St. Joe's Students Attend World Affairs Seminar

On June 16-22, 2007, we received an opportunity to attend the 31st Annual World Affairs Seminar in White-Water Wisconsin. The World Affairs Seminar is an international educational program for high school students to bring about a better understanding of the world problems through the study of current issues. At this seminar we got the chance to discuss the pressing global issues our world faces today. There were 600 high school students from around the world that attended this seminar held at the White-Water Campus. This year's theme for the seminar was "Global Health: Prescription for Survival-Who's responsible?" It focused on HIV/AID prevention and control, sanitation, clean water projects, health education for improving health care at the village level, clean water projects, eye care for cataract removal and better infant care. The daily schedule included lectures from visiting expert speakers, documentary films, small group discussion sessions, and opportunities to participate in social and recreational activities across the campus. Every participant was put into a small discussion group and was assigned a country or a non- profit organization to represent for a global forum. Each group was responsible for developing a position paper that stated their opinion on the issue that was presented to us for discussion. We applied because we are interested in the pressing global issues of today. If we had any pre-existing opinions before it had changed after this week. We obtained a greater understanding of the complexity of these issues. This was mainly because of the opinions of others that we had not previously considered. These opinions were expressed either by the numerous speakers that we heard or just by talking to the other students from the many other countries around the world. We are very grateful to have been given this opportunity to attend the World Affairs Seminar by The Rotary Club of Edmonton. We went into this week not knowing what to expect and came out with more knowledge of the world around us. We would like to thank The Rotary Club of Edmonton for giving us this experience that had an incredible positive impact on us. We are thankful to have learned more about the world. This seminar really changed our perspective on the world. Jessica Gingras and Sabrina Licata