Meet Naja K., 22, and Deema K., 22. They are currently facilitators for Engineering World Health’s (EWH) Virtual Engineering Innovation and Cultural Exchange (VEIC) program. They participated in EWH’s Summer 2020 iteration of VEIC, a course which brings together students from the United States and Lebanon to focus on low-resource design and engineering for healthcare in an international setting. These ExchangeAlumni now guide young people in the U.S. and Lebanon to take part in meaningful cross-cultural experiences through virtual exchange.
As students in last year’s five-week program, Naja and Deema had the opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and cultures, and improve their communication and teamwork skills by working together on biomedical engineering projects.
Naja’s team worked on a design to improve the supply chain of medical devices in low-resource environments, a project that won the design competition at the end of the program. He still keeps in touch with his teammates from Arizona and Texas to catch up once in a while and see what they’re up to.
Deema’s team designed and presented a low-cost, portable infant incubator alternative, through which she learned about conceptual design, functional architecture, technical feasibility, entrepreneurship, and circuit system development.
Naja and Deema wanted to build upon what was already an enriching experience from last year’s program, so when they were asked to return as facilitators, the answer was an easy “yes.” From June through August, they spent a total of 12 weeks working with high school and university students from the United States and Lebanon, acting as mentors and guides as students work through self-directed learning modules, collaborate virtually in groups, and innovate solutions to global health challenges. Because of their own participation in the program prior to facilitating, Naja and Deema are able to leverage their own experience participating in the program to support current participants.
Naja’s favorite part about working with participants is seeing them improve and gain confidence in their communication skills throughout the program. “I was able to put my communication and facilitation skills to use by guiding the participants through the program material and helping them identify healthcare problems in low-resource settings. I also leveraged my knowledge about the program and material to effectively manage the sessions and provide better feedback for participants,“ Naja said.
Both Naja and Deema would recommend that other students participate in EWH’s Virtual Engineering Innovation and Cultural Exchange in the future, and seek out other opportunities for virtual cross-cultural exchange. “I learned so much: I truly felt I was submerged in the different cultures,” said Deema. “You have the chance to meet different people and know more about their cultures, while also working on something that is important: innovating for healthcare in low-resource settings,” said Naja.
As an engineer, Deema says that she has witnessed first-hand that “challenges are the driving force of solutions,” and she plans to continue challenging herself and encouraging her students to do the same. “It is okay to ask questions and be unfamiliar with tasks. You are there to learn!”
Naja recently graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Notre Dame University – Louaize in Lebanon, the same university where Deema earned her degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Naja considers his experience as a student and facilitator to be a milestone in his academic and professional path. His future plans include staying in the engineering field and possibly pursuing graduate studies. Thanks to his virtual exchange experience, he has the necessary interpersonal skills and resourcefulness to reach his goals.
Engineering World Health’s Virtual Engineering Innovation & Cultural Exchange is supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
For Magdalena Haule Njaidi, success is defined not only by how many products are sold out of her warehouse in Pwani, Tanzania, but also by the number of women she mentors and empowers. These two aspects make up the core of the ExhangeAlumni’s business, “Mama wa Shamba,” which she founded after completing a program through the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE).
Magdalena grew up with an interest in entrepreneurship. But it wasn’t until completing the AWE program in 2019 that she harnessed her interest into a business dedicated to sustainable food production and consumption. After receiving a $10,000 grant from the United States African Development Foundation (USADF), Magdalena was able to pursue this interest and founded Mama wa Shamba with the goal of producing high-quality, ethically-sourced maize flour and cassava noodles for the Pwani region of Tanzania.
The enterprise, which started with the production of pounded fresh cassava leaves locally known as “Kisamvu,” has grown exponentially. It now produces four additional products – including nutritious flour, maize flour, pumpkin seeds, and cassava chinchin. Prior to the start of her AWE program, Magdalena only had four reliable customers and sold products from her home. Since participating in the 2019 AWE program, Magdalena was able to improve her time management, record keeping, marketing, product packaging, and public speaking skills.
Her products are now packaged with quality materials to attract and increase the number of her customers and her regular customer base has more than doubled! Through her USDAF grant, Magdalena has been able to purchase processing machines and build a small factory to keep up with demand.
One of the most invaluable parts of Magdalena’s exchange was getting to join a network of like-minded, entrepreneurial women who shared similar professional interests. She learned a lot from the other participants, including around effective branding and how to create a product with a distinct logo that will resonate with her consumer base.
Magdalena’s impact through Mama wa Shamba goes beyond providing access to sustainably processed grains. She also works to engage and mentor young women in her village around starting and growing small businesses to increase their own income. To date, she has trained 15 women; five of them are purchasing Mama wa Shamba products on credit at wholesale prices to sell for profit. She also conducts training on food safety and hygiene to support women in her community to help alleviate poverty.
“Education was my only ladder out,” said Monica Marks, a first-generation college graduate and exchange alumna of the Fulbright, Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), Boren Fellowship, and Rhodes Scholarship. “I also had a strong desire to travel, but no money to travel with.”
Monica, who now teaches Middle Eastern politics at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, joined MentorTalks on Wednesday, November 17 to discuss how she successfully applied for all four scholarships, her journey from rural Appalachia to the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
Monica’s interest in the world can be traced back to her childhood, when she would get lost in books, and her father teaching her how to adapt to new situations and be open-minded.
Her first exchange experience, the Boren Scholarship in Tanzania, was perhaps the most transformative. “Most of my learning was not done in the classroom,” she said. Instead, her situational learning was just as important – learning how to be uncomfortable in a new place was a lesson that she would carry with her in her time in Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond.
In this episode, Monica also shares advice on finding one’s niche. For those seeking meaning in a career, she recommends aligning what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, and what makes you angry. This “golden triangle,” as she calls it, can help you discover where your skill set lies and how to build an effective narrative around it.
This narrative can then help you to lean into yourself, and she advises those who are applying for a scholarship to do just this. Equally important as a resume or CV, she believes, are the stories and experiences that make us who we are. Stories like taking a bus across Turkey and back or traveling across Syria alone -- or finding ways to immerse yourself virtually in a culture, if travel is not an option -- are experiences that bring you to life as a three-dimensional person.
Learn more tips from Monica and how exchanges can open doors in this episode of MentorTalks on Facebook.
Dr. Monica Marks – Biography
Monica Marks is a scholar of Islamist movements, sex, and politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Her research focuses on broad topics across the region and beyond, but especially in regards to the tensions between pluralism and state power in the two countries where she's lived longest: Tunisia and Turkey. Prior to joining NYU Abu Dhabi, Dr. Marks was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She completed her PhD, an ethnographic study of post-2011 Tunisian politics based on over 1,200 in-country interviews, in 2018 at St Antony's College, Oxford.
A first-generation college student from rural Kentucky, Dr. Marks has studied in Tanzania, Tunisia, and Jordan; and, in Turkey as a Fulbright Scholar, before completing her Masters and PhD at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. During her graduate studies, Dr. Marks was based primarily in Tunisia (2011-2016) and Turkey (2016-2018), where she published academic work and more public-facing analysis for leading North American and European think tanks, along with publications like Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, for which she also freelanced briefly as a journalist.
Dr. Marks is passionate about mentoring students, facilitating creative fieldwork in and beyond the MENA region, and bringing academic research into greater conversation with journalism, policy-related analysis, and public-facing conversation.
Carlos knew he was interested in nanotechnology and its potential to solve global challenges, but he did not have the necessary experience of working on a cross-cultural team to develop these solutions yet. By participating in World Learning’s The Experiment Digital, he was not only able to build upon his technical skills, but he also learned how to communicate and work with others to turn his aspirations into a reality.
In summer 2020, Carlos took part in The Experiment Digital, attending interactive learning modules and presentations while also engaging in synchronous exchanges with peers in Iraq, Algeria, Yemen, and his home country, the U.S. During his virtual exchange program, Carlos developed business, community development, and communications skills while also strengthening his passion for scientific solutions. In addition to technical skills, Carlos also learned valuable interpersonal communication skills.
“Even though our culture and lifestyles are very different, I think with the COVID experience, we developed a mutual understanding which allowed us to be free and have something in common,” Carlos said about working on a multinational team.
Through his virtual exchange, Carlos recognized the existence of stereotypes and learned how to dismantle them. Moreover, through his experience Carlos gained cultural sensitivity and understanding. “If you try to do something similar in your community, you already know that culture. If you do a program like The Experiment Digital, it’s international, you can learn about culture and other things and apply those lessons.”
The Experiment Digital also gave Carlos necessary job readiness skills. “As the economy goes digital, The Experiment Digital gives you a glimpse of what the future of work will look like for us.” Carlos took his newfound skills and joined The Knowledge Society (TKS), a global community of young people who work with emerging technologies to solve problems and positively impact the world. Carlos takes part in sessions where he learns about new technologies and takes part in trainings – learning how to take technical knowledge and translate it into real world solutions. In addition to his involvement with TKS, he has worked on various projects since his virtual exchange, including a hackathon and a digital tracing project for the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to The Experiment Digital, Carlos used his robust communication skills and teamwork experience to successfully work on these projects while further developing his collaboration and presentation skills. “Everything I learned from The Experiment Digital came together when I had to solve open ended problems.”
Carlos is focused on addressing the needs of the future, and applying science and technology to solve these problems. His ultimate goal is to make a dent in more than one industry – especially relating to energy storage and space exploration using nano materials. Furthermore, he wants to explore answers to human behavior: “How did we get here? Why are places different and why does conflict exist?” No matter what direction Carlos goes, he will bring with him the understanding of how important human-to-human collaboration is, an idea solidified during his virtual exchange: “The people who travel the furthest travel together.”
The Experiment Digital, implemented by World Learning, is supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
In response to a need for greater media literacy education in Peru, exchange alumnus Jonathan Kastro and his team developed a program, called “Media for Women (M4W)” after virtually attending the Alumni Thematic International Exchange Seminar (Alumni TIES) TechCamp Reconnect seminar on “Advancing Digital Citizenship through Media Literacy.”
Jonathan’s idea can be traced back to how he sees the impact that the World Wide Web has had on global society. In just a few decades, communication between individuals was reduced from weeks to days, days to hours, and hours to just a matter of seconds. People have become dependent on the media to inform them of what is happening in their local and global communities.
With the increased speed of information exchange and reliance, however, global media is vulnerable to a bombardment of messages and biased content that narrates the news from different perspectives, with some messages inciting disinformation and false claims. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, the issue of disinformation and lack of media literacy was magnified. As waves of migrants left their countries to pursue better opportunities and environments during this time of uncertainty, contradictory information regarding the pandemic only increased on a global scale.
This has generated a need for citizens to develop critical thinking about the media content they consume. Jonathan’s project arose out of this need – its goal is to equip citizens with the skills to analyze information critically and responsibly. After attending the Alumni TIES TechCamp Reconnect seminar, he and his team were awarded an Alumni TIES small grant from the U.S. Department of State to enact their project and address the demand for media literacy in their local community.
The Media for Women (M4W) program provided participants with training in media literacy, critical analysis of the news, civic responsibility awareness, and understanding the role of the media in society. The program was primarily designed for women and LGBTQ+ community leaders that serve in various roles such as students, teachers, and entrepreneurs and applied the multiplier effect so that the content shared during the trainings could reach into the community at large. Although the primary beneficiary country was Peru, the call for applications was extended to both Peruvian women and Venezuelan migrants located in Peru to unify and strengthen relations between nationalities in order to work together and generate value in their communities.
With these goals in mind, their team compiled four main objectives for M4W:
- Develop a network of female leadership that encourages responsible digital citizenship.
- Fight misinformation by strengthening the critical spirit.
- Evaluate the role of the Peruvian media, influencers, and opinion leaders.
- Strengthen the critical analysis of the news and social networks in Peru.
Through the program, Jonathan and his team trained 100 leaders under the guidance of highly experienced facilitators and equipped them with content on topics such as critical analysis of the media, journalism as a fourth estate, digital security, humanizing data in the pandemic, migration, violence, and inequality of sex, conspiracy theories, and the influence of the media on public opinion. As part of the training program, participants worked together on teams to answer a series of questions on selected articles to practice and engage in the lessons they learned about media literacy. This activity culminated in the ideation of solutions and the creation of focus groups where participants established joint projects to solve problems related to topics such as sex violence, the infodemic, human rights, and homophobia/transphobia. They presented their ideas to the local Callao community and showcased the lessons that they learned.
Throughout the process, participants shared their opinions and reflections about the Media 4 Women program which allowed the team to improve the trainings for future iterations. In fact, the varying cultural differences of the Peruvian and Venezuelan participants pushed them to adapt their messages and processes in order to maximize the effectiveness and experience of the trainings for all participants. This offered additional insight on how the team can continue expanding their target audience with the ultimate hope of teaching media literacy and digital citizenship to everyone in Latin America.
What does it take to put on a monthly, 30-minute live program? From recruiting potential guests to putting together a show that viewers get to see in real time, MentorTalks is no small feat. In this episode, our team at the U.S. Department of State shared how it all began, how it’s going, and what we have learned along the way.
What does it take to be a guest on MentorTalks? “We’re looking for someone who has tips they can share with the audience – tips that our global ExchangeAlumni network can pick up on,” Asha said.
Guests who appear on MentorTalks vary in background, professional expertise, and interest – but they have one thing in common: they are all ExchangeAlumni.
“We have people who are leaders in their field, and usually who have taken a unique career path – they have built on their exchange experience and use their skills to build their career.”
Learn how MentorTalks got started, how our ExchangeAlumni team transitioned from the studio to home, how we define success for each episode, and much more. You can catch MentorTalks on Facebook @ExchangeAlumni, on LinkedIn #ExchangeAlumni, and on YouTube Live. All episodes are also available on this website.
Do you have a potential guest you’d like to pitch for MentorTalks? Email us at exchangealumni@state.gov, subject: MentorTalks guest.
Asha Beh - biography
Asha Beh leads ExchangeAlumni digital outreach and strategy at the U.S. Department of State, in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She is the executive producer of MentorTalks, a live streamed series, and Voices of Exchange, an audio podcast. In her current position, she uses skills from her previous media roles at Bloomberg Business News, NPR, CNN, NBC, and CNBC.com, as well as her digital media skills from managing a worldwide environmental social media community of three million people, expanding and building connections among thousands of eInterns, and diversifying and improving digital and video efforts at the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, India.
During her time in government, Asha has been instrumental in putting together the first-ever, full day User Experience (UX) event for the State. Asha also helped make federal paid parental leave a reality through her work as co-chair of the top work-life balance employee organization at State. Asha is a lifelong member of the South Asian Journalists Association, where she also served on the executive board.
Cuban American artist, educator, Arts Envoy exchange alumna, and 2020 Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund (CDAF) winner Agnes Chavez is empowering young people to live more consciously. With her love for projection art, Agnes has combined technology with artistic expression to tackle environmental challenges and to inspire citizens to play their part in achieving a more sustainable world.
Until 2009, Agnes had been a successful studio artist and metal sculptor. When she first saw an example of large-scale mapping projected onto a building, though, she had a creative epiphany. Around this time, Agnes saw that projectors and mapping software were becoming more accessible and affordable, and she decided to team up with programmers Jared Tarbell and Alessandro Saccoia to explore the overlap between mapping technology and data visualization art.
With their help, Agnes created her first data visualization projection entitled (x)trees – a stunning interactive forest of light and words that works by generating branches of trees in real time from SMS and tweets sent from a live audience. The project was designed to raise awareness of deforestation and the need to find a balance between nature and technology.
In 2018, Agnes won a grant for (x)trees to be part of an Arts Envoy project in Guadalajara, Mexico. This equipped her to take her art and education work internationally. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Agnes turned to the genre of immersive and interactive art as a way to help develop scientific literacy among young people.
This led to the CDAF-funded project called Space Messengers, which is a traveling international virtual exchange workshop culminating with an immersive and educational sci-art projection installation. The project shows student's 'space messages' and silhouettes communicating the science they learned, and it aims to show work toward a sustainable interplanetary future.
Agnes’ goal with the project is to educate and empower youth to become more informed, compassionate, and environmentally aware citizens. The culminating Space Messengers project will launch for the first time at the Festival Internacional de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal, from October 15-17, 2021 and then will travel to Guadalajara, Mexico and New Mexico in 2022.
Agnes credits much of her success to becoming part of the exchange alumni network – as she says her experience working with like-minded people has helped her greatly.
“My participation in the International Exchange Alumni program is what made possible the BioSTEAM International and Space Messengers project,” Agnes says. And she admits she also is a student, in the ways she has benefited from the project.
“The people and partnerships that have been established through this network have expanded my reach, increased my capacity, and inspired creative ways to tackle humanitarian and ecological challenges.”
Agnes hopes that by continuing to work with and challenge students to push themselves creatively and intellectually, she can connect and bring hope to citizens in her home state of New Mexico and around the world.
“The experience that has most influenced the way I work has been collaborating with US Embassies around the world. They have made me realize how we can attain shared goals through interdisciplinary and art-based projects that empower our communities.”
Find out more about Agnes and her work on her website, www.stemarts.com.
On building rooftops and backs of motorcycle taxis “boda bodas”—the city’s most common method of transportation—in Kampala, Uganda, sits Engineer Bainomugisha’s creation to actively track and clean up Africa’s air pollution. Bainomugisha, an ExchangeAlumni of the Mandela Washington Fellowship program, designed the small, black, low-cost boxes to collect samples from over 50 locations and use AI to detect and predict the flow and variety of local pollutants. He and his team were recently selected for the 2019 Google AI Impact Challenge - one out of 20 teams, and out of 2,600 submissions.
