Youths from Fairfax did not expect to see firsthand what they had been taught in history class. They were visiting Newtown, N.D., a town that had been created 50 years ago by three displaced Native American tribes forced to vacate their land for a dam. Through their visit, the young adults learned that mistakes made in the past were still being made in the recent present.
"You hear in history class of what we did to the Native Americans," said Jessica Price, 17, of Springfield. "But we go there, and 50 years ago, the same thing was happening ... We introduced a whole other culture to the Native Americans that has changed their way of life."
The youths visited North Dakota in July 2003 and April 2002 as part of a multi-year youth program at the Little River United Church of Christ in Annandale. The Youth Global Learning Initiative of "Y-Geli," as its participants call it, aims to teach young adults about social justice as local, national and global citizens. By understanding the situations which have caused or brought about prejudice and discord, the youths are asked how they can find solutions both within themselves and through dialogue with their local and global peers.
"If they can walk away from this experience and learn that tolerance and violence are things we can control, then we've done our job," said Jackie Shaffer of Burke, mother to Eric Shaffer, 16, a participant in the program.
THE LITTLE River United Church of Christ created the program Y-Geli two years ago, in response to the distrust and fear that had arisen from 9/11 and the 2002 sniper incidents. Wanting to do something for the young adults of the congregation, the church created the three-phase program.
The first phase examines prejudice at the local and national level through visits to North Dakota and Memphis, Tenn. The second phase asks youths to see how those issues reverberate on a global scale through interactions with church leaders and with peers from around the world. The third phase puts what they learned into practice through a project in a developing country.
The program includes not only youth from the Little River United Church of Christ, but teenagers from Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring and Heritage United Church of Christ in Baltimore.
And it is the 32 young adults and 8 adults from the three churches who will be traveling together this summer to take part in the second phase of the program. From June 26 to July 6, the group will depart the area and first visit Geneva, Switzerland, where they will meet with church leaders with the World Council of Churches. Then they will stay in Taizé, France, a spiritual community where citizens from around the world visit each summer. At Taizé, they will meet teenagers from other countries, and from conversations with them, they will start to discern their role in social justice as Americans and world citizens.
"That's another type of interacting, where you have a group of young people working in such a way that's supportive of each other," said Harold Price, Jessica Price's father. "That's just as important as the global experience. I've been really impressed with their ability to deal with teenage issues, sometimes I think in a better way than the adults do."
WHILE TEAM MEMBERS said their expectations for the summer trip were flexible, they will take with them what they had learned in North Dakota and Memphis.
In Newtown, they had discovered that most of the Native Americans there lived in government-subsidized housing. The floor of the church they were helping to rebuild had fallen through.
"It's something you hear about occasionally through the news, but you never experience it," said Eric Honour, 16, of Fairfax, recalling the poverty that exists in poorer countries. "There are things like that you never hear about here."
Despite the poverty, the teen-agers were touched by the graciousness with which they were received. A woman named Juanita invited them to a birthday party, and another man invited them to see his buffalo farm.
"I was surprised by her focus on forgiveness," said Clare Pankey, 17, of Fairfax, referring to Juanita.
When the youths traveled Memphis, they went on a civil rights immersion trip. They visited the civil rights museum, which had been the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and they watched video footage and discussed prejudice and stereotyping.
Even before going to those two destinations, the young adults had met monthly with youths from the two other partnering churches to learn about cross-cultural communication. The teenagers learned how to work with people from environments different from their own: Baltimore's congregation is more urban and black, and Silver Spring's congregation was also urban and racially and economically diverse.
"It taught us how different people can live," said Eric Honour of the past trips and the cross-cultural exercises they had done with the other young adults. "It taught us a lot about when you meet someone, to think about what challenges they have."
As the team prepares to travel to Europe, its members are open to what experiences and people they will encounter, knowing that whatever happens will only educate them more.
"I expect it to be more eye-opening for our youth in a global way," Shaffer said.