My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
With good reason, newscasts here in Houston this week have been focussing on the anti-US protests in the Middle East and North Africa. In most cases, the protests have arisen as a reaction to a very amateurish anti-Islam film that was purportedly made earlier this year in California. If the intention was to be provocative, then unfortunately the filmmaker seems to have succeeded, as protests have erupted in nearly 20 countries, most notably in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Libya, resulting in deaths and injuries.
Sadly, the violence has affected not only diplomatic compounds and businesses, but also schools. One of the organizations of which Awty is a member is the AAIE (Association for the Advancement of International Education). Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from the Executive Director of AAIE, Elsa Lamb, informing me that the American Cooperative School of Tunis (in Tunisia) had been burned and plundered by protesters. The e-mail quoted an article from the New York Times saying the following:
“The worst damage was inflicted on the American Cooperative School of Tunis, a highly regarded institution that, despite its name, catered mostly to the children of non-American expatriates, nearly half of whom work for the African Development Bank. School officials, who had sent the 650 students home early, said a few protesters scaled the fence and dismantled monitoring cameras, followed by 300 to 400 others, some of them local residents, who looted everything including 700 laptop computers, musical instruments and the safe in the director's office, and then set the building on fire.
“It’s ransacked,” the director, Allan Bredy, said in a telephone interview. “We were thinking it was something the Tunisia government would keep under control. We had no idea they would allow things to go as wildly as they did.”
The school's director of security, David Santiago, said a group of staff members formed a posse armed with baseball bats to chase lingering looters away hours after the assault. “Our elementary school library is burning as we speak,” he said angrily as he and his colleagues sought to assess the damage. “It’s complete chaos.”
It is sad to see human nature degenerate into violence at any time, but when violent actions attack innocent people who had nothing to do with the original provocation, it is especially saddening. In this case, innocent children’s futures have been jeopardized by destroying a school - how can that be justified as a legitimate response to the making of a pathetic film made on the other side of the world? Such is the power of internet technology – the film had only attracted an audience of about ten people (all of whom were reportedly highly critical of its abysmal quality) when it had its one public screening at a movie theater in California earlier this year. The paradox of the current protests is that they have drawn the attention of millions of people around the world to a terribly made film with no artistic merit whatsoever that would otherwise have gone largely unnoticed.
The other paradox of the situation is that the protesters have responded to uninformed intolerance (in the film) by demonstrating uninformed intolerance (by attacking an international school). Like Awty, the American Cooperative School of Tunis is an IB World School that teaches the International Baccalaureate Diploma program (it has been teaching the program since 2000). An important component of the IB philosophy is the importance of tolerance in forming young lives. In the words of the IB Mission Statement: The IB programs “encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.”
I visited Tunisia about 15 months ago, including the city of Tunis (where the photo at the top of this blog was taken). I met with one of my students (who was home at the time on summer holiday from our school in Hong Kong) as well as her father, a noted journalist for a French-language newspaper. Tunisia was where the ‘Arab Spring’ began, and when I visited shortly after that momentous event, there were still armored vehicles in the street but also a real sense of optimism that the dark days were fading into a never-to-be-revisited past. The riots during the last few days must surely raise anxieties that the future might not be quite as peaceful as everyone was hoping.
It makes me realize just how important Awty’s educational mission of developing international understanding and global tolerance among all peoples and cultures are in these troubled times!
On a much happier note, it was a great honor this week to welcome Père Jean Monique Bruno to my office. Père Bruno had travelled to Houston from Haiti where he runs the Ecole St Barthélémy, a school he founded in 2000 to provide an education for poor families in Terrier Rouge in north-eastern Haiti. From its small beginnings, the Ecole St Barthélémy now has 780 students, and has a new classroom block that is largely solar powered with an internet connection.
In Père Bruno’s own words, “I am more and more convinced that education is the best way to help the people of Haiti; through our schools we are preparing the future citizens who will make the difference in the country”. These words resonated very powerfully with me, mirroring as they did the famous words of Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.
With good reason, Père Bruno is a revered figure in Haiti, as he has started six schools during his life that have provided educational opportunities for Haiti’s poor that would otherwise have been impossible. It was a privilege to welcome him into my office, and it is a continuing privilege for Awty’s faculty and students to be involved with this extraordinary project.
This has been an important week for our new students. Tuesday was designated as Newcomers’ Day, and was celebrated by distributing cupcakes to all the new students. The photos below show some of the scenes from last Tuesday.
On Thursday and Friday, all the students in the Middle and Upper School went away for our annual Fall Trips. Travelling to various campsites and venues in Texas, the Fall Trips were designed to help new students and continuing students get to know each other more deeply than is possible within the structure of everyday lessons. This year, our student population has grown to 1485 students, of whom just over 300 are new to the school.
I was unable to join any of the Fall Trips this year because of an important commitment I had on Thursday evening to attend the launch of our 2013 Gala. Although the Gala is still several months away (it will be held on 23rd February 2013), a huge amount of work has already been done by the two Gala chairs, Janice Glaser and Najali Tajalli, together with their team of planners. Thursday evening’s function provided the team of Gala organizers with important information about the event and some of the exciting plans that are underway. The Gala will have an African theme – specifically, “From Awty to Africa – a walk on the wild side”. Having heard some of the plans on Thursday night, I can hardly wait until 23rd February!
As many of our families know, the new multi-storey parking garage is almost finished. The pick up and drop off areas are already operational on a limited basis, and we are hoping that the main part of the new structure will be opened no later than when we return from the fall break on Monday 8th October. The photos below show the progress this week.
Educating for tolerance
Sunday, 16 September 2012