[1]Hello, my name is Rayn Riel. Im from Brooklyn, New York. Im 18 and graduated high school last year.

I deferred from Tufts University to take a gap year with a program called Thinking Beyond Borders. We traveled for 8 months and in 8 different countries, studying a variety of international development issues. We went to Costa Rica, Peru, and Cambodia, but spent most of our time in four countries: Ecuador, China, India, and South Africa. And we are now spending the last few weeks here at home, reflecting on what weve learned. Now I am here to share with you a little bit of what Ive learned on my journey.

[2]So, before we get started, I would like to ask you guys something. Take a look at the questions on the screen. What do you think?

Why should you care about the environment? Why should you care about education? Why should you care about agriculture/food? Why should you care about public health?

If you dont care, why dont you?

We care about issues when we feel connected to them; when we understand how it relates to us personally. I asked about the environment, education, agriculture, and public health because I learned about these subjects during my time in Thinking Beyond Borders. I learned through community service work, living in home-stays, cultural immersion, lots of reading and projects, and seminars.

I have always felt passionate about the earth, and fixing its problems. Another passion of mine was design. Essentially, I was really into physical infrastructure all types of buildings, trains, dams, bridges, tunnels and I still am. Ive always liked building and designing things and still want to study architecture and engineering. I decided to go on this gap year because it would fulfill both of these interests: exploring the world, and, at the same time, design.

I did not realize how relevant our infrastructure and physical

space is to development! For example, by building a school in a village in order for kids to get an education, one would think that the village or slum would start educating its youth. But there are many other considerations to be made besides the physical structure. Where will the teachers come from if the village does not have any teachers, and how will they get there? How will the students go to school if they are unbearably sick? Why are they sick? Is it because of the environment such as dirty water or maybe it is because of the food, and their agriculture? And why would they go to school if their families need them on the farm, or if they are making money selling drugs and committing crimes, or if the student is a girl in an unequal society? But what if they are getting educated? Where will they go once educated, and what will happen to their community and their culture as the years progress? These are just some of the problems, and they all connect back to a theme of interdependent issues such as the environment, education, agriculture, public health, social infrastructure, and the economy. For now, let me get into more detail with these interconnecting issues,

through my experiences in each of the four main countries I went to on this trip.

In a world that is more connected than ever before, we need to see beyond the immediate picture. What happens around the world often affects us, and more often than not, is caused by us in the United States, as a result of our power and influence in the world, in the first place. I had some very powerful experiences abroad, and learned why I should and need to care as a result.

[3]In Ecuador, for 1 month I lived with an indigenous community of people called the Tsachila, in their village of Los Naranjos. [4]Until 50 years ago, the Tsachila lived in the jungle completely isolated. My host-family tells me in Spanish (because I do not know their indigenous language Tsafiki) that they had nothing and they pointed around the house to show the progress theyve made now they have clothes, TV, school, literature, toys everything would be fine except for one problem: environmental degradation.

[5]As a result of clear-cut deforestation, everything is drying up. The river that they rely on for water and for food gets shallower and narrower yearly. The soil that they rely on for their farming and for their food also gets drier and less healthy yearly. The plantains get smaller every year because there is less nutrition for them in the soil. And that means their wallets are drying up, too. [6]As volunteers, our job was to plant 5,500 trees along the riverbanks in order to reforest, and rejuvenate the river and jungle ecosystem surrounding it. With our boots, malaria medicine, and mosquito repellent, we accomplished the job we set out to do. [7]When trees line the river, it is a natural way to filter out pollutants, and rejuvenate the ecosystem. And this is needed, especially when harmful chemical fertilizer that is used on the crops runs off into the river. [8]The Tsachila are not educated when it comes to learning sustainable agricultural practices. They cleared their jungle for agriculture, and their soil health depletes every year due to chemical fertilizers, monoculture, and a lack of organic inputs and biodiversity. And their diet their health is poor,

as a result of dirty drinking water from the river, and an unbalanced diet, which mainly consists of starchy plantains. [9]Indeed, if they continue with current practices, eventually their land will become a desert, their source of income will disappear, and their community will vanish as they migrate to the cities. And their culture, already under threat as a result of assimilation and their youth leaving for work in the cities, will surely not survive if they cant sustain themselves. [10]Therefore, their economic and social sustainability are interconnected. With sustainable environmental practices come, hand-in-hand, sustainable agricultural practices, good health, and an education system that teaches these practices. You cant have one without the other; theyre all connected and dependent on each other.

[11]Due to globalization and in a large part, due to American influence, the Tsachila deforested their jungle and started farming the way they do. We may buy their produce in our supermarket. Think about your own health when you eat food that has been grown with chemicals and with

unhealthy soil the food you eat will not be nutritious to you. In fact, it may even be harmful. [12]And our oceans get polluted from the chemical fertilizer and pesticides, as it runs off into waterways. Furthermore, our climate will be affected by deforestation, and all of the related effects of climate change will impact everyone around the world. [13]Stronger storms and higher ocean levels could destroy your community, not to mention harm your environment, economy, public health, and society. [14]Now lets talk about China, where, among many things, I climbed the Great Wall and regrettably ate dog meat.

[15]Why do people think the way they do? People think the way they do because of how theyre educated. And theyre educated under a pedagogy, or way of teaching, dependent on the culture. Education influences culture, and culture influences education. I saw this firsthand by teaching English in Chinese public schools, both in the city of Kunming, and the village of Shaxi. [16]Students in China are taught in a large classroom of around 60 students, via rote

memorization and repetition. Rarely is there any creativity, individual thought or expression, or thinking outside of the box involved, which is very convenient for the totalitarian government, which does not really want people to think freely. Yet is this way of thinking benefiting our interconnected issues?

[17]One day, I went to the zoo in Kunming. At the zoo, a Chinese woman revealed something to me that could have easily gotten her in trouble with the government, because it involves speaking up about human rights. When I told this woman that the animals in the zoo looked unhappy and not free, she responded by saying that the Chinese people are like those animals, and that I am lucky to live in America. I took this to heart.

[18]If you dont speak up, what can happen? Although Chinas economy is growing rapidly, millions of people have been able to move into the middle class, and physical infrastructure is being built everywhere, there is a catch.

China is able to grow so rapidly because it sells cheap goods abroad, especially to Americans. The easiest ways to be cheap often involve overlooking long-term implications and the consequences related to all of the issues I discussed earlier. [19]It is cheap to pollute, because you dont have to deal with your output. So coal, which is cheap and heavily polluting, causes a lot of unhealthy, smoggy air. And factories pollute without restraint as well. None of this is good for a healthy human or for a healthy ecosystem. All of these environmental problems will affect you at home because of connected ecosystems as well as a connected economy. For example, youre probably buying fruit from China, or your newest iPod. [20]Chinese people cant speak up about these things and they arent necessarily aware of the problems to begin with, because they arent taught about them. Why would their government want them to know? [21]Although a lack of education leads to environmental problems, it also leads to health problems and agricultural problems. For example, if you dont know how to take care of yourself, how do you know what is

healthy? If you dont know how to farm, how are you not going to end up farming unsustainably? And how can they solve problems if they arent educated? In the end, education deeply relates to our other interconnected issues. Nonetheless, as China continues to grow and interact with the outside world through technology, I think things will change via social and economic pressure. [22]Lets get into India now

[23]India has one of the oldest cultures in the world. Yet its agricultural system is quite new. Around 40 years ago, at the time of the change, people were starving. America intervened with a new system of industrial agriculture, giving Indians chemical fertilizers and pesticides, so that monocultures, and therefore more yield of a specific, hybrid crop, could work without fail. Pumps that allowed Indians to drill deep underground to tap unused aquifers to water the crops were also installed. Monocultures allowed each farmer to have more yield, and especially with the introduction of the tractor to replace cows, less people were needed in rural

areas. [24]As a result, vast swaths of poor people moved to the cities from rural areas, creating large slums, with people living and begging (especially to foreigners like me on the roads) in terrible conditions and contributing to all of these issues. There was a surge in food production, so that children that were dying from starvation ended up living, causing a population explosion. But people are still starving today due to a lack of distribution. [25]And the farming methods that Americans thought would help them, just like they thought it would help themselves, turned out to be very harmful and unsustainable. In short, the environment is being damaged heavily (and as a result, public health as well) because of too much water use in agriculture, dependence on chemical fertilizers and tractors, transportation of produce, and greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

[26]I went to India to work on sustainable farms, and to be educated about sustainable practices that could help solve this problem, which would also solve other problems related

to the environment, education, health, the economy, and society as a whole. I found that the solution for India lies with cow manure lots of it. Its pretty much all we dealt with at the sustainable farms. They had organic methods, using no petroleum so no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or tractors. The sun, not oil, and the cow, were the centerpieces of the system. The grass grew with the help of the cows organicmanure-fertilizer, and the cow ate the grass, and then its manure was put back into the system. It was a closed system. [27]Because the cow is holy in India, it is not killed and so what this farm sells is organic fertilizer, cow byproducts (such as dairy), and medicine (processed cow urine, for example). Among the many things they sell, they sell energy. Cow manure is used in a biogas plant at the farm to create natural gas as well as more nutritious fertilizer through a complicated chemical process. The point is that energy that would otherwise be wasted as greenhouse gas emissions coming up from the manure is harnessed in India. Also, if food is grown locally and sustainably, that means minimal transportation costs,

assuming that the energy used to power transportation does not come from renewable sources. This food is healthier than food grown on chemicals, there is less pollution that harms your health and the environment, and farmers are not economically dependent on oil and running into debt, to name a few examples of the interconnectivity of agriculture with other sectors. [28]In the end, sustainable agriculture is a very important step to be made if one is to solve global problems relating to all of the issues environment, education, public health, the economy and social structure. [29]Now let me talk about South Africa, [30]where in my spare time, I went on a safari, and I went skydiving, bungee jumping, and paintballing. But most importantly, I spent time helping sick people living in slums.

[31]Like in all nations, culture and history are driving forces behind what occurs in the present. In South Africas case, when the Dutch, and then the British, arrived, they began taking control of the many different, scattered tribes. Over hundreds of years, inequality between colonists and

colonized grew, and eventually the post-colonial government set up a system of segregation, known as apartheid. [32]Non-whites were forced to live outside of cities, in communities known as townships. Today, the majority of non-whites still live in townships, and even though apartheid has ended, reverberations are still being felt, and will continue to be felt for generations. [33]Inequality and racism are rampant.

I worked in South African townships mine was more of a slum - walking around with a home-based caregiver and helping patients with tuberculosis, high blood pressure, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes. Id enter their homes, which oftentimes were wooden shacks with newspaper walls, and see, smell, and hear misery. One of the home-based caregivers, an anonymous black African, has HIV and still works; she is a positive example to the community and I miss her dearly. I learned a lot from her. [34]Nonetheless, non-white Africans are poor as a result of a relationship with the issues Ive been discussing. Their society put them in

this place. Their economy does not give them job opportunities. Many are not going to school. And their diet consists of unhealthy, fatty foods, from the same industrial agricultural system I mentioned before. No wonder many suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, while only a few countries away on the same continent, people are starving. In order to combat tuberculosis and AIDS with treatment, one needs to have a healthy diet as well. This is too expensive and simply is not happening. [35]In many rural areas, HIV/AIDS, as well as malaria, are destroying families and communities, which affects all of our issues negatively.

[36]So, I hope now you have a general sense of how everything is connected, and also a general sense of what I did on my trip. I think it is evident that we do need to care, not only because of a moral responsibility, but also because what happens outside of your community affects you. We need to care now, because the sooner, the better. So what can we do about it? Ill give you an example through design

my passion - as we wrap up here. [37]Lets call it IMPACT Design, as it balances traditional design which is form and function, and, truth and beauty with responsible, sustainable impact on all of these issues.

[38]Lets think outside of the box what are your assumptions about what a building is? Is it just a place, and thats it? [39]Or maybe you understand the negative implications involved with the construction of a building, and question your assumptions as to what a building could be.

[40]Lets think outside of the building. What if a building did not have a negative impact on the world? What if it actually helped the world, and the construction and existence of the building was beneficial to the environment, education, agriculture, public health, society, and the economy? [41]Although I have many ideas for how this would work, let me just briefly explain a few of them through one type of structure: lower-income housing.

[42]In America, in the inner cities, like here, in the D.C. area, many lower-income housing units are in need of repair. Currently, due to a lack of funding for public housing, as well as due to poverty, the buildings are a disgrace. Of course, not all of these structures are this way but some are. By repairing broken elevators, fixing plumbing, cleaning walls, replacing shattered windows, and adding light, among other fixes, their environment will be greatly improved. Ones environment deeply affects ones physical, mental, and spiritual state, so making the buildings beautiful, and not just cheap structures, is part of the solution. And when one wants to remake the buildings, there are ways to positively address all of our issues.

[43]But Im talking about thinking outside of the building with the design. What if the building used renewable sources of energy, and it had solar panels [44]and wind turbines [45]installed on the building, supplying the majority of its energy? And what if we included biogas plants [46], commonly used in Indian farms to create energy from

organic waste, to the building as well? Energy would be created from human waste. Electricity could be provided by renewable sources, and besides, most lighting for the building could come from sunlight to begin with. The same can be said with heating and cooling. The materials needed for everything in the building could be recycled. And what if there was a rooftop farm [47], and farming was incorporated with the structure? The farm could practice sustainable agriculture, and the soil could come from compost made within the building, as a result of everyones organic waste from his or her lunch, among other inputs.

How would this benefit all of our issues? Ill be brief and touch on only a few things. First of all, renewable energy means no pollution, and no dependency on oil (which would be a great move for all factors), as well as more profit and increased real estate value due to both being able to create your own energy and even sell extra energy. Rooftop farming means sustainable, local, healthy produce for a healthier person and environment. It also is a great way to

reduce storm water run-off, which usually causes sewage treatment plants to overflow and release waste into waterways. All of these changes positively impact the environment, and therefore, positively impact all of our issues and society as a whole (for example, by averting climate change due to less pollution, or having cleaner air in the city to breathe). In the end, this lower-income housing structure would positively impact all of our issues, because everything is connected! Of course, design won't solve all problems alone, such as all of the causes and effects of poverty, but it is part of it. Perhaps designers can also work with the communities that their projects are in, and help out in ways similar to what I've described of my trip.

If the projects can be transformed by working and communicating with government, public housing, or even private companies to redevelop, then what about other structures? There is tremendous opportunity to eventually transform what it means to live in an urban environment. For example, a windy subway tunnel with wind turbines inside of

it to generate its own energy, or a school that has an urban farm so that they can learn about sustainable practices and eat healthy school lunch as well, or even a sewage treatment plant that processes human waste similar to cow manure in India, and generates energy in biogas plants for the city. All of these things, and more, positively affect each of our issues and lead to a sustainable future.

[48]Why havent these problems been solved already?

[49]To help answer this question, take a look at the screen. You have less than a minute to try and figure it out. THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX GAME [Continue below after around 20 seconds,.. Tease them to find the answer for themselves by using the different slides/steps for the solution feel the audience] [50] [51] [52] [53]

Obviously answering why we havent solved these problems already is very complicated. There are so many reasons. I

think that it comes down to the limits of a linear mindset, and not being able to think outside of the box. This implies asking the big questions, being critical, and challenging your assumptions. For example, dependency on oil is great for people making money off of it, but what about all of the problems caused by it? Balance must be found.

On the screen, the lines are connected, just like the issues are and the only way to see this is to think outside of the box.

Why should we care? If you care about the environment, and about deforestation, then you should also care about education, public health, agriculture, society, and the economy. The same goes for every interconnected issue. Cutting down a tree doesnt just harm the environment, as Ive explained today. The relationships between issues are very complex and yet at the same time very simple. They can work to our advantage or be detrimental to our very survival on this planet. [54]

In the end, find something that you are passionate about, and think outside of the box! Realize the connections, and remember these words: who, what, when, where, why, and how. [55]

______________________________________________________________________________________ ___________ SIDE NOTES *ORGANIZE DESIGN PART FOR PP (THE TABLE GRAPHICS STUFF!!) *get parents to bring up external harddrive to graduation so that my photos can get to TBB and on brochures, website, etc.. Powerpoint with photos bullet point summaries

*copies of M.P. and P.O.Ls.. * talk to the audience, move around, be excited but know material, be able to navigate, semi-memorize * Be confident, pace yourself, annunciate, gestures *read out loud make sure it makes sense when you read for powerpoint: work on public speaking Water being enthusiastic Pronunciation