Feature

How to meet the challenges of 21st century

Badrul Samrat

With the novel view of establishing friendly relations among the people, especially the young, from every corner of the world, Mondialogo is expanding its circumference day by day. It is an initiative of both UNESCO and the renowned automobiles company Daimler. Mondialogo encourages the young students to learn about cultural diversity and to be respectful to the cultures of other nations. UNESCO thinks most of the violence occurring among the nations of the world is for the discriminations in the cultural and national orientations. The people who are students these days are the future leaders of their respective countries. So, standing on the platform of Mondialogo, they are confined to a promise of making a peaceful world on the days to come.

The dimensions of the activities of Mondialogo include School Contests and Engineering Awards. The web portal of Mondialogo is www.mondialogo.org which plays a vital role.

The Mondialogo School Contest offers the students under 12th level aging from 14 to 18 to take part in the intercultural dialogue. In this regard, a student needs to be registered in the Mondialogo School Contest under the supervision of a teacher. A teacher can nominate a highest number of 30 students to form a team for the contest. Several teams from the same school can be formed if the number of interested students is enough to form a team. After forming a team, the teacher along with all the members of his team creates a team page that includes a short description of the school, a photo of the team, the number of the team members, a profile of the teacher's own along with the team members and so on.

This year in 2008, the number of participating teams is 2740. However, among all the teams, every two teams from the different continents are associated with each other by UNESCO. As a result two teams start exchanging their own cultural resources between them. Simultaneously they work on a project that is somehow connected with both teams. From Bangladesh, there are 14 teams who have already confirmed their participations in the contest. Three of them have edited their team pages by this time. For instance, we, a group of 15 students of Birshrestha Munshi Abdur Rouf Rifles College, Peelkhana, Dhaka, are the members of 'World for Us' and we are working with our co-operative team 'Eco-Motoc' from Romania on a project titled 'Global warming is our problem too'. Our partner team consists of six members and their teacher Aura Ciobanu. We are hopeful about completing our joint project work with the mutual contributions of the both co-operative teams by next April. And we have to submit our Mondialogo joint project report and result to UNESCO by 31 may 2008. After that UNESCO will select 25 joint specimens out of all the projects submitted and at the same time 50 corresponding teams will be considered to be the finalists of the year. As recognition for the achievement, the teacher and the most active member of every finalist team will be awarded formally in a Mondialogo International Symposium. In the festive closing ceremony, three most successful paired teams will be awarded with cash money for the development of their respective schools. The three teachers as well as the three students of the three teams will be given certificates for their widespread contribution in the intercultural dialogue.

In the Mondialgo Engineering Award, the students of various engineering universities under their respective groups take part in the intercultural dialogue. The students who are studying in various engineering universities can play a vital role in improving living standards throughout the world. So, the Mondialgo Engineering Award opens doorways for the students of engineering universities in various countries to work in co-operation for the durable infrastructural development of the world. The teams with the top project proposals are awarded with cash money as remuneration for the outstanding contributions in the applied fields of engineering technologies.

We work in Mondialgo on the basis of three phases such as 'I', 'You' and 'We' stages. At the 'I' stage, any individual knows about himself, his own culture, heritages, and historical places and so on. At the 'You' stage, the members of a couple of teams know each other individually. And at the 'We' stage the members of the two teams exchanged their thoughts, opinions and cultural resources to form a tangible project as a reflection of the dialogue between the two teams.

Weekly questions bear a great significance in Mondialogo which all the teams receive every week. Finding out logical solutions to crucial issues at the present time throughout the world, the team members answer them that are open to all community members to see. The answers of the questions are settled with the members of a team. Then these are sent with the help of the teacher.

No doubt, Mondialogo possesses the abilities to replace violence and collisions with peace and solidarity among the nations in the world. So there is no substitution of Mondialogo to meet the challenges of 21st century.

Writer is Class XI student of Birshrestha Munshi Abdur Rouf Rifles College, Peelkhana, Dhaka and a team member of 'World for Us'.