As citizen ambassadors, ordinary Americans can help build global understanding, trust

It seems that this year the need for civility in America and abroad is more urgent than it has been for many years.

One way to improve global civility may be for more of us to become a kind of citizen ambassador. My wife and I have found at least two ways to serve in this manner.

One way is by hosting one of the nearly 1 million international students who come every year to the U.S. to live with American families and study in our high schools, colleges and universities. The other is by joining some 67 million Americans who travel outside the country each year to experience the world around us.

Becoming an American citizen ambassador allows a person to share American culture with others and to bridge the often-confusing cultural divide with those 7.5 billion people from 194 other countries with whom we come in contact.

Each of us can do our part. Over the last 20 years, we have hosted a dozen foreign exchange students and traveled to nearly 70 countries. Each of these opportunities has offered us life-changing experiences.

Distance, language, and cultural differences sometimes make us feel worlds apart but when you welcome an international student into your home, you quickly discover they become family with far more common ground that expected.

Through shared conversations and experiences at home, school, and throughout the community, you learn how close together "worlds apart" can really be and come to understand there are more ways than one to think about things.

Angel, from Taiwan, was our first exchange student. English was at first a challenge for her, but she stayed enthusiastically engaged, eventually working on a school cable TV program and making the daily public announcements. After earning her master's degree in hospitality management in France, she now specializes in overseeing the opening of mega-resorts in fabulous places all over the globe.

Pablo, from Chile, taught us how to welcome each day with a smile, and we and other people warmed to him so easily. Now trained as a medical technician, he lives near his hometown and is married with a 2-month-old son.

Kalvin, whose highly successful father and grandparents live and do business in China, loved basketball, cars and American shoes (he took back a dozen pairs), while serious Salome from Switzerland has finished her master's degree in civil engineering and visited us last year as part of her postgraduation gift.

Julia, from Brazil, is a medical doctor and researcher, married to Diego, an engineer, and they are expecting their little daughter any day now.

Shannon Pallikunnel is now working as a pediatrician in Vienna, Austria.

Years ago, we traveled to a Russian base camp in Antarctica and met with their scientists and others from Australia and Chile for an evening to talk about global warming — and discovered they were not of one mind about what to do.

We experienced some international stress while flying into Jordan after being told by a friendly Arab educator to tell folks that we were Canadian to avoid confrontation over perceived U.S. "saber rattling" in the Middle East.

Last year we took a Danube River cruise to explore the former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe with informed natives eager to tell us about themselves and their national heritages.

Earlier this year, we white-water rafted, zip-lined and snorkeled in Costa Rica, exploring with other adventurers a green-friendly nation that is over one-quarter ecologically preserved with marvelous rain forest and mountains.

We have found that American diplomatic genius does not rest with our inventors, business executives or elected lawmakers nor in our electronic media or authors or newspapers; effective global or domestic ambassadorship always is found most with the common people doing more listening than talking.