The Visionary

I guess the reason I'm writing these blog posts is to record my thoughts and to practice my writing... so bear with me. I will try to make them as insightful and interesting as possible. Until I get better at writing and formulating my thoughts, however, I guess this is mostly for myself. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to give more valuable input to blog followers :]

So I guess I have one month to catch up, which I'll gradually try to do with these blog posts.

Today, we listened to the president of Ashinaga give a speech regarding the 100-year plan in Africa as well as his general vision for Ashinaga. To summarize, the main goal of this organization is to end poverty. For the whole world. Yes, it's a broad goal (and quite ambitious), but they're currently focusing via improving education for the most underprivileged group of students. The 100-year plan basically means that they'll take the "brightest" students from all over Africa, bring them to the top university, and then, these students will bring back what they learned in these universities to their country. 100 years of this, then poverty is gone.... according to them.

It's quite interesting to have such a vision. When somebody asked Tamai how he dealt with criticism, he simply responded that nobody has ever criticized him. It makes me wonder if a leader of an organization (the visionary) is always so separated from the logistical aspects of an organization... and kind of floating on the cloud of his vision. They say you need a vision when you start an organization, but being too much a visionary may blind yourself from criticizing yourself and thinking about the basis of your organization. I'm more a technical person, so when I hear "100 year plan" or "ending poverty" I want to know what will happen in the next months, next year, the five year plan, etc. I want to know what they mean by "expanding internationally" and "spreading the Ashinaga vision." Does that simply mean letting everybody know about the organization or building more rainbow houses across the world? Five years from now, for example, if they want to expand in the US, does that mean they want a headquarter in the US? For what purpose? For another avenue to raise awareness and fundraise internationally? If so, how?

As much as I applaud him for being so dedicated to this vision and raising $1 billion dollars to give financial support to orphans all over the world (and the opportunity to go to college), I've always been prone to ask: what could I have done better. When I think $1 billion, I don't just applaud the amount of money Ashinaga has raised. I think: how could this organization used the $1 billion more effectively? How can Ashinaga send 100,000 orphans to college rather than 90,000? ... and to even micromanage a bit more, how can Ashinaga set the basis for a successful English Summer Program for next year?

All these technical things, Tamai has no responsibility for. He is the visionary. Hopefully on Sunday we can talk to the new supervisor for the English program to propose a new basis for the English program and potentially an international tsudoi in America. I would also love to hear how they want to expand to the US and what we, as interns, and soon to be "Ashinaga alumni" can do to help.

The Best Way to Learn

Besides coming to Japan and trying to improve my Japanese, one of my main motivations for interning at Ashinaga this summer was to learn. My aspirations of being involved with academia strongly exemplifies my love of learning and teaching, but the kind of learning I wanted to take away from this summer is a bit different. I wanted to learn the in's and out's of organizing a group of people for a common cause. I wanted to learn how to teach. I wanted to learn how to communicate. But I realized this kind of learning doesn't need specific goals, because what I ended up learning the last couple of days was unexpected and valuable: I just learned about other peoples' lives.

Cultural interaction really accentuates how different the world really is. Not only have I been able to talk to Japanese students, but also international students from Afghanistan, Somalia, Brazil, Indonesia, etc. Often times, we take for granted the power of cultural interaction, which seems to be overshadowed by the daunting field of international relations dictated by the politics of the leaders. But yesterday evening, by just talking to a student from Afghanistan about democracy and its relation to Islam, I realized that before supporting the process of democratization in the Middle East, I simply needed to learn more. So I'm currently re-evaluating my views of democracy especially in conjunction with the class I took regarding International Relations between the US and East Asia with Thomas Christensen. It seems like this realization might be useless in resolving conflict between the Middle East and the US, but pursuing this method of learning should be an imperative aspect in international relations. It reminded me of the FACES program in Stanford and the idea of bringing in university students from China and the United States to discuss about US-China relations.

In the beginning of the internship, I was bit anxious to get started in learning the operations of a nonprofit organization and really work. But, I realized another valuable method of learning is by simply talking to the students here. I'll try to keep this in mind throughout the whole summer... I bet I'll learn loads of new stuff with this mindset :].


Here's a recap of what I did:

Day 4:

We visited the headquarters around Shinjuku station with the new interns. It was so small, but most of the workers were away on a business trip... I really wanted to meet Mr. Tamai but he was also away. They took us to an interesting shrine which had a methodical way of 1) cleaning hands and 2) praying.

Yummy Fast Food Curry

 The most eventful thing was our Welcome Party! It was amazing... delicious food and lots of booze ;). Sukiyaki was so yummy!

Day 5: It's the weekend so not much has happened. I took a run with a student and practiced a bit of my Japanese. We talked about a lot of differences between the United States and Japan. I'm getting ready to head out to explore Central Tokyo!