Exchange programs make the world more peaceful, one student at a time.
Mara Egherman, a college librarian, was sitting at her desk when she saw an email pop up: Ryan Ahmad, a Muslim exchange student in Iowa from the Philippines, needed a place to stay. There had been trouble at his school, and he’d been beaten up by a fellow exchange student.
Egherman flashed back to her 16-year-old self, alone in a foreign country. “I knew I had to take this kid in,” she says. As a high school student, Egherman had applied for an exchange program in South Africa. But after arriving in Johannesburg in 1982, she discovered that her host family had racial notions that dovetailed with those of the apartheid regime. Egherman was forbidden from speaking to the help. The family considered Nelson Mandela (then still in prison) a terrorist. And they kept a cache of weapons in a closet for protection. For a teenager from the Midwest, this was disorienting – and eye-opening. Egherman saw people being treated in ways she’d never imagined.
Yet at school, she made lifelong friends, one of whom invited her home for the last few months of her exchange. Egherman’s new family couldn’t have been more different, with three sisters and lots of laughter. Because that friend reached out to Egherman, her exchange experience was a positive one. She came home a changed person, with an enhanced ability to imagine the lives of people in other places. That was the whole reason she’d signed up to go abroad.
Most exchange programs have one goal in mind: to expose young people to other cultures to promote international understanding and peace. The thought is that it’s harder to hate someone you know. Scientists call this the contact hypothesis, and it’s the idea behind not only Rotary Youth Exchange – which European clubs started in the 1920s, and which sends roughly 8,000 students to about 80 countries each year – but also programs such as Seeds of Peace and the post-9/11 Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program, which brought Ahmad to Iowa in 2012.
When Rotary Youth Exchange began, the bitter, bloody memories of World War I were still fresh. It was part of a larger movement that hoped to increase ties between cultures and nations – and that picked up momentum after World War II. The effort to temper nationalism, sectarianism, and tribalism also included the founding of the United Nations, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the undertaking of the Nuremberg trials, and the success of the American civil rights movement.
Historically, groups have tended to regard themselves as operating at a higher level – as being better, more human – than the people around them. According to Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute and Jung-Kyoo Choi at Kyungpook National University in Korea, the tendency to be altruistic toward those who are members of our in-group and callous toward those who are not gave us an advantage over other hominids. They call it “parochial altruism,” an evolutionary strategy not unlike that of the dreaded Argentine ant, which has colonized huge swaths of the planet. These ants refuse to fight one another, and separate colonies sometimes team up. Yet they are extremely aggressive toward other species of ants. The group grows stronger in uniting against the others. If Bowles and Choi are right, then evolution equipped us with an ability to draw a line between us and them, to separate the in-group from the out-group, to shut off our capacity to see through others’ eyes.
Fortunately, there is a key difference in this respect between humans and ants: As we cross the lines between groups and see how thin they really are, our definition of “us” – of who’s in our circle – can change.
That is what Egherman and other exchange students have experienced. So when she got the email about Ahmad, she knew she had a debt to pay. She understood what a difference she could make for this kid – lonely, in trouble, and far from home. A few days after she responded, Ahmad showed up at her family’s door in Des Moines. Their house was next to a university, their neighborhood full of immigrants from Africa, Vietnam, and Mexico. At Ahmad’s new school, he thrived immediately.
“Within three hours of being at our house, he had friends,” Egherman recalls. He spent time with her 15-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old son. He hung out at the local mall and went to his new classmates’ homes for dinner. And by the end of the year, he didn’t want to leave.
As Egherman watched him blossom, she hoped she’d passed along the same gift she’d received all those years ago. She hoped she’d done everything she could – for him, for her, and for all of us – to make the circle a little bigger than it was before. — Frank Bures