“G r o u p   S t u d y   E x c h a n g e”
Rotary Foundation Presentation
by Rotarian Frank Deaver

     You have been reminded by the introduction that your speaker is a journalist, and journalists are supposed to be objective.  Admittedly, that assumption is proven wrong by some journalists almost daily.  But it’s a noble goal that most of us at least pretend to seek. Today, however, I must admit to you this journalist’s total lack of objectivity—his blatant biases, in fact—on at least a couple of subjects.

     First is a totally positive bias in favor of Rotary and all its educational and humanitarian endeavors.  Second, and part of the first, is an unabashed enthusiasm for the multiple rewards of Group Study Exchange.

     For more than thirty years, I have been involved in Group Study Exchange—twice as a team leader of outbound teams, many times as host of GSE visitors in our district, and almost constantly over those years as a member of the club and/or district GSE committee.  And for all those years, I have struggled with the task of adequately answering the question, “What is GSE?”  I have come to the conclusion that the question cannot adequately be answered; that GSE cannot really be defined; that only if it is experienced can it be fully understood.

     Nevertheless, in an effort to share GSE with Rotarians who cannot personally experience it, I have continued in an attempt to define it.  Let me approach that task by categorizing four kinds of foreign travelers: tourists, business people, politicians, and Group Study Exchange.  Each of these groups is characterized by distinctly different motives, activities, and benefits.  At the risk of oversimplification—but for the sake of clarification—let me start with these identifications:
               1. Tourists go abroad to make pictures.
               2. Business people go abroad to make money.
               3. Politicians go abroad to make news.
               4. GSE teams go abroad to make friends.

     While tourists may see monuments, GSE members learn why the locals erected and revere those monuments.
     While business people may write contracts, GSE members observe the skills and pride-of-workmanship that go into local production.
     While politicians may conclude inter-governmental agreements, GSE members come to understand nationalism and its very personal sentiments.

     We’ll return to more analysis of these categories later, but now let’s try to expand our definition.

     I like to call GSE “an immersion experience in another society.”  There’s nothing superficial about GSE.  It doesn’t fit any of the other three categories above.  There’s nothing impersonal about it.  GSE, instead, is people-to-people, one-on-one.  GSE allows participants not just to get into a country or society, not just into communities and homes, but into the heads and hearts of counterparts. 

     GSE is not so much a travel experience as a living experience. This kind of “immersion experience” has been proving itself over and over again, now for well more than a quarter century.  Group Study Exchange, which began in a very small way and almost experimentally, has proven itself through its growth and continuity.

     So to analyze its impact, let’s engage in a few moments of statistical extension.  Let’s start, as an example with “John Doe,” a team member nominated by  “Your Club” to “Whatever Nation.”

     From the day he is selected by the district committee as a team member, John prepares for his trip, and shares his enthusiasm with friends and colleagues.  During his entire preparation period, from decision to departure, his enthusiasm and anticipation will be shared with scores, perhaps hundreds, of people.

     While he is in the host country, John will live in several homes, visit many places, talk personally with scores of local people, speak before many audiences, and share cross-cultural insights with hundreds, perhaps thousands, more.

     After his return home, John will present programs for Rotary Clubs and other organizations, and for years—actually for the rest of his life—he will share what he learned in his GSE experiences.  It is no exaggeration to say that the experience will have changed his life—and through his influence it will have influenced countless other lives.

     The net result of this one person’s influence—before, during, and after his GSE trip—will be a multiplier effect of international goodwill and understanding that extends to literally thousands of others, both in his home country and in the country of his destination.

     Now, multiply this one person’s influence by the five or six members of a team.  Multiply that by two for the sake of the counterpart team.  Multiply that by the approximately two hundred exchanges sponsored by RI in a given year.  Multiply that by the nearly 40 years of GSE.

     Obviously this exercise cannot lead to a precise count, but it should be obvious that the total number of people touched by GSE influence has reached astronomical proportions, and has extended into the lives of influential members of most communities in the world.  Not only are the lives of GSE participants influenced, but their collective influence extends secondarily almost beyond comprehension.

     That influence was brought prominently into focus a few years ago in the 1982 British-Argentine war over the Falkland Islands (or the Malvenas, as the Argentines prefer).  Our District 6860 hosted a GSE team from England in 1979, then a team from Argentina in 1981.  Not long after the latter visit, the war broke out between the countries of these two successive sets of guests.

     Those of us who had hosted the Brits and the Argentines began to receive from our friends long and impassioned letters, setting forth their nations’ concerns and imploring us to understand.  It was not ultimately important that we agree with them, for obviously there was nothing we could do to aid either side.  What our friends wanted was simply understanding.

     The hostilities ended with a negotiated cease-fire and preservation of the status quo in the Falklands, but most of the world is unaware that the settlement involved Rotary and GSE influences.  At a Rotary International Assembly in Nashville, it was Rotarians—including some from the two combatant countries—who worked on a proposed peaceful solution and worked to influence diplomats of the two countries to come to terms.

     This one experience can be extended to worldwide proportions, with GSE-sponsored exchange teams having visited virtually all countries of the world.  The personal relationships,  the one-on-one contacts, the cross-cultural understanding that come from these experiences, would make it difficult for any of these GSE visitors, or even those whom they have influenced in that ripple-effect we described, to be willing to take up arms against their counterparts.

     Now let us return to our four types of international travelers.

     Tourists may be good for the host economy, but they have only limited positive influence on international understanding.  Their influence may instead be very negative.  The epithet “Ugly American” has been used to describe many tourists from the United States, and in some cases the term is legitimately earned.  Too many Americans go abroad to stay in the “Cairo Hilton” or the “Paris Sheraton” or the “Tokyo Hyatt,” and they might just as well be in the “Atlanta Ramada.”  They expect English-speaking waiters to provide them their familiar eggs-over-easy and prime-rib-medium-rare. They’re happier if prices are quoted to them in familiar American dollars.  And when they venture out of the comfortable cocoon of their hotel, they’ll more than likely be on air-conditioned buses with English-speaking guides, who will show them tourist sights that they will picture and later describe as “quaint.”

     But such is the reality of tourism.

     Business people don’t even take time for sightseeing.  They may fly into a country, meet with business counterparts in an airport hotel conference room, and hammer out business deals measured only by economic yardsticks. The business community has little room for understanding the human equation of local pride in quality of workmanship.  Willingness to exploit locally cheap labor is an accepted part of the hard business reality.  Personal considerations tend to be subverted to the bottom-line of the balance sheet.

     But such is the reality of business.

     Political leaders meet almost as briefly and perhaps even more impersonally.  Subordinates hammer out agendas and details in advance, and when the leaders face each other it’s more of a media event than a real working session.  They shake hands—even if they hold each other in contempt—because it’s expected of them.  They smile—not necessarily because they are pleased at the outcome of the meeting—but because the news cameras are recording their every expression.  And the back-home-publics may have reason to wonder if a leader is driven by genuine international altruism or by what’s perceived as best for the next domestic election.  Someone has well said that a politician’s motivation is most realistically measured by an action’s influence on the ballot box.

     But such is the reality of politics.

     So we are left, then, with travelers in programs such as Rotary’s Group Study Exchange.  They, and with rare exceptions only they, are the international travelers who truly make a contribution to cross-cultural understanding and goodwill.

     A GSE team member may live in half a dozen or more homes in another country, and in the process establish friendships that will last a lifetime.  An American GSE person, for example, may come to recognize that the American way is not the only way—and perhaps not even the best way.  Another society’s way may not inherently be worse—or better—but only different.  And while their way may not be best for us, similarly our way may not be best for them.

     Without the “immersion experience” afforded by GSE, we may never come to recognize that basic truth.

     GSE has proven its benefits in the lives of countless individuals. Precisely because those individual experiences are so profound, they then extend themselves far beyond just the individual.  Consider, for example, these words from a letter written by a GSE team member to a host family:

     I cried when I left, because I may never see that new set of friends again.  But the wonder of it all is that for that small space in time, we held hands and touched each other’s lives—and in the process we grew richer in spirit.  In time, memory will become dim.  But we have become a mosaic of what we have gone through together.  And whether we remember or forget, we have become—and will always be—a part of each other.

     So now let us return to our attempt at a definition of Rotary’s Group Study Exchange.  Let us expand upon simply calling it an “immersion experience in another society.”  Let us characterize it bluntly, even dramatically, perhaps even prophetically.  Let us say boldly and with Rotary pride that Group Study Exchange has proven itself one of the strongest forces in the world for peace.

     Remember the Brits and the Argentines?  I don’t know if those two countries every had a direct Rotary exchange, but can you imagine—if they had—the feelings of a former GSE team member, looking down the barrel of a rifle and wondering if a former GSE host was within his sights?  That possibility, I submit to you, is “peace with a personal motive.”

     Herein, then, is the legacy of Rotary’s GSE influence on world harmony—the reason I suggest that Group Study Exchange is a strong force for peace.  The thousands of team members, over past decades, and all the people they have influenced in their home and host countries, constitute a massive population of peoples who would prefer friendship over confrontation.

     If true peace, lasting peace, is ever to come to this world, it will not be because political leaders meet and shake hands and smile for the cameras.  It will not be because business leaders negotiate reciprocally beneficial trade relations. Instead, it will be because individual people, ordinary people, get to know each other on a personal basis.  It will be because as individuals we come to understand and respect each other, and to recognize that our differences should be complementary, not competitive.  It will be because individuals in large numbers become personal and lasting friends.

     And fellow Rotarians, that is my message to you today.  Rotary is making a difference, a difference that can be measured in goodwill, understanding, friendship, and peace.

     Like each of you, I wear my Rotary pin with great pride.  And like many of you, I am pleased also to wear the pin of a Paul Harris Fellow.  But when I pause to reflect on the meaning behind those pins, and on the far-reaching impact of Rotary through its foundation and such international programs as Group Study Exchange, my Rotary pride is multiplied, because I recognize that we are not just another club with social and fraternal goals.

     Rotary is making a difference.  Rotary is extending the world’s hope for lasting peace.  And Rotary is doing it through the disarmingly simple program of people-to-people understanding.

     That is the genius of Group Study Exchange.  And that is why today we can boldly assert that Rotary, our Rotary, is making a difference in this world, through multiplied opportunities for individuals to participate in “immersion experiences in other societies.”