Discovering the Real Me: Character Education

Carrying out its mission to challenge and empower the next generation to create lives of authenticity, abundance, and altruism, the US-based NextGen Academy sent students to five Asian nations in the spring of 2008 to serve as interns in UPF's Character Education Initiative.

Interns Ana Reid, Manae Pisano, and Heung Kook Stephens were assigned to Bangladesh. They conducted an eight-day workshop with Dhaka University students. They also met Ambassadors for Peace, including the presidents of branches of the Universal Peace Federation, Women's Federation for World Peace, representatives from the media, university professors and teachers, and leaders from various NGOs and other organizations. The interns presented slide shows, answered questions clearly, and in general conducted themselves among adults with respectful confidence. One young woman gave a three and a half hour presentation on the topic of loving others truly, which had teachers and students alike fired up with enthusiasm.

The interns also went to small villages in the beautiful Bangladesh countryside and visited schools built in previous years by sister projects. Interns both taught character education and put it into practice by assisting and engineering a service project to refurbish the aging schools.

Participants were fortunate enough to be there over the Bengali New Year. As if nature itself was celebrating, a spectacular thunderstorm knocked out all the power (a not uncommon occurrence there), put on a show in the sky, cooled everything down, rained hail, and then gave rise to a panoramic sunrise like a giant fiery orange ball (as Jeff Adshead described it) rising over the rice and vegetable fields,

Besides teaching about altruistic love, respect, compassion, and other virtues, the interns provided entertainment featuring songs, beat boxing, and even break dancing. Break dancing is not very well known in Bangladesh but it ignited extreme enthusiasm-so much that Heung Kook, the intern turned performer, thought he could easily become a celebrity. His audiences of children screamed with such high-pitched enthusiasm, he nearly went deaf.