Building relations across oceans and continents

Not long after hatching the plan for ReConnect, I traveled to Rwanda. There, I spent my mid-term break at a remote school—the Kampanga School. During my time at Kampanga, I spent time playing football (soccer) with the students, donated various pieces of athletic gear I had collected in the lead up to the trip, and, most importantly, shared different cultural ways of training with the school’s players.

Not only did the boys I met reinforce the necessity for and potential effectiveness of ReConnect—these, my Rwandan peers, were evidence that kids can and should thrive without their attention focused 24/7 on technology. Indeed, they also demonstrated the very leadership qualities I was hoping the platform would highlight and develop. It was these boys, too, who would come to comprise the ReConnect's Musanze chapter.

Because I already knew these boys and had a sense for their values and attitudes, working with them to establish their chapter was much less challenging and far more meaningful than it otherwise might have been. For instance, thanks to interviews I conducted with the Head Boy and Head of School at Kampanga, I had learned that discipline and a sense of community were vital both to individual students and to the school’s character-driven mission. Instead of appealing to “individualistic” goals—personal recognition, prize-winning, etc.—these interviews and my other, more casual conversations with students taught me that promoting collective achievement would have a far greater appeal and impact among the school’s students.

Reorienting myself toward group-based goals rather than individual ones was inspiring and, surprisingly, familiar: it was how football coaches had always told me to think while on the field. “All for one and one for all”: such a motto had not just cultural but also huge athletic significance. I was eager to explore how ReConnect might reinforce these ideas and how I, too, might explore thinking in "collectivist" terms in my own life.

Reflecting in Costa Rica

Many of these same ideas got reinforced when I spent the following spring break in Costa Rica for a surfing camp. Even though the cultural context was different in plenty of ways—ways I was working to be sensitive to—the experience reinforced the importance of collectivity: the group’s victory is your own. The other teens I met, even though they had  many of the same preoccupations as teens in the UK (school, dating, music), had a sense of obligation to (and found comfort in!) the group they were a part of.

Of course, the fact that I learned about this difference through a surfing retreat might sound strange or counterintuitive. But quite the contrary! In fact, my surfing instructors (and my surfer peers) all mentioned how surfing was about “communing” with the ocean—with the waves, with the rhythm and sounds of the water. It struck me that this was a metaphor for the “communion” I was trying to help produce with ReConnect: adolescents like me turning away from their screens and ‘listening’ to the ocean of life around and underneath them. It was their/our environment—our natural surroundings as well as our peers—that would carry us along in beautiful, coasting harmony as long as we listened in the right ways and remained present.

I hope ReConnect can help my peers here in the UK and elsewhere—whether in Costa Rica, Rwanda, or even farther away—find this delightful and productive symbiosis.