Transcription of Higher Education #55
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Campbell: That’s one of the real problems, that a lot of the parents have less education than the kids do. If you’re not getting that from home, then what reason do you really have to continue studying and to continue pursuing that higher level of education.
Spencer: On one hand it has everything to do with study abroad and learning how to speak a foreign language, but on the other hand, it’s really about learning how to live with a different family. A family other than your own.
Dave: So to me, becoming enlightened is about washing away all of the stuff which obscures a person. It’s a bit like when a sculptor comes across a piece of raw stone and starts to chisel it away, because they can see inside a beautiful statue.
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Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast. Show number 55. Higher Education. Airing for the first time on September 30th 2012, on WLOB and WPEI Radio, Portland Maine.
On today’s show we feature long term, Safe Passage volunteer Campbell Belisle-Haley, Spencer Jones from CIEE, and spiritual teacher Dave Oshana.
When we think of higher education, we often think about colleges, and universities, and campuses of great thoughts, and books and knowledge being shared, but really, when you seek to learn, you can learn it from many different places, and most of all, you can learn it from yourself. One of the reasons that we had my son, Campbell Belisle-Haley come in and talk to us today about his time spent in Guatemala, is that he received quite an education after leaving Yarmouth High School and spending time with the children who’s families really earn a living at the Guatemala city dump.
Not only did he learn about the bounty that we have here in the United States, but he learned about the bounty that the children and their families have in Guatemala City. He learned how to speak Spanish. He learned how to manage his money. He learned how to do his own laundry. He learned what it was like to be in a different culture. All of these were learned outside the walls of an institution.
We have Spencer Jones coming on to talk to us today about CIEE, because this is just such an organization that promotes learning outside traditional walls. Spencer happens to be my neighbor and also a fellow of the Yarmouth High School graduate.
As a special treat, we’ll be speaking with spiritual teacher Dave Oshana, who joined up via Skype from Finland. Dave will actually going to be offering enlightenment demystified program, coming up here in Portland on October 4th. We hope you’ll get some prior education from Dave as well.
I’d also like to mention an upcoming event that’s been part of the community and a place where I’ve been myself. This is the Maine Cancer Foundation’s Cure Cancer for Maine Luncheon, which is taking place this Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012, at 11:30 at Holiday Inn by the Bay. Some long-time listeners, you will recognize the Maine Cancer Foundation as being involved with Maine’s Try for a Cure. October being breast cancer awareness month, we thought this would be appropriate time to mention this up coming event. In fact, Meredith Strang Burgess will be talking on our breast health show later in October.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour has been an interesting experience for me as a physician. It’s been extremely interesting to sit across the microphone, from not only my sister, Dr. Amy Belisle, who happened to be in our children’s health show, but also from my son, Campbell Belisle-Haley. It continues to teach me about the importance of family and community, and learning from the people who are around you.
I thought it might be nice to share a quote from the book, Our Daily Tread, which was created for Safe Passage and is still available for sale through Islandport Press Books. This quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” That is what I’ve learned over the past year with the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, is that much of what we need to know is already in us, we just need to recognize it as being beautiful. Thank you for joining us today. We hope you enjoy our show with my son Campbell Belisle-Haley, Spencer Jones, and Dave Oshana.
Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast is pleased to be sponsored by the University of New England. As part of our collaboration with the University of New England, we offer a segment we call Wellness Innovations. This wellness innovation is about spiritual assessment. 80% of patients and family physicians perceive religion to be important. Supporting spiritual beliefs is a key component of holistic patient centered care. The spiritual assessment allows physicians to support patients by stress empathetic listening, documenting spiritual preferences for future visits, incorporating the precepts of the patient’s faith traditions into treatment plans, and encouraging patients to use the resources of their spiritual traditions and communities for over all wellness.
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Dr. Lisa: In today’s show, I’m privileged to have in the studio with me, someone who is objectively, I think, a very fine individual. Subjectively, he’s my son, so I think he’s pretty fine from that standpoint. I’ve watched the child grow up. He’s a child of my heart. This is Campbell Belisle-Haley. I think he has something really important to tell us about higher education, which is what our show is about today, higher education. Campbell was educated at Yarmouth High School and graduated in, last year. Yarmouth is my alma mater. We both received a fine education there, but then he went on into something a little bit different. He’s getting ready to go to the University of Maine to major in biochemistry, but I think you received an education in a way, perhaps that he hadn’t thought he might, in the last year. Thanks for coming in and talking to us today.
Campbell: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Campbell, tell me, what did you do last year? Where did you go?
Campbell: Over the past year I’ve been living in Guatemala and volunteering at Safe Passage or Camino Seguro, which is a non-profit organization that works in the Guatemala city dump community.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you become interested in that organization?
Campbell: Well, this is the question that I’ve been asked many times. It’s always sort of a different answer because there’s many different connections, there’s many different things that led to me volunteering at Safe Passage. One of which being that, obviously you knew Hanley Denning, and you helped write Our Daily Tread book for Safe Passage. Of course we live in Yarmouth, which is the home of Safe Passage in the United States. I just had heard from many people that it was a good opportunity to expand your boundaries and learn in a different way.
Dr. Lisa: There were other students that you knew from Yarmouth and other area high schools who had also volunteered at Safe Passage, which is also called Camino Seguro.
Campbell: Right. There are a bunch of groups that came down from my high school, just for a week to volunteer at Safe Passage. There are also a fair amount of long-term volunteers that I knew of or knew personally. I was able to talk to them and learn more about the experience, learn more about Safe Passage, and it helped me make my decision that much easier to go volunteer down there for a year.
Dr. Lisa: You could have stayed home and worked. You could have gone to other places. Instead, you chose to go to a third world country, where the standards of living are very different from here. What types of things did you learn from that, and describe the situation down there.
Campbell: It’s an interesting situation. They don’t have the same comforts that we have here, obviously, it’s a whole different field of people. Most of the people are living in very different places than we’re used to. The biggest difference is that they take everything that they have, they take everything that they don’t have, and they just turn it into happiness. They’re just very very happy people in Guatemala.
Dr. Lisa: They’re very happy, despite some of the conditions you observed?
Campbell: Right. I have the perspective of seeing both the conditions that they live in and the conditions we live, so I can see it from both sides. For them, they really don’t know anything different. They’ve been living like that, their parents have been living like that, their grandparents have been living in that way and they don’t really have the perspective that we have, coming from a much wealthier nation, a much wealthier area.
Dr. Lisa: Can you paint a little bit of a picture for the people who are listening who may not be familiar with Safe Passage or the organizations work in Guatemala City. What types of conditions are we talking about?
Campbell: Well, Safe Passage services 550 children who live around the Guatemala city dump. The way the Guatemala city dump is where it’s set up, it’s there a number of workers that pick garbage from the dump or try to find resources that they can sell from the city dump. They obviously go and collect them and come out of the dump and sell them. We work primarily with the children of the families of the people living in that area. Whether they work in the dump, or whether they work in another area that’s not directly connected to the dump, or they just are completely disconnected from the dump, we work with, primarily, the families that live in zone 7 and zone 3 around that area.
Dr. Lisa: These are families that don’t have a lot of money.
Campbell: No. The people who work in the city dump make around $10 a day. A single working person, collecting garbage, collecting plastic, collecting metal, will make about $10 in any given day.
Dr. Lisa: This is not a pretty dump. It’s not a landfill or a transfer station, this is a dump with open garbage and big trucks that come and dump trash on the ground and wild dogs and vultures, and snow.
Campbell: It’s a lot less developed than what we have in the United States, , but I don’t know if I ever seen a pretty dump, but in terms of the dumps that I’ve seen, it’s on the lower echelon.
Dr. Lisa: It’s also, it’s large, it runs right through the center of the city, and it’s big.
Campbell: It’s gigantic. You can see it from three different, four different zones in Guatemala city. It encompasses a whole area. That’s how we’re able to connect to that many people, because it’s just so massive in its self.
Dr. Lisa: You talk about the happiness of these children. I know you saw this at different ages, because you started out there as a volunteer with the four year old classroom?
Campbell: Right.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about that experience and tell me what types of things you noticed about the children at that age?
Campbell: The children of that age just need more love, I noticed, than the people who are around that age that live in America. They’re very happy, they’re very happy living in the situation that they live in. They just need more personal connection. They need more hugs than kids that I’ve worked with in America.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve actually coached kids in soccer and other sports in that age range, roughly, here.
Campbell: Right. Before I went to Guatemala, I was a soccer coach and a summer camp coach for three or four years for kids that live in Yarmouth, from ages around probably closer to six or seven. Probably closer to first grade, up until eight grade, freshman year.
Dr. Lisa: So you were able to contrast that with these children, that even though they were a little bit younger, what they seemed to need was the contact and the attachment, and the affection and the relationship.
Campbell: Right. Right. We have a very nice family system in America. A very developed sense of family in that we expect to have a mother and a father in the picture.
Dr. Lisa: Kind of a nuclear family idea.
Campbell: Right, right.
Dr. Lisa: They don’t have that in Guatemala city? Is that what your suggesting?
Campbell: I’m suggesting that there are a lot of factors that play into them not necessarily having that same level of development of their family system.
Dr. Lisa: So maybe a little bit less stable in some cases?
Campbell: Yeah. Of the families that I worked with, there’s very few father’s that are in the picture. Generally the mom’s in the picture, although sometimes she’s not. There are very few nuclear families among the people who live around the Guatemala city dump.
Dr. Lisa: The first part of the year, you were with the four year olds.
Campbell: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Then you moved up to being a tutor and tutoring older children.
Campbell: There was another transitional step in between there.
Dr. Lisa: Okay. So what did you do in the transitional step?
Campbell: I went down in October or November, I worked with the four year olds. I was a classroom assistant. I basically helped them brush their teeth, play with puzzles, and helped to implement the planting seeds methodology that’s used in the Guateria. Then in January, I moved to the main building, which is where the older kids go, kids older than six. There I was also a classroom volunteer, but the help was a little bit different in that I helped them with their homework, I taught them a little bit of English, I gave them more academic help. Then in April I became a full-time tutor. That was where I was giving individual attention to about 25 kids on a weekly basis, to help them with any math or reading concerns that they were having.
Dr. Lisa: You had to take your high school level Spanish and bring it to a whole new level as a teacher down in Guatemala city with Safe Passage.
Campbell: Spanish was a little bit tricky for me. I’d never been a language learner. I’ve always struggled with that. I’ve always been a math and science guy. As you’ve said, I’m majoring in biochemistry. Spanish took a little while for me. Going down in October I really couldn’t have worked with anybody besides the four year old, because I couldn’t really communicate with older kids. I couldn’t really communicate at a conversational level. I really had to work hard to develop that to the point where I could teach math and I could teach reading in Spanish.
Dr. Lisa: You did that from April until August. Did you find that you yourself continued to learn Spanish and skills in teaching?
Campbell: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a fun learning process. Learning a new language while you’re in a country that speaks that language is a much more intriguing and much more interesting process than it is learning in a class room. I soaked up every word, every phrase. I love speaking Guatemalan Spanish. I really enjoyed learning the language.
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Dr. Lisa: As you know, the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast is focused on the mind body and soul. Sometimes our bodies are giving us a little indication that maybe things aren’t quite right. Here to talk to us about some particular things that we can listen to when our bodies are acting up, is Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialist in Falmouth, Maine. Today’s diagnosis is rotator cuff tear. Dr. John.
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Dr. Lisa: You went from Yarmouth High School, which is pretty suburban, Maine, pretty suburban many places actually. Although, possibly a little bit more privileged than many places, to this very stark contrasted place, geographically and otherwise. Did you experience culture shock?
Campbell: A little bit. I heard a lot more about culture shock than I feel like I actually experiences. I definitely experienced some difficult transitions from living here to living in Guatemala and then when I came back I experienced those same transitions. I don’t really know if I would label it as culture shock. I don’t really know if I’d really had an experience where I was just like, “Wow, this is so different I can’t deal with this right now.” You just sort of take it in stride and you just adjust as you go.
Dr. Lisa: What about living on your own. You had parents and sisters and a house and things kind of taken care of for you for the first 18 years. What happened when you were all by yourself in a foreign country with so much money and having to get yourself back and forth?
Campbell: Right. That was probably the most difficult transition. I think that learning Spanish and being able to connect with my kids was really difficult, but that, in addition to the fact that I went home and you weren’t there and my dad wasn’t there, neither of my sisters, none of my friends from home were there, was, I think, the most difficult part of living in Guatemala and being down there for a year.
Dr. Lisa: You developed friendships with people that kind of, I don’t know, substituted a family, perhaps?
Campbell: I consider most of my really close guy friends down there to be my brothers. My friends who were girls that also work in Camino Seguro, have just been like my older sisters for the past six months. It’s very incredible. I’ve developed some incredible relationships with all the people who work down there and live down there.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that the children and the families that are involved with Safe Passage, which has been going on a little bit more than a decade, I think.
Campbell: ’99.
Dr. Lisa: Yep. So it was founded in ’99. They have 500 children now. Do you think that these children perhaps value education more, or maybe don’t take it for granted as much as we might in this country?
Campbell: They’re put in a situation where it’s much easier for them to value education. They are contrasting with maybe another set of Guatemalan children who aren’t in Safe Passage. They have more of the opportunity to feel like learning is important. That’s one of the two, I think, the two most important things that Safe Passage does. Making the students feel like their education is worth while, that their education is a really important part of their lives. I think Safe Passage is able to do that. It’s not a school, we’re a reinforcement center and we’re just there so that the kids are passing their classes, their getting help with their homework, and of course, help from the social worker.
Dr. Lisa: So what happens is the younger students, they are educated at Safe Passage, the older students, they go to school somewhere else and then come to Safe Passage for school assistance and tutoring, like the tutoring you offer.
Campbell: Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: There’s also a program for women who have children in the Safe Passage program, to actually get, I think, the equivalent of a GED?
Campbell: Yes. We have two different programs for the adult literacy program. We have the moms that come in, usually during the day. They usually spend a significant amount of their day studying at Safe Passage. They’re working to either get a Premadia education, which is up to sixth grade, or a basico education, which is up through like freshman year in high school. The really high over achiever are working to get an education, which is like in high school, a GED equivalent.
We also have the program that the dads complete. We have a group of dads that usually come in at night because they’re working during the day and they’re trying to make money for their family. They come in during the night and they’re also working towards those goals. That’s one of the real problems, is that a lot of the parents have less education than the kids do. If you’re not getting that from home, then what reason do you really have to continue studying and to continue pursuing that higher level of education.
Dr. Lisa: You’re trying to create a culture within the household so that what you are doing at Safe Passage and at the children’s schools gets reinforced at home.
Campbell: Right. There are actually a few model families at Safe Passage. These are the ones where three of the kids go to Safe Passage, maybe there’s one in the Guateria or the pre-school. And there’s two in the main building, and then there’s the dads working but also trying to be in the adult literacy program. The mom’s in the adult literacy program. They just grasp everything, they take advantage of everything that Safe Passage has to offer. That’s really the culture that we’re trying to create, where education is important, education is worth a lot.
Dr. Lisa: I picked you up at the airport, I don’t know, a week ago, something like that. You’re starting college. As we’re taping this, you’re going to college for the first time tomorrow.
Campbell: Tomorrow, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: That’s not much time in this country, but you did spend some time with your friends. How do you think your experience over the last year contrasted with the experience of your friends who went to college last year?
Campbell: I think that me and my friends both received an education, but both received a very very different education. A lot of my friends have been talking to me about their introductory bio classes or their calculus classes. I don’t really have anything to add from that perspective but I can talk to them all day about just teaching math and teaching Spanish, and giving love to little ninos.
Dr. Lisa: Little ninos. How do you think this will impact your future plans?
Campbell: I think that it’s just given me a stronger perspective. Keep in mind that I’m not 19 years old yet, so I don’t really want to make any big plans right now.
Dr. Lisa: There’s no pressure.
Campbell: Without even being in college. But I definitely will take this whole experience into consideration when I’m deciding what I want to do, what career path I want to go down, what decisions I want to make with my life. More importantly, the thing that Guatemala has, I think, has given me most of all, is a perspective about family. I think more than anything, I’ve learned a lot of Spanish. I’ve learned how to teach. I’ve learned how to live by myself, but just the idea that family is the most important thing is probably the greatest things that I’ve taken from Guatemala.
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s an appropriate way to end my conversation with you. My son, Campbell Belisle-Haley, who has been a long-term volunteer with the organization Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro, in Guatemala city. Thank you for being here with me today Campbell.
Campbell: Thank you for having me mom.
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Dr. Lisa: When we think about higher education, we do think about colleges, we think about universities, we think about advanced degrees, but there is a type of education that you get from just living out in the world. Today we have with us, Spencer Jones, who is the general manager of Gateway programs with the Counsel on International Educational Exchange. Which is also know as CIEE. He happens to be our neighbor, right down the street, fourth street here in Portland. Thank you for coming in today.
Spencer: It’s great to be here.
Dr. Lisa: You happen to be my neighbor in Yarmouth also, so it’s kind of interesting.
Spencer: That is true, and we went to the same high school.
Dr. Lisa: And we did. So talk about higher education. You graduated a few years before I did. Obviously, a fellow Clipper and somebody who’s gone out into the world to do bigger things.
Spencer: Well, I’ve gone out into the world, like so many of us do, and had a lot of interesting experiences. I’m glad to report that I’m moved back to Maine and live in Yarmouth Maine again.
Dr. Lisa: That is an interesting thing to note, that you lived abroad, I think in South America, is that what I remember?
Spencer: That’s right, in Chili, and in Miami for eight years, which I think counts at Latin America in many ways.
Dr. Lisa: You decided to come back.
Spencer: Absolutely. I think that for anybody, when they start to have children, the pull of having your parents grandchildren closer together is a strong pull, and that was certainly part of our thinking.
Dr. Lisa: For you the brain drain then, that is said to exist here in Maine, isn’t quite as real.
Spencer: Well, I don’t know if I would say it isn’t real. There was a long period of time, certainly over 20 year where I moved away from Maine and then didn’t come back very often. There was certainly a period of time where I was away, a most significant one.
Dr. Lisa: But you’re back.
Spencer: Yep.
Dr. Lisa: And you brought CIEE here to Portland.
Spencer: Well, I wouldn’t want to take credit for that personally. CIEE used to be in New York City and in Boston. It has two fairly large divisions. They were each located in those two cities. In 2003, which was before I started working with the organization, the decision was made to bring the entire company together and bring it’s world wide headquarters here to Portland. That happened in two phases. In 2003, the division of the organization that deals with undergraduate study abroad, moved to Portland and rented space on Commercial Street. Then in 2007, the other division, which came up from Boston, and that division deals with the foreign student that come to the United States to work and study her on J1 Visas, they moved in 2007 to the newly constructed building at 300 fourth street.
Dr. Lisa: Why Maine? Why did CIEE, which has a lot of people working for it. Why did they come to Maine?
Spencer: It does have a lot of people. It’s got over 500 employees in nearly 50 cities around the world so it’s a fairly significant organization. I think at the end of the day, the decision that was made in 2002 was one of a lifestyle decision, where the senior staff involved in the organization realized that they couldn’t continue to provide a good quality of life for the people working in New York. They looked for different cities that they could move the organization to. They looked at, I think five, that included Raleigh Durham, Portsmouth, Portland, and a variety of cities like that. Portland won out in the end. It was really a decision about how to give staff a good life and provide a base for running an international business.
Dr. Lisa: What does CIEE do? It sounds like you have a lot of people working in various parts of the world to offer different experiences to people. Can you give me sort of a snap shot?
Spencer: Sure. I’m not sure you’ll always get the breadth of what we do from our website, it’s difficult to get it all on to our website. CIEE is a not for profit organization that’s been around since 1947. It is the leading provider of study abroad and international cultural exchange programs in the United States. It has a couple major areas of operation. We are the largest provider of undergraduate study abroad, particularly of the semester and year long variety. That’s an operation that’s been in existence for probably 50 years. We do that in conjunction with a consortium of over 300 colleges and universities around the country, that actually approve and guide our academic programing. Those are four credit programs that are offered through colleges and universities around the United States. That’s one large area of operation.
The next largest is that we are the single largest provider of J-Visas, sponsors of J-Visas in the United States. We provide those visas to a whole variety of foreign students who are looking for educational and cultural exchange experiences in the United States. That can range everywhere from a high school student who wants to spend a year at Yarmouth High School studying and living with a host family, to senior research scholars who are looking for a chance to do research in the United States because in their home university and their home country, they don’t have the correct kind of nuclear imaging equipment. It really ranges the whole gambit.
Then we have the third area of operation which I call the everything else bucket, which is a very large area of operation that covers smaller programs that in their aggregate constitute a large part of what we do. We operate private foundations on behalf of certain organizations, we run a large number of scholarship programs, we operate insurance companies to make sure that the program participants that we have are correctly insured within regulations and they’re safe when they’re in their respective countries. We have teach abroad programs where we find recent college graduates from the United States a paid teaching job in a foreign country. There’s just a whole range of programs that we’re involved with.
Dr. Lisa: With a broad range of programs being offered by CIEE, I’m sure that different people at different stages in their lives have different motivations. What are some of the common motivations that bring people through your door?
Spencer: Well, it’s interesting. There are a few common themes in the motivations that we see. Incidentally, it’s not just the motivations of the people who go on our programs, but it’s the motivations of other people close to those people. The one that we always joke about is the young woman who wants to study abroad and her mother. Do they have the same motivations? Sure, maybe they both want the daughter to go study abroad, but that doesn’t mean that their motivations are always the same. The daughter can be very interested in being independent and being away from, what she might see as an overbearing mother, and the mother is very interested in having the daughter learn how to speak a foreign language. Maybe the daughter feels that way, maybe she doesn’t. But they both agree that going to study abroad would be a good thing for the daughter to do.
They’re all over the place like that. The big themes are all around, ones a personal transformation, there are ones of perspective, there are ones of independence and confidence. Particularly for high school students, you’ll see that all the time, that a student will go study abroad for a year, and really what’s happening is they’re living with a family other than their own for an entire year. Just think of the kind of change that that might bring in a student.
On one hand, it has everything to do with study abroad and learning how to speak a foreign language, but on the other hand, it’s really about learning how to live with a different family, a family other than your own. Almost always, when you see high school students come back from that kind of experience, you’ll find them to be different, to be transformed, to be more confident, to be more able to plan what they’d like to do with their life. There are all those kinds of things.
We also always joke that what we really are selling is romance. I mean that in the highest sense of the word. There’s the romance of going abroad. There’s the romance of learning how to speak a new language, how to communicate with others. There’s the romance of independence. then there’s the romance of finding a boyfriend. There all those different kinds of romance, and study abroad provides a vehicle for that that’s really quite exciting.
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Dr. Lisa: How about your family. You have some boys, I happen to know.
Spencer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Lisa: Who actually have gone to school with my children.
Spencer: Right.
Dr. Lisa: I also happen to know that you’ve kind of sent them out into the world.
Spencer: We have. In fact, my own life has followed that trajectory. I grew up in little old Yarmouth Maine and I studied abroad in high school. I lived in Santiago Chili for about half a year. As I continued to grow older, I continued to study abroad. I spent my junior year abroad. I left Williams College and went to Madrid Spain and lived there for a year and studied there. You would see that reflected when I left the United States, I think in 1992. My wife and I, with a one year old child, moved to Santiago Chili and lived there for over six years. We had three more children while we were there. It really did have quite an impact on my life.
Moving back slowly to the United States, my own children have followed a similar trajectory. One that, I guess isn’t surprising, but two of my boys have studied abroad. One in Argentina, one in Spain. We’ve hosted a foreign student from Spain who still comes back and lives with us, every year it seems like. It’s been a big part of my life and a big part of my family’s life and I think it’s made a big difference.
Dr. Lisa: What types of changes have you seen in your own boys, as they’ve come back to your family after studying abroad?
Spencer: Well, it’s funny because I look at them as a father, and I see all these wonderful changes. Then if I looked at them objectively, as somebody who works in the business of study abroad, they’re pretty mundane, because that happened to everybody, but it’s really wonderful to see them as a father. They come back more confident, more able to talk to people that they don’t know, more willing to try new foods, I would say generally happier with being in Yarmouth, because they understand, they have a perspective on what’s good about a small town, what it lacks, but what it offers as well. It’s that perspective on things that probably makes it easier for them and easier for everybody.
Dr. Lisa: What advice would you offer to parents of high school students who maybe aren’t quite ready for college and the whole idea of the gap year. Is that something that you deal with?
Spencer: We absolutely do. We help students go on gap years all the time. What I would say about the gap year is it’s something that has not existed broadly in the United States. It’s something that’s becoming more prevalent. It has existed in other countries, such as Britain, for a long time. It’s rooted in this concept that not all students are ready once they graduate from high school, to make the most of their college experience, and perhaps trying something different could help them better prepare for being able to take advantage of the college experience.
For me, that can range anywhere from pumping gas at a gas station for a year, because maybe at the end of that you realize that you don’t want to do that for the rest of your life, to going and crushing grapes in Tuscany, to white water rafting or studying French in Paris with CIEE. There’s a whole broad range of things that you can do. What most people tend to see at the end of that is they tend to see people who come back that are more focused and have an idea of what they want to get out of their college experience. Therefore, they are more successful in doing those things.
Dr. Lisa: I think you’ve covered a lot of ground here and I know people are going to want to find out more about CIEE. Although, as you said, maybe the website doesn’t even quite capture it. What’s the best way for people to find out about your organization?
Spencer: They should absolutely go to the website. It’s www.ciee.org. There’s information about all of the many different programs that we have there. Or, they can call us at 1-800-40-study. We have 100s and 100s of people that are waiting to counsel people and help figure out what’s the best way to grow through study abroad. Those are easy things to do.
Dr. Lisa: Do you have a facebook page?
Spencer: We probably have, I’m going to guess here, over 100 facebook pages. We have alumni that graduate from our programs every year, 1000s and 1000s of alumni. Many of them communicate through facebook pages for years afterwards. We also have a huge number of videos and blogs from students who have participated. We really encourage people to write and to reflect on what they’ve done. Those are available not just at our website, but on youtube and other venues for that.
Dr. Lisa: I was on your website this morning and I was noticing something about a Mitchell initiative. I think this is talking about George Mitchel, who of course is a Bowdoin graduate like me. I was kind of intrigued by this. Do you tell me a little bit about that?
Spencer: Sure, I can tell you about that. That’s something that’s fairly recent. It’s been an effort that started with the advent of our new CEO, Jim Pellow, who is very interested in reaching out to like minded organizations in the state of Maine, since we are a Maine organization as well. That’s a collaboration between the Mitchel Institute and CIEE to provide some scholarships for an abroad experience for people who have received a Mitchel scholarship. The Mitchel Institute provides scholarships for university study to graduates from every single town and city in Maine. CIEE has begun to provide an international component to that scholarship in conjunction with the Mitchel Institute. We recently had two scholarship awardees, one who went to Jordan to study conflict there, and another one to North Ireland to study conflict there. Those first two parallel some of the principal interests that Senator Mitchel’s had recently.
Dr. Lisa: All of this is very nice because what it’s saying is that you don’t necessarily have to be exceedingly wealthy to travel abroad. That there are access points for different people depending upon their circumstances.
Spencer: There absolutely is. I think it’s also fair to say that historically, that access has been an issue in the entire field of study abroad. CIEE has been working very hard to try to alleviate that access problem. About a year and a half ago, announced a significant scholarship fund, called the game scholarship fund, which has over a million dollars in it’s coffers, and provides a significant number of awards.
Dr. Lisa: I think this is a great way to close our interview. Talking about higher education with Spencer Jones of CIEE. I encourage all of our listeners to go to the website and find out more about your organization.
Spencer: Thanks, it’s been great to be here.
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Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast is always seeking new and interesting ideas from new and interesting people, wherever they maybe coming from. Recently we spoke with spiritual teacher Dave Oshana via Skype from Finland. Dave Oshana will be here in Maine on Thursday, October 4th, 2012. At the Mayo Street Art Center. Speaking on Enlightenment Demystified. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Dave Oshana.
Dr. Lisa: Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave: Hi Lisa, thank you.
Dr. Lisa: Dave, you have impressive credentials. I’ve looked through them. You have a background in psychology and a long standing background within spirituality, and you’ve also been enlightened and you consider yourself, what, tell me exactly.
Dave: I call myself an enlightened spiritual teacher, although I see myself more as a guide that I help a person find themselves and when they fully find their true self, that for me would be enlightenment. It would be the end of their search. If their search hasn’t ended it wouldn’t be enlightenment.
Dr. Lisa: This is something that you wanted to do because you’ve experienced yourself.
Dave: Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually also because I had been seeking for enlightenment from a very young age. It had been a very confusing and long and protracted search, going to very many different places and contorting myself both physically, mentally, and emotionally, into all kinds of shapes, behaviors, even dress codes, diets and lifestyles. After sometime, I even started to doubt that enlightenment existed and I started telling all my spiritual peers, even at meeting where visiting teachers would come over. I was surprised, maybe more than anyone else, when I found out that enlightenment is real, because it suddenly happened to me.
Dr. Lisa: Define enlightenment for the people who are listening.
Dave: Okay. At first I saw enlightenment as a perspective shift where I had dropped back out of my mind and out of my thoughts, and now I was simply the watcher, watching my thoughts and my life happening and my relationships and my emotions and, I was just watching everything. Enjoying it, but not really being moved around by the world that I was watching. I have come up with a, what I feel, is a easier to understand definition. Less abstract, less far away. For me, enlightenment is where a person becomes the self that they truly are inside.
Many people say that they know inside them there’s another person and they just wished that they could be that person, but everyday they find themselves prevented by something inside them from being what they really are. For me, becoming enlightened is about washing away all of the stuff which obscures a person. It’s a bit like when a sculptor comes across a piece of raw stone and starts to chisel it away, because they can see inside, a beautiful statue. That’s what I see when I come in to contact with people, I see their real self inside, which has often been suppressed and put down, and even punished during their early years. So they hide that self away.
Dr. Lisa: Why is enlightenment important? Once people are enlightened, how does it enrich their lives?
Dave: Well, I really don’t like to talk about the benefits, funny enough, because I don’t think that enlightenment is something that one should go after for the benefit. For me, the enlightened life is a life of surrender to what is. It’s the surrender to my God given nature, and it’s a surrender to the higher energies which bring everything into existence and make the universe run like clockwork. I suppose, although I’m reluctant to talk about different religious concept, I suppose my way is more of a Daoist way, whereas I’m going with the flow of nature and what is. What enlightenment does, though, is it releases a person from the forced identity which they have. That constant self preoccupation with working on themselves, tweaking their identity, dealing with their emotional and psychological stuff. When enlightenment happens, that stuff gets chucked out in one big parcel, never to come back in the same way ever again. It’s not that an enlightened person can’t access their memories, it’s just that their memories may as well be someone else’s history and not their own.
Dr. Lisa: I know from our prior conversation with you, that there are different things that you offer as a coach or spiritual teacher. Different ways that you help people move along their spiritual path. Could you briefly describe these things for us?
Dave: Yeah. Primarily, in spite of myself, there’s an energy which supports and guides a person. That energy comes clearly into view when a person is with me, but they may also notice it working in their life after they’ve been with me. I call that energy the enlightenment transmission. It’s an intelligent transformational, inspirational energy.
The second thing I provide is my human side, not just this invisible energy. Through my human side, I guide a person with explanations, describe to them what’s happening, help them out when they feel that they’re getting stuck somewhere on their spiritual path or even just in their life, because they see their life as intertwined with the spiritual life. There’s nothing separate.
With the advice and guidance that I give, I also teach a form of healing, moving, meditation, that cleans the energy body, so it cleans out thoughts and emotions, leaving a person feeling empty, clear, and relaxed inside. I also give lifestyle advice, which includes some information about the best kinds of food to eat and when to eat those foods and in which situations and climates, and which foods are suitable for a person constitution.
I offer those three things. An energy, a teaching, a moving meditation, which has got various techniques, and lifestyle advice. As well as one-to-ones, or what you call one-on-ones, I think in America, and group teaching environments which include one day intensives and also long residential retreats.
Dr. Lisa: My understanding is that you are coming to the United States to offer an introductory seminar and also a one day intensive. This is coming up Thursday October 4th at the Mayo Street Art Center in Portland. The title of this introductory seminar is Enlightenment Demystified with Dave Oshana.
Dave: Yeah. There’s a sub-title talk, Experience the Enlightenment Transmission for Yourself.
Dr. Lisa: Dave, what is the best way for people to find out more information about what you do and about this upcoming event?
Dave: I have several websites, but the most recent website, and it’s undergoing constant improvements, but it has about 50 online class replays every Sunday. When I’m at home, I’m giving live classes on the internet. If people come to daveoshana.com it’s all one word. Daveoshana.com, they can find out about this event and they can also listen to free audio, catch up with some of my teachings. There’s also several other websites which I owned before daveoshana.com, like enlightenment-now.com, which has some articles which I’ve written.
Dr. Lisa: Very good. We thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us from Finland. We’re looking forward to having you in Maine, giving this talk, Enlightenment Demystified. Also thanks to Lisa Silverman here in Maine for letting us know that you’d be coming our way. We hope that our listeners will take advantage of you’re being with us.
Dave: It’s a pleasure, thank you.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast. Show number 55, higher education. Airing for the first time on September 30th, 2012 on WOLB and WPEI Radio, Portland Maine. Also available via Pod cast on iTunes and on our website doctorlisa.org. We hope you’ll take the time to go to our website and read about individual guest information. We also hope that you’ll take the time to like our facebook page and hear about our up coming events.
Even more importantly, perhaps, we hope that you’ll spend some time connecting with our sponsors. Every single one of our sponsors is a personal friend of mine that I’ve cultivated a relationship with over months, years, even decades. These are people that I care deeply for and believe in. These are people who are doing good things for the community. These are the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour sponsors that you hear about throughout our show and at the end.
Let them know that you’re listening to our show and that you appreciate their efforts on our behalf. This is Dr. Lisa, wishing you all a bountiful life, but in particular, wishing my son, Campbell Belisle-Haley, a happy 19th birthday, this October 1st. All the best in his upcoming years studying biochemistry at the University of Maine. It’s truly a pleasure to be your mom.
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The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pod cast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a Pod cast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or facebook page for details.