other tour agenda in Argentina of which there are many. So keep in mind that you can stay a few days before or after the tour and visit the scenic parts of Argentina, we could go on and on about that but the portion of the Reality Tour is what as the name says “Reality”. The cost of the tour also includes contributions to the organizations we visit. This enhances the sense of participation on the part of the travelers and supports the work the organizations are doing. Your vacation dollars are working for a good cause. What brings you closer to the people is the direct connection to people. You are there sitting with them and you’re listening. Listening to the stories and listening to their experience and most fortunately you’re learning from them.

We are now witness to the global economic crisis in the United States and in Europe and in many other places in the world, something that may be new to many of us. Argentineans found many of their solutions, many of their ways out. People come to the understanding that there are alternatives that can be implemented here and now without waiting for somebody else to come and rescue us. Finding that in your community, in your peers with the people that surround you is very enriching.

Thank you Delia for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing and facilitating our Reality Tours to Argentina.

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and experience Argentina first-hand.

Delia and Delegates in Argentina

In the first of a two part series, Delia shares with us in an interview conducted by our intern Kathleen Reynolds, the significance of the 2001 financial crisis and what lessons it provides for us today.

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Kathleen: Can you explain the significance of the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina?  Grassroots worker-run cooperatives radically changed the debate. How did they shift the focus from the cost of labor to the cost of owners?

Recuperated Factories, “of the People”, 2003

Delia: Well I’m sure you are aware that in the end of 2001 the whole economy in Argentina collapsed. It was a true collapse in the sense that nothing was working. There was literally no more money. There was no pay, there were only empty promises. Different provinces in Argentina which are like states here (in the U.S.) started to make their own currency. There was no credit for individuals or for businesses.

Business works on credit. There was no credit to be had. Nothing. The banks literally closed. These are banks like Citibank, Bank of Boston… Supposedly they all had the backing of the United States, not so. When the time came they simply closed and that was devastating for everybody. It was impossible to do anything so people took to the streets!

At that point there was a lot of political turmoil. I think there were four central governments that wanted to default. It was a total collapse. People could not even withdraw their own money from the bank because the banks were all closed. Some people were banging literally with hammers, banging on the closed doors of the banks. Everybody took to the streets. People were trying to get anything that they could get their hands on to make noise, pots and pans, banging with their hands, just making noise and saying the words everybody needs to go!  Everybody meant everybody politically.

Exchanging with Community Organizations

When people realized that their place of work wouldn’t even give them the promise of payment they began to rise up. Bankruptcy was widespread. Workers recognized that they were not going to be able to do anything to feed their families. That’s when they began to realize that they needed to find a solution for themselves.

The solution did not depend on the big picture, not on the politicians, the rules, the laws or the economic situation. It was a local issue. It was the smaller community that needed to come together. We had the movements and the assemblies, which were simply people that were meeting on the street corner trying to figure out how to help one another in the smallest sense of the neighborhood. They were called neighborhood assemblies and some of them organized broader markets in the work place.

Workers realized that they were still there, the machinery was still there, only the bosses were missing because they had declared bankruptcy. They were gone. So people decided to keep the shop open. And that’s when they started to do this movement that was later called recuperated factories, recuperated from bankruptcy.  But that wasn’t so easy because of the police of course. People were literally occupying their workplaces. The word “occupy” now has a different meaning.

In Argentina, people were simply saying ok we’re going to stay. We are not going to allow our bosses to take away the machinery to sell it out. We are going to keep and protect the machinery as well as the work place and we are going to keep it going. Of course at first they realized, wait a moment we don’t know anything about administration because the administration was in the hands of the bosses. That’s when the whole society somehow found a way to come together. Students from the university of economics came around and taught the workers how to keep the books and they realized that they could run this themselves. There’s no magic in management. We can manage ourselves. We can do it. And that’s when they decided, we can keep on going, and we really don’t need the bosses.

Cooperative Factory-Struggle, Work and Culture

The big advantage was that suddenly all of  the surplus that usually went to pay the higher salaries of the management was brought back into the factories as actual production. Now I think there are about 300 occupied factories still functioning.

Factory is not the proper word. It’s workplaces. (There are many different types of businesses;) cooperative hotels, clinics, and alll kinds of factories. For instance, one of them is a hotel where we stay with Reality Tours. We had the firsthand experience of seeing how it’s run. It’s a big hotel in the middle of town. Of course there was no guarantee but it all came together in a very positive way.

Some (groups) like La Vacca, the journalism cooperative that we work with, started to regroup. They began to form networks so that cooperatives could organize and buy from one another. One of the things I find very interesting is going back to visit some of these places, I can see the progress. It’s incredible to see how things evolved. In some instances people wanted to maintain a true horizontal management or decision-making process. Decisions are made by consensus. Other people decided that it was too time consuming and they selected representatives to form a commission. The commission would make day-to-day decisions, consulting only now and then with the full assembly.

They all have pros and cons. It’s very interesting to talk with different people about their experiences. For instance people who organized committees said that it was amazing how very soon afterwards there were marked differences.

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Thank you Delia for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing and facilitating our Reality Tours to Argentina! 

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.

In the second of a two part series about Global Exchange’s history in Ireland, our co-founder, Kevin Danaher shares the inspiration behind our delegations during an interview with Reality Tours intern Kathleen Reynolds.

Kathleen: What were your most memorable events on a Reality Tour to Northern Ireland?

Kevin: There were a lot of them… So we go in this one place it was actually called the Felons and to be a member of this club you have to have been a convicted felon, so you think whoa this is a bunch of tough guys. So we walk in there are a few guys over at the bar they look at us and they wave at me they call me over they say you’ve got the head of a Celt are you Irish I said my father was born and raised in county Limerick. For four hours these guys just regaled us with stories about this and that. These were just two working class guys but their knowledge of Irish history was incredible… if you put them up against normal Americans knowing American history it would be no contest. You could see the political element of it because so much had been taken away from them that at least the history was something they could hold onto and feel fervent about. It is almost like the way some guys follow football teams, or soccer teams, or baseball teams and they know all the details. That’s the way these guys were with history.

Kevin Danaher, Co-Founder of Global Exchange

We kept meeting these kind of people over and over again you know just regular people.  It resonated with me because my father was that kind of guy.  He was functionally illiterate he had no schooling to speak of, was too poor had to work and yet he was probably the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He was a good man,  just the kind of person who was a friend. If you need a shirt he’ll take his off. That’s pretty easy to do. Everybody could do that if they wanted to, if they set their mind to it. Irish are really good role models and we engage good decent working class people.  These are the kind of people based interactions that make up my favorite memories.

Kathleen: What about pressing issues in Ireland today?

Kevin: The reunification of Ireland is a big deal because you’ve got centuries of separation and barriers. The Irish free state invested a lot of money in its’ education system. It created a very well educated work force that was also a low wage work force so it attracted a lot of transnational corporations, credit card processing the Intel computer type companies… you had this well trained workforce that would still work for low wages and it was part of the EC. They used to call Ireland the Celtic Tiger because the economy was growing like crazy in the early 2000’s. The main issues that I stress people examine now are economic independence and local green economy.

With this 2008 crash a lot of people got screwed. Now there are a lot of young Irish people who are leaving. They’ve got good education and skills but they can’t get jobs in their country. Look you can get your political independence if you don’t get your economic dependence and control your economy the political independence doesn’t mean much. Boom and Bust is the nature of Capitalism it’s a cyclical system.

Thanks to Kevin and Kathleen for sharing a bit or the story behind Reality Tours to Northern Ireland.  Many of our delegations were set up to examine the history of colonialism, peace and conflict resolution, economic development and coincided with the West Belfast Arts Festival.  They continue today. If you are interested in an alternative journey to Ireland, check out last weeks Blog What Inspired Reality Tours to Ireland and a past participant’s story To Belfast and Back with Global Exchange.
TAKE ACTION! Learn how to customize your own Reality Tour trip to Ireland today.

Kevin Danaher, Co-Founder of Global Exchange

In the first of a two part series about Global Exchange’s history in Ireland, our co-founder, Kevin Danaher shares the inspiration behind our delegations during an interview with Reality Tours intern Kathleen Reynolds.

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Kathleen: What inspired the Reality Tours delegation to Ireland?

Kevin:  My father was born and raised in South West Ireland, county Limerick, so I had a very personal interest in getting trips to Ireland started. We focused on Northern Ireland because of the politics at the time. When people see a little town in Northern Ireland where the British military base is constructed in such a way that it breaks the architectural unity of the town square… They built the military base purposely so that the corner of the base intrudes and breaks the architectural unity of the town square. When you’re walking on the sidewalk you have to step out in the street to get around the corner of the military base. It was a way of saying structurally, we’re in your house you can’t do anything about it and we’re going to be here forever, look how permanent this structure is. Well, as a matter of fact that military base is gone now and the British are leaving Northern Ireland. That’s the end of an eight hundred year process. The first Norman Invasion from England was 1169. The Irish put up a good fight.  They kept out the Roman armies, which is an amazing achievement because they were such crazy fighters but the British subdued them.

If you look at populations, the only country I know of that has half the population today that it had 150 years ago is Ireland.  Most people when asked that question respond- Ethiopia, Rwanda whatever, no it’s Ireland! So many people died or were chased away, like my father at the age of 21. He was the only one (in my family) who had the opportunity. An aunt offered to take him to the US and he jumped at the opportunity, but he cried every day of his adult life. He was homesick for Ireland. He didn’t really want to leave which is true of most immigrants. People don’t leave out of desire to go see the bright lights of LA. It’s family necessity. It’s to try to earn an income and send money back. In the 1930’s my father was making 30 dollars a week and he sent 5 dollars of that back to Ireland. It really made the difference for that family. It helped the children to survive. I had a real personal empathy for what had gone on in Ireland. Ireland is a country with people who took English, the colonizers language and made it into an articulate tool of resistance. Some of the greatest writers in English happen to be Irish. Very fun loving people, it’s easy to make friends. Another thing too, there’s a very deep sense of history. Everything else was taken away from them but they held onto their history. There’s a quote from someone… after one of the rebellions in the 1800s he said “you fools you’ve left us our Fenian dead but as long as we hold these graves Ireland un-free will never be at rest.” That sense of standing on the shoulders of those who gave up their lives in the struggle. After 800 years the British are leaving and Ireland will eventually be unified.

Kathleen: Bobby Sands died in the Maze prison of Northern Ireland some 31 years ago. Can you explain the significance of Bobby Sands’ legacy?

Kevin: They used to call it going on the blanket. Political prisoners took off their clothes stopped eating and just wrapped themselves up in a blanket. People were willing to give up their lives consciously by starving themselves to death and it would draw these massive support movements to support people like Bobby Sands. People like Bobby Sands understood that it’s the mass mobilizations, mass movements that make revolutions, it’s not individual leaders or genius, it’s large numbers of people. In order to get them motivated sometimes leaders have to take arrows in their back.

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Since 1997 Global Exchange has offered departures to Northern Ireland. Many of our delegations were set up to examine the history of colonialism, peace and conflict resolution, economic development and coincided with the West Belfast Arts Festival.  They continue today. If you are interested in an alternative journey to Ireland, check out a past participant’s story To Belfast and Back with Global Exchange.

TAKE ACTION! Learn how to customize your own Reality Tour trip to Ireland today.

Many of our Reality Tours Costa Rica alumni will remember the brilliant educator and activist, Marta Sanchez.  Marta has organized and facilitated our Global Exchange open and customized groups since 2005. Today Marta shares her story with us.  Learn how she became part of our Global Exchange family!

I got involved with Global Exchange Reality Tours after my enrollment in the Palestine-Israel delegation  about 10 years ago.  That intense experience unveiled to me an excruciatingly painful reality I was short to imagine. Although far from attempting a comparison, this experience turned on many lights in my understanding concerning the reality of my own country and the “convenient blindness” we people use to suffer from.

By that time, Costa Rica was in the middle of a historical process: the eventual signing up of the  Central American Free Trade Agreement.  Like most of the population, I was unaware of  the serious implications of CAFTA against our Social State of Law  which we “Ticos” always took for granted!

Given this historical context, Andrea  my daughter, who happened to be the Central America RT coordinator at GX by that time, organized an RT program for Costa Rica.  I promised her to find someone who could trip lead the first delegation, but my best candidate failed the last minute, and I had to take up. Here began a series of living experiences that taught me a lot about the myths and realities of my own country. As an illustration, the first of these experiences came from a  meeting with Costa Rican former president Rodrigo Carazo. Carazo was a passionate anti-CAFTA fighter and, in his home, the GX delegates and myself received  first-hand information about the uncertain future of  Central American economies if Costa Rica ended up signing the treaty — Costa Rica was the last country in Central America to submit to CAFTA. This meeting was illuminating in unusual ways. For example, the delegates could not believe a politician of such an exceptional moral stature, like Carazo had displayed this special deference towards us by inviting us to his home!

GX delegations now visit Costa Rica from coast to coast. The living experiences our delegates can tell are many and varied, and the resonance of these encounters are still there. One of the tours, for instance, made it possible for a community to count on attractive alternatives for kids and  their mothers  to rescue both even from prostitution. Back home, one of our delegates pulled  the necessary strings to  provide funds, so that ASOMUFAQ, in the Central Pacific, could finish a theater project  and a  restaurant. Today that community has a theater group for kids that now participate in annual national contexts (and Global Exchange delegations can count on a delicious restaurant that serve typical dishes prepared by these women…)

I´m sure the living experiences GX Reality Tours have brought  to me and the many people involved have affected us one way or another. The reality of a tourism-dependent country such as Costa Rica can only be revealed by conscious tourism, and this only justifies  the meaning of this program.  Now I only organize the itineraries on a pro bonus basis but, from the comments by the delegates, I can say that the Mission and Vision of Global Exchange Reality Tours  is amply accomplished in Costa Rica.

Interested in meeting Marta and traveling beyond the normal ecotourist path in Costa Rica this year?  Join us and explore Ecotourism and Sustainability on the Northern Pacific Coast in November.

Thank you to Reality Tours staff alumni Andrea Valverde for sharing our mission and for introducing us to your mom. We have been blessed to have her host our members.

Special Thanks to our Reality Tours intern Kathleen Reynolds for conducting this interview.

Kevin Danaher, Co-Founder of Global Exchange

Have you ever wondered where that first Reality Tour visited? Reality Tours associate Kathleen Reynolds had the opportunity to ask Global Exchange Co-founder Kevin Danaher to find out:

Kathleen: Where was the very first Reality Tour?

Kevin: Actually it was to Mozambique and Zimbabwe. I had scored some funding for Africa educational work. With a friend of mine from Chicago, Prexy Nesbitt, we took a group of about 12 to 15 people.

There was a shooting war going on in Mozambique at the time involving guerilla army Ranamo (Mozambican National Resistance), a total terrorist organization. We didn’t really know what we were doing but we got everyone through.

There was one time in particular when we left Zimbabwe. Our bus was not able to leave because I didn’t have the right export papers. We got a ride from a nun with a pickup truck who did two shuttles to take us all into Mozambique.

The next day we had to arrange for a dump truck, different vehicles to carry everyone. At one point we were going to a refugee camp. On the way everybody was all excited and there was all this chatter going on. After being there, seeing little babies dying right in front of their eyes I remember very distinctly the ride back was absolutely silent.

You could see everybody was deep inside themselves, either crying or trying to wrap their hearts and brains around what they had experienced.

I think that that is what real education is about. It’s not just frontal lobes it’s about what’s in your chest and how you feel empathy for other people even if they are on the other side of the planet.

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Decades later we know the transformational power of travel continues. We have grown from those first few annual Reality Tours to over one hundred planned departures in 2012.

While our planning and logistics have been refined (a lot!) over the years, our passion and spirit of truly connecting “people to people” has remained the same. If you’re looking to expand your heart and mind, consider joining us on a Reality Tour.

TAKE ACTION!

Where have you longed to travel? Below are a few of our upcoming Reality Tours trips with spots still open. If you’re interested in a destination not listed below, check out our complete list of 2012/2013 Reality Tours on our website, or consider a Customized Tour!

Upcoming Reality Tours–Spots Open:

• Cuba: Public Education – A Legacy of Literacy and Learning
• July 6, 2012 – July 15, 2012
• Iran: Ancient Civilizations and Contemporary Culture
• September 22, 2012 – October 6, 2012
• North Korea: Beyond the Bamboo Curtain
• September 7, 2012 – September 15, 2012
• India: Rights of Nature with Dr. Vandana Shiva
• November 1, 2012 – November 11, 2012
• Ecuador: New Year’s on the Equator
• December 27, 2012 – January 4, 2013

Here are some easy ways to find the trip that’s right for you! Search for your dream trip…

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