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.
Learning from young people
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.
After our students' time in the U.S., we have visited most of them in their homelands and, as adults, several have also returned to visit us.