Cultural Exchange

I was contracted to cover a series of State Department foreign exchange programs that are administered by the UMass Donahue Institute. For two and a half months I followed the various groups – including Iraqi college students, Indonesian teachers, Argentine grad students and a group of 18 professors each from seperate countries – as they experienced everything America has to offer. The participants of each program spent about a month in Amherst, MA taking classes on American politics and touring around the region before traveling down the east coast to Washington DC. It was a fabulous adventure and I learned alot from the experience. Each program had its own challenges and opportunities which made every day an adventure for me. In the end I took nearly 9,000 photos and produced two short videos for the university to use in its grant applications.

Below, I’ve posted some of the content from the Indonesian program. I’ll have more up here later, but technical glitches have kept them down for the time being.

Enjoy!
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

The program Tolerance and Democracy: A Two Nation Exchange brought 16 Indonesian teachers to the United States to learn about our education system and how the teaching of tolerance has developed here.

The Iraqi Young Leader Exchange Program brought 50 Iraqi college students to the United States for six weeks. Half of the group wet to a Virginia university to learn about science and technology, while the other 25 came up to UMass Amherst to learn about how the United States forms and implements public policy.

You’ll probably note that the two videos have a few similar sequences, several of the same shots and some of the same background music. While I tried to mix it up a bit, the two groups did share similar accommodations and each video was meant for a different audience. As for the music, without a sound engineer or access to much royalty-free music, I had to rely on what was available to me in Garageband and Soundtrack Pro.