Global Society

It's a Small Global Society After All
On January 10, 2003, a group of St. John’s students traveled to Hanoi to attend the International Peace and Development Conference in Vietnam. The trip, co-sponsored by St. John’s and Vietnam’s Institute for International Relations (IIR), was designed to give students from the U.S. and Vietnam the opportunity to interact and work together on common problems such as poverty, education and health care. It was a chance for students from opposite sides of the global community to finally sit down and get to know one another. At this conference, friendship and new bonds formed. The trip left an indelible impression upon the lives of the participants. Dr. Frank Biafora, Associate Dean for St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and one of the primary organizers of the event, described it as some of the most active learning he had ever seen in his 12 years of teaching.

This historic trip has already made a difference at St. John’s. A new Study Abroad curriculum in Vietnam and an exchange program with the Institute have been implemented. Of course, the journey will always remind the participants that in the global village, 8,000 miles really isn’t a world away.

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St. John’s student Joshua Marino called the experience “the greatest step toward peace that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” He added, “I am sure that before this first meeting we all had some preconceived notions about each other. We don't know much about each other's countries other than the fact that we were involved in a war. Whatever these notions were, they instantly went away when we met.”