AMMAN, JORDAN - Every significant journey starts with a vision, a single step and kindred spirits.
Chady El Masri dreams of a brighter future for the Middle East. An oral surgeon in Lebanon and a Palestinian, Masri is a courageous fellow in a region where candor is discouraged and speech often is repressed. But he has a vision, a plan and newfound Middle Eastern colleagues, thanks to a life-changing program headquartered in an unlikely place: Hamline University in St. Paul.
Masri, 28, has no powerful political or military backers in the faction-divided Middle East. But he did emerge a leader among his group of scientists, business, health professionals and journalists in the 2012 class of Hamline Middle East Fellowship. The participants -- including Jews, Christians and Muslims from several Middle Eastern countries -- speak of their five-week fellowship at Hamline as a transcendent experience.
"I am executing my business plan to develop dental clinics in every city in the Middle East, modeled after HealthPartners in Minnesota, which our group studied while I was at Hamline," Masri told me one August evening in Amman. "We will focus on health and educating our youth ... who are too influenced by guys with guns. I believe we can make an incredible difference."
More than 20 of the Hamline Fellows from 2011 and 2012 had gathered for two days of meetings in Jordan's capital, one stop on a several-day tour of the work underway by the Hamline Fellows in Jordan, Israel and Palestinian territory on the West Bank.
Minnesota experience
Masri's new partners include Ofir Libstein, another consensus leader from the 2012 class of what's formally called the Middle East Education to Employment Fellowship Project. Last spring, they spent five weeks at the large likes of Wells Fargo, Cargill and HealthPartners, as well as nonprofits ranging from HIRED to the Neighborhood Development Center, to see how Minnesotans of different races, religions and ethnicity collaborate at businesses and nonprofits, finance housing, commercial expansion and health clinics.
They also studied the media, including the Star Tribune. In August, I was invited along with several Twin Cities business executives, nonprofit employees and Hamline professors to visit many of the 2011 and 2012 fellows in their homelands.