Cairo, I’ll be Back

So I have left Cairo for the last time on this trip, spending an additional week there after returning from Sudan.  Like Sudan, I am considering writing a short analysis of the country from my experiences, but I am still not sure if I should, and if I do, if I should post it.  The reason for my uncertainty lies both in the fact that while running a non-profit that is explicitly non-political, if there is a viable way for me to comment on these countries without making political statements.  I mean I do have political opinions personally, but I wonder if my own expression could create false assumptions about World Faith, whose leadership are as politically diverse as they are religiously.  Also, certain countries I am openly critical of, but it seems potentially problematic if I criticize a nation’s government that we as an organization are working in, especially in a place like Egypt where civil liberties are diminishing if existent.  More to come as I decide.

 

However, World Faith Cairo is born, and interesting is growing much faster there than we ever had in New York the first month.  We did we get a group of young people legitimately interesting in leading the chapter, with the awesome assistance of Catherine Manfre, an NYU alumnus, who is World Faith’s Regional Director of Egypt.  But even better is we got connected to some of the movers and shakers of Cairo.  Including that of Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond.

 

“Dr. Harrell-Bond is an institution,” her future replacement said, referring to her clout in the international refugee aid world.  Michael Hellen-Chu, a friend of mine who works at the UN on the Darfur political solutions team, informed me of her intense behavour and her immense knowledge in the field.  Catherine set up some meetings, of which I wasn’t prepped for before. All the sudden I was sitting face to face with Dr. Harrell-Bond.  She is about to retire in two weeks, and for some reason she dug our approach, and essentially dragged me to all her meetings and introduced us to several organizations in Cairo. 

 

After meeting with her and everyone else, Catherine and those working with her decided that the best way to kick off World Faith Cairo was through a language exchange between English speaking study-abroad students and Iraqi refugees, who are over 100,000 numbers in Cairo.  So our chapter will likely not just be based on Coptic-Muslim division, but also be able to challenge West-Arab relations, and Egyptian-Iraqi relations.  I am stoked to see what comes of it.

 

 Now I am in Amman,  where I originally intended on relaxing.  However, after meeting several people in interfaith, I sort of slipped into World Faith mode and now we are exploring to see if a chapter is a possibility here.  Someone wants to introduce me to Prince Hassan, who is very active in the interfaith works here, so we will see what comes of it.  Until then, pray that we find some funding so that I can actually continue this fulltime!

A Week in Sudan

 

 

Well this last week has been a great journey.  Someone once told me that the best way to evaluate where you are at any given point is based on these three questions:  Are you giving?  Are you learning?  Are you having fun?

 

I feel this past week definitely fulfilled the three quotas.  A World Faith Chapter is starting with great support in Khartoum, I learned tons about the history and current issues that Sudan is facing, and I met great people who both further inspired me and made the trip enjoyable.

 

First of all, there is something a bit ironic about meeting anyone from Sudan… They are the most peaceful and amicable people as a culture that I have found in my travels in some 20 countries now.  It is damn near impossible to imagine these same people, whether from the north or south, Port Sudan or from Darfur, as capable of what we hear on in the western media, which at time is misleading (I plan on writing another post just on this subject).  As arrived on the tarmac this irony became apparent, as the warm smiles greeted me as I arrived, with pieces of Sudan Air wreckage in the background. 

 

I spent my first few days in Omdurman, being hosted by Gihad Abunafeesa, now the Regional Director of Sudan for World Faith.  Gihad’s family took great care of me, as I as staying the male side of their gender-separated home, which I shared with her cousin Midu, who is suffering from Sickle-Celled Anemia, and an old Darfurian Sheikh who was deaf, neither of which spoke English.  Because of the extreme heat, us three slept outside every night, in the guys’ courtyard, while a light breeze would cool me off.

 

I met with students from Gihad’s university, Ahfad University, where she is her fourth year as a medical student.  I worked from there most days, ironically sticking out as a tall white guy in an all-girls school in Africa.  I met many young people interested in the World Faith chapter, and things really solidified when Gihad introduced me to the awesome people of Cafa, a local organization that works on a grassroots level to address issues in Sudan such as AIDS education,  peace-building with IDP camps, and training volunteers who are placed in humanitarian projects.  After a meeting with Cafa’s Director Yassir Ibrahim, Cafa agreed to host a World Faith Chapter, and has a four-person committee working on how to develop the project, while I am working on promoting the volunteer base.   

 

I feel like I am missing so much but it was one of those experiences, which has some many details, such as my new Sudanese friends, one of which runs an ad agency and I went into a meeting with him, when I should I stayed quiet I instead proposed that this construction company think big, using buildsudan.com (which they bought that day).  Or the wedding I went to, where I spent an entire afternoon learning the 50 words necessary to greet a Sudanese person properly (the greetings go on and on, it’s great!).  Too much occurred in this period to full articulate, so I guess this is just an ambiguous post…

 

In other news, I am 3 weeks away from returning to the states.  Unless we get funding between now and then, I will have to begin jobhunting… time to start preparing my resumé.  L  

On My Way Out

I delayed the release of this post so it wouldn’t post until I am on the plane to Sudan.  I did that as I was getting a lot of concerned people writing, calling, etc, and I needed to pray and think about this one on my own.  I appreciate everyone’s concern, but I hope that you all trust that I have planned accordingly and will put safety first in my decision making.  Furthermore, the fact that I am going is not a sign of disrespect to those of you who have dissented.  Let’s all pray that I have God’s protection throughout.

 

So now for the story of what it takes to get a Sudanese visa…  While I watched a Swedish couple get their visa in a few hours last week, I applied two weeks ago.  Starting last Thursday, I have spent anywhere from one to three hours each day at the Sudanese Consulate just to find out if my application has been approved (supposedly by the Sudanese President al-Bashir himself, though I question if that actually happens).  Finally yesterday I just stayed around for four hours harassing the consulate guy, Yassir, who has been on a first-name basis with me for nearly a week now.  After these four hours he led me to a room in the back of the consulate where a older Sudanese man in a brown tailored suit sat, staring at his computer screen.  After a minute of silence (and only a vague acknowledgement of my existence), he fumbled with his printer mumbling, “busy, what?”  Turning to me he asked if knew anything about printers.

 

Seeing that he hadn’t even touched my application, I thought I would take advantage of this moment to pick up some points.  A minute later I’m sitting at his desk going through is peripheral settings for his computer and he’s on his cell phone talking to his wife.  That’s when Yassir walks back in to find me at the Consulate General’s desk and the CG standing up beside me like nothings out of place.  Yassir burst with laughter.

 

After printing out some sheets I noticed they were blueprints for a house.  “My house” he announced with a touch of both hope and pride.  Looking over the plans I saw some basic issues caused some dead space in the design (most of  you don’t know this, but before I moved to New York I worked summers and weekends/evenings for a few years in construction, saving up for NYU… that was a life-time ago).  I respectfully told him, “you know, if you move this wall and this wall, and extended these rooms and move these doors, you could get rid of this dead space and make the whole place more space-efficient.”  He bought it.  He got so excited that he brought me back over to his computer to show me the location of his house on Google Earth.  After buttering him up he began the questioning:   “What do you know about Sudan?”

 

Though I wasn’t sure what the right answer was, I was pretty sure it wasn’t, “well the same government that helps you pay for this house is also sponsoring a genocide.”  Irony plays out when for the first time that I could remember, I was trying to be the dumb American.  He continued his propagandist remarks about how Sudanese are better than Egyptians, and how Sudan is “the safest country in Africa.” Right.  But with childlike naivety I led him to believe that this was great input, and that I had no idea about the country’s history or current dilemmas.  “Don’t listen to Western media, Sudanese are the nicest people in the world.”   So I responded with, “boy I do wish to get to see that inshallah.”   

 

APPROVED

 

After that, everything fell into place within a day.  More to report from the other side.

The Next Chapter: Cairo

After an enjoyable weekend in Amman while basically living out of Book@Cafe, I took a bus to Aqaba and ended up waiting 10 hours for a ferry across to Noueba, which left at 4am, and unloaded at 1pm.  That was the worse experience of the trip so far, and if wasn’t for the fact that a friendly Syrian (who also happened to be a Druze from Souada, go figure) helped me out, I may have just totally gone nuts.

Cairo has been an enjoyable experience, as after spending some time here each summer I am finally mentally prepared for the insanity that is Cairo before arriving.  Cairo is essentially the same size as New York, only you take away the infrastructure and add heat.  

My host last week was the morning DJ for Nile FM, the largest english radio station in the Arab world.  After a few days, she invited me into the studio to talk about the hospitality club we are in for such hosting (www.couchsurfing.com), and I also got to talk a bit about the chapter we are working to start in Cairo for World Faith.  It was funny to do an interview on the radio that wasn’t focused on World Faith, but rather talking about someone else’s project.  The interview will be posted on the World Faith website soon.

So after getting settled here, I met with Mustafa Abdullah, the leader of the World Faith chapter in Winston-Salem, and with Catherine Manfre, who is going to be our new Regional Director for Egypt.  After some meetings we came up with our plan of attack, and are hosting an interest meeting for the chapter this Tuesday at Pottery Cafe, across from American University of Cairo (Where Catherine had studied).  We already have quite a few interested people, and I think it will be a very interesting meeting… these sort of things get me re-inspired and remind me why I even do this in the first place.  More to report as afterwards.

Finally, after going to the Sudanese Embassy, I found out that my application for Sudan has to be personally signed by President Bashir, who was indicted by the ICC the same day I applied… I have no idea if I am going to get this visa or not.  Furthermore I have spent most the money I set aside for this trip already, so I am digging a little deeper than I feel comfortable with, but c’est la vie.  STILL reaching out to funders and seeing if we can get some real funding behind World Faith, as we still have done all that we have on less than $20,000 in the past two years.  I apologize that most of my blogs right now are commentary, but I hope to expand into more exploratory discussions when I am not traveling… Right now I am using the blog to keep people updated that I haven’t been able to single out and update.  More to come, as usual…

Meet the Druze

Well the past few days were a prime example of when things go quite differently than you expect.  Upon leaving Beirut towards Damascus, I got held up waiting for the Syrian visa, which is par for the course.  This time however, rather than taking two hours (as it was in January) they took five hours.  By this time it was 10:30 pm, and there were no cabs in sight.

 

Then that’s when things get interesting.  A woman had heard me talking to another man there about finding a taxi, and recognized that I am not native (my broken Arabic is a bit of a giveaway), and told her husband that they should help me since I am a foreigner.  After looking around he said he saw no foreigner, but she ensued and he invited me in their car to get a ride to Damascus.

 

Rather then following old adage of “stranger danger,” I took a chance and accepted.  On the way after our introductions we all discovered that we were heading to Amman, them two days later, and me the next day.  Maen, the husband, proposed, “How about this, why don’t you come to Souaida with us, join us at my parents home, meet my children, and then come with us to Amman.  You can be our guest.”  I accepted.

 

Souaida, a town of Christians and Druze, is a decent-sized town complete with a market, but show no signs of foreigner presence.  Being Druze, they shared with me stories of their prophets and traditions.  One in particular that stuck out was that of Nafs al-Kulliyya.  He told me about how Nafs al-Kulliyya was a prophet before Easaa (arabic name for Jesus), and he was arrested, and eventually beheaded, having his head put on a platter.  That’s when I made the connection and told him that in english we call him John the Baptist, which ended up being the same name literally translated.

 

I told him that John the Baptist is burried in Damascus, in the center of what was once a church, but now is the Ummayad Mosque.  In another part of the mosque is where the head of Hussain, a Shiia leader from early Islamic times, is kept.  Finally, just outside the Ummayad Mosque, is the tomb of Salah-Ad-Din, known in english as Saladin.  Saladin, a Kurd, led the Mamaluks against the Crusaders.  So essentially, the Druze have a shrine to a Christian messenger who is burried in a Mosque, betweeen a Shiia leader’s head and a Mujjahadin tomb.  You can’t make this stuff up.

 

It is hard to encapsulate the intensity of being a guest to Arabs.  No opportunity to give abundantly is left unexploited, as I am overfed, rested, and they took care of me as my health turned and my sore throat became a flu, complete with coughing, sneezing, running nose, and the works.  Also, they brought me to their holy sites, as Druze, that were in their area.  It was such a great learning experience, both about their culture and religion, as well as how to be a guest that accepts hospitality (those of you who know me well know I get uncomfortable in these type of situations, as I usually do things for myself).  Today we drove together from their hometown to Amman, where we parted ways.  Whether informed by their faith, culture, or intuation, their hospitality will always be remember.  This gave me a chance to see a different side of Syria.  More to come as my travels progress.

With Love from Beirut

Greetings from Beirut!

On this Fourth of July I will be celebrating with some friends here Beirut, most of which don’t know what the holiday is or what it represents, but are joining me for supposed “moral support.”

After graduating, I have decided to push World Faith full-time as a volunteer. While I am still sending our organizational plan to foundations and other contacts in search of funding that permits me to sustainably continue this pertinent work, I am also traveling to make it more “fundable.” Essentially, if there was something holding back a potential funder from supporting World Faith, I want to remove it.

So I am in Beirut now, working to help the local chapter here, 2gether, regroup after some of their key members left the country after the last bout of violence. The issue raises a more general trend, that the social entrepreneurs and promising leaders of the future leave, draining Lebanon of some of its greatest talent for the future.

Next week I will go to Amman, through Damascus, for a few days, finishing the week in Cairo. I’ll meet up with Mustafa Abdullah, the leader of Winston-Salem for World Faith chapter, to start cultivating our contacts there to see if a chapter can be started there as well. I look forward to returning to Cairo and seeing some good friends of mine, like Michael Esso, a fun-loving but dependable friend, and Angie Balata, a humbling and inspiring friend who is as quick-witted as she is sharp-tongued. Other friends await and I know it will be a good trip. I’m awaiting details, but it still looks I will continue on to Khartoum, Sudan to do the same.

While working here, at the moment from the United Lebanon Foundation’s office, I have been inspired at the value of human contact. For instance, when I flew into Beirut I had no reservation for a hotel, so I returned to the hotel we stayed at when we did the first trip of The Lebanon Project back in January. Not only did the manager, and most the staff, remember me, but he refused to charge more than half the listed price a night. Le Marly Hotel is a friend of World Faith.

Also, the frustrated state of the Lebanese population has never been more apparent. Upon passing a photo of Rafik Hariri, and digitized numbers next to him: 1 2 3 4. I asked my taxi driver what the numbers were… It has been 1,234 days since the (likely Syrian) assassination of Hariri. Yet in these few years, the Lebanese have survived more political stability than the US has since the US Civil War. Some have lost hope, resorting to accepting the status quo, or leaving Lebanon. Others retain hope, but wait for the blood-stained political leaders, virtually all guilty of crimes against humanity during the Lebanese Civil War, with non-regional and non-religious leaders who seek to unify Lebanon. However, I have found very few that are inspired enough to take action. One in particular sticks out to me.

If there were an interfaith project happening anywhere in greater Beirut, Nader Houella would be there, and there is a likely chance he had something to do with the planning. In a country of memories, Nader dreams. I don’t think I have talked to Nader on one occasion without him telling me of an idea he has had. Beyond this, he actually works to carry them out, a trait hard to come by in Lebanon. We are talking about putting together a unity concert for August, and I do believe it will happen. More to come as details progress.

In Closing…

this is my official write-up for the end of my Fellowship with the Interfaith Youth Core:

Reflecting on the past year as a part of IFYC Fellows Alliance is a difficult undertaking. Though the intent initially was likely based on trainings and campus work, I feel like the best parts of it were by-products of this intent, such as the great opportunities I was granted from the IFYC, and the potentially life-lasting friendships that started out of the fellowship.
On campus here at New York University I can definitely say that being a part of the IFYC Fellows Alliance assisted in my work, and that of our group World Faith. Starting out, we had great trouble getting recognized from the existing faith-oriented groups on campus, who simply did not take our mission seriously. That was acerbated by the fact that what interfaith events did take place on campus were usually dialogue-based, and faith-specific. However, between the connecting with the IFYC, other breakthroughs we had at World Faith, and the result of some of the great opportunities during the Fellowship, I was able to generate enough credibility to expand our programs, including co-programming with most of the larger faith-oriented groups on campus.
Our focus on bringing the discourse of religion back into the university also had institutional effects. After partnering with different groups on campus, we successfully lobbied the university to adopt chaplaincy, starting with four paid chaplains and several volunteers, giving religious guidance for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus on campus. Furthermore, the president of New York University announced the creation of an Interfaith Center, while the administration works to purchase space for such a center, which will likely cost some $20-50 million dollars upon completion. Though I was not alone in this, nor World Faith the only force, but we were an integral part of the student mobilization for these changes.
Our programs also have grown in participation, while our first events were often attended by only a hand-full of participants, World Faith has grown to holding our Week of Interfaith Youth Service, in which 120 participants got involved in one of our four interfaith community service programs, including one day where over 60 participants volunteered city-wide in hospitals, parks, and homeless shelters. Furthermore, we teamed up with an initiative started by NYU students (who I was put in contact with their IFYC) to send ten religiously-diverse students to Lebanon to do service work with local students. Altogether, with the help of the Fellows Alliance, World Faith, under my leadership, has had a pivotal role in reshaping the role faith plays both in campus life and in service at New York University. With my passing the leadership on to younger students for next year, I expect that the impact will continue to develop.
For my personal development, I definitely feel that one aspect of the training given to Fellows by IFYC did help me greatly. Language, whether speaking to students, or speaking to the media, is imperative to effectively deliver your message, while catering to your audience. I feel the staff greatly influenced my tightening of language describing the mission of interfaith service throughout the year, including great advice given to me by Cassie Meyers and April Kunze during the Q Conference this April.
Also, being that I have chosen to take one the interfaith world professionally, IFYC has given me many great opportunities to exercise the advice and training that they gave. During the year I was interviewed on two radio shows, and Good Morning America with the Fellowship, with prepared me for other interview. Whether with IFYC’s help, suggestion, or mandate, I also attended six conferences during the year, during which at some I spoke, presented, or was publicly recognized for the my interfaith work during this year. Being in New York, they recommended for many great opportunities, including meeting with a Saudi Dean traveling as a visitor with the US State Department’s International Leadership program. These are just a few of the great opportunities the IFYC gave me during my year with the Fellow’s Alliance. Not only did they encourage further personal and professional development, they gave credibility to the work I have devoted so much time and effort to during the year.
The contact network I have developed with IFYC’s staff’s help is global and powerful, and I am sure that I will continue to utilize it as a develop World Faith further as an organization, but I do not believe that even the contacts are the most valuable aspect of the year. I believe the most lasting impact of the Fellow’s Alliance on my life with be that of personal connections.
The fellowship will most likely remind me of the mixture of parsing Bob Marley lyrics, discussing theological friction-points, and theorizing program ideas with Soofia Ahmed, Farah Qureshi, and Hafsa Kanjal. Or perhaps having some of the most blunt discourses possible with Jessica Kent and Anne Bouthilette. Even possibly being completely and obnoxiously unproductive and crazy with Joshua Stanton and Nadeem Modan, or holding jovial yet inspiring conversations with Austin Maness. Every Fellow represents more than a contact to me, but a memory and a friend. The staff of IFYC represents more than just human resource, but mentors and family. As a Christian, I believe that God is Love, and where Love is, God has blessed. This rubric elucidates the value of our work, as we are able to live as examples of what interfaith cooperative can look like, in a world of compassion and understanding.
As I conclude this paragraph, I am completely my year-long commitment to the Fellow’s Alliance. However, with the end of the Fellowship, I see the beginning of a career in making the interfaith movement, a long journey in personal growth in faith, and life-long friendships that will remind us why we even bothered to try to make a difference in the first place.

In Peace and Love,

Frank Fredericks
Former IFYC Fellow

The Lunge: The Conviction becomes a Life Sentence

So the big question everyone is asking me:

“Frank, What’s next?”

Other than praying that I don’t fail my final two classes and working hard at the Italian culture organization, I have reached an epiphany. I will work full-time on World Faith after I graduate. I will take the Lunge

If finding a job isn’t intimidating, most people think it is crazy to attempt to be self-employed. However I am going a step further and doing so with a non-profit. I also run a record label, but I very well may close it during the summer if it does not progress profitably. So I will begin working to secure funding for the project between now and graduation. If by graduation we have not raised sufficient funds for full-time support, I will continue with my summer plans of developing and building our projects in India, Lebanon, and Egypt.

In the meantime we are considering adding a new program to the World Faith network which will essentially be a music camp for Palestinian and Israeli children in Israel. We are exploring logistically how that association would take form. Our programming team at NYU has grown to over 10 as begin planning for our WEEK of Interfaith Service, coming this April. This will be my last event as Chapter President of World Faith NYU, and begin my journey of realizing the worthy ideal of World Faith.

That’s all for now. I wish I had more to write, but as the opportunities abound, ambiguity resides. In the next 6 weeks I will be in conferences in Boston, the CGI in New Orleans, Chicago, and on a panel at the Q Conference in NYC. I see that my past two posts, over a month old each, are still on the top list, so its nice to know someone else out there is reading. As long as that’s the case I will try to keep writing…

The Lebanon Project: The Beginning and the Next Step

A vision is something that is extremely personal, hard to express, and harder to manifest. I know this as I have spent most my time and effort on building my own vision of World Faith. The Lebanon Project was not my vision, but the vision of some inspired and quick-to-mobilize NYU students who wanted to lead a service-learning project to Lebanon with the backing of World Faith. Organizationally this is ideal as each World Faith project should not require micromanagement, and decentralization is a key term I use frequently when describing the evolution of World Faith. However, on The Lebanon Project’s first service-learning trip, I had the blessing of joining them as a participant.

I arrived in Beirut as tired as the rest of us after two days of travel (and many unsuccessful attempts at solving a rubic’s cube I bought for the journey); a group of 10 students, diverse in many ways. From Muslims to Christians, Jews and Agnostics, We as a group had to have at least 17 passports among us, as we were such an ethnically diverse group. We immediately all expressed a touch of shock to find the irony of Lebanon: The nation which represents so many headlines of political instability and religious friction is not only clean and modern, but cosmopolitan and relatively calm.

The service-learning projects were varied but revealing. After touring the destruction in the south of Lebanon, we brought art supplies to an UNRWA refugee school for Palestinian children. As we encouraged the each student to draw their idea of peace, we were quickly shown the varied ideologies of peace: a map of Palestine with a fence around, a flaming building with rockets flying at it, and a field with what appeared to be children running in it. I inquired about the latter. The child said to me that he understood peace to be when, “children can play together; Christian and Muslim children, and even Jewish Children.” Amazing. What Martin Luther King spoke at age 34, this refugee child unknowingly reflected at age eight.

From the varied service-learning projects and dialogue events we had, one theme was definitely revealed to me, which completed some unfinished thoughts from previous travels in the region. After this trip (in which I also went to Syria), I have now personally been in Palestine/Israel, and every country that borders it. I have the heard the same stories from many perspectives; more than one per country. This trip, especially with our time spent in the south, particularly in the Beqa’a Valley, had a tendency to come back to the wars and occupations with Israel, being in 1975, 1982, or 2006. I realized that as Americans, we have a tendency to only see the headlines and the numbers at best, if we are even informed of that much. After meeting our volunteer guide through the south Mohammad, I learnt that his home had been leveled in 2006, “collateral damage.” Now I can no longer think of the situation of 2006 in sheer numbers and headlines. I suffered from this disconnect before this trip, even though in 2006 I was only 100 miles away, working on the US State Department’s evacuation, but I still had missed this great lesson that was revealed to me: When you go and meet people on their terms in their homeland, and you hear their story, regardless of your political opinions, you must put a human face to the headlines and statistics. The humanization of all parties makes you see conflict in new light. THIS IS A MODERATING FORCE.

When the service-learning trip ended, and my fellow participants returned to New York, and I began my next journey (after a slight detour to Damascus, in which I was ridiculously ill). I met with several leaders of interfaith work in Beirut to learn about the history and past failures of interfaith work in Lebanon (including some projects that ended in death threats), and I met with young minds frustrated with the current state of affairs who have the ideas but not the forum to share them. After my week of learning as much as I could about the role of religion in politics and media, I rented out a local café’s meeting room and held an open meeting for anyone interested in interfaith projects in Lebanon, about three hours before I had to be at the airport for my return flight.

Ten religiously diverse young people, from age 19 to 26, met me there. After briefly sharing my own experience, I allowed the attendees to share their own views and frustrations. I noticed a theme, so I asked a friend of mine present, Ziad, why when we met and I asked how he identified himself, he answered, “a citizen,” and not “Christian,” or “Muslim.” He answered, and the others agreed, that, “Our political parties, the structure of our society, is all built on religious lines, which is hurting the unity of Lebanon, we need to secularize!”

I responded to him with a dilemma, “But then if our generation is fixated on secularization, what is left in the discourse of religion in politics and the media? The conversation is dominated by those who use the religious language for division and disunity.” So I proposed, “Rather than secularizing, what if we pluralize, in that we respond in the public discourse with religious language applied to unity and peace-building?” The conversation stretched over two hours, and it resulted in everyone in attendance agreeing to meet a week later to design their own interfaith service team, as a World Faith chapter in Lebanon. I was ecstatic. I flew back, worn out yet inspired, and solved the rubic’s cube in the Moscow Airport. A week later, they came together and met, bringing in some new friends, and agreed on a name (“2gether”), and slated their first event for March 1. As one of them recently wrote me, “The journey begins…”

What is both inspiring and frustrating is that with all the groundbreaking work I have seen World Faith be blessed with in contributing, inciting, inspiring and facilitating, we have done it with relatively little funds. Everyone is volunteers, and we are still waiting for our non-profit status to finalize. We are a few weeks away from opening applications for our Humari Dunya project in India slated for June (led by the amazing and inspiring Soofia Ahmed), which we need to fundraise for, and since I have returned to the US less than two weeks ago, I have received messages from people interested in start local World Faith chapters in four more locations. We are also working with a local organization and the City of New York to create a pilot program of developing a protocol for houses of worship to mobilize as proselytizing-free Ready Receiving Centers in emergency situations of different sorts, which I hope to export to other World Faith chapters in the world. Even in publicity, we have been hugely blessed, as in the past four months I have personally done three TV interviews (including Good Morning America), two radio interviews and one print. I am three months away from graduating and pray that I will be blessed with the opportunity to go full-time with World Faith, and the biggest uncertainty is the financial viability of such a plan. I am working on sustainability programs as well, but even those require starting capital. So I am going to continue with what we have, but in the coming months I will be also begin reaching some of the limits of what we can do. So I work in faith that the means will become available as the scope of our projects increase, even as the speed of growth continues to amaze me week by week.

Relavant links: http://www.worldfaith.org

http://www.worldfaith.org/tlp

http://www.myspace.com/worldfaith

بنروح لي لوبنان بوكرا

Tomorrow I am leaving for Lebanon.

This is a big milestone for World Faith (the interfaith service project organization we are starting here in NYC), as this is our first international project. We are taking 10 religiously diverse students from New York to team up with religiously diverse Lebanese students to do some service learning projects, including volunteering at a Palestinian refugee school, as well as leading interfaith dialogue trainings at a local university, which also may be televised.

This comes at a tamulchuous time, as Lebanon was put on the Travel Warning list for the State Dept again this October, and they currently do not have a president. Though I want to enjoy this project to its fullest, I realized that unlike my previous travels where I was alone, I now have responsibility for others, in a time and place prone to disaster. Disaster has been the greatest identifying mark for Lebanon in my mind, as my experience of the Lebanese evacuation in 2006 still hovers in the back of my head.

However, I look forward to what is in store for us. I will be staying an extra week after the project to meet with local leaders of the NGO and non-profit world in order to see if we can build a team of mobilized students to more consistently do work in Beirut, as we do in New York. If any one reading this knows people in Lebanon who would be interested in meeting, please let me know and feel free to email your contact and cc me (frank@worldfaith.org). Hope all is well with everyone and your families.

Happy New Year!