Daniel Zwerdling's travels have taken him all over the world and have taught him a few lessons about cultural differences.
His work as a reporter for National Public Radio has taken him through dozens of countries where he's learned: the U.S. doesn't know what's best for the world, people need to see the world through other cultures' eyes and the world is an amazing place that's tough to capture, among other things.
He tried to teach these lessons to about 200 people in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Forum Room on Tuesday evening.
Zwerdling related each of his lessons to certain anecdotes in his life. The first lesson came from time spent in Kenya. He hired a staff to maintain his house and land as most people did. He said hiring a house staff was required because it provided jobs for people to support themselves and their families.
His landscaper, Hudson, was working one day and cut down a full-grown banana tree. The tree was beautifully placed next to a whitewashed wall and provided a great scene. Zwerdling and his wife were upset he would just cut down a tree and he lectured Hudson and asked him not to do that again.
Zwerdling later found out from a friend that he was wrong; he didn't know what was best. Hudson had harvested the tree correctly and made sure it would regrow.
"And I thought, ‘Oh my god. I'm the first world pig I've been ranting about all those years,'" he said.
Karl Rauchenstein said Zwerdling's presentation was interesting and he made a lot of good points about respecting cultural differences.
"A lot of times [the U.S.] thinks throwing money at problems will help," he said, "but it makes things worse."
The senior manufacturing and engineering technology major said he went to the presentation out of curiosity and left having learned something.
Zwerdling second lesson came from Zimbabwe. He and his wife visited a wildlife habitat and watched huge elephants. He was amazed and couldn't understand why the people would want to poach them. The elephant population was shrinking and National Geographic did stories blaming elephant poachers.
Zwerdling wanted to see the story through the eyes of the people who lived there. He went to a neighboring village and asked people about the elephants and the poachers. The story was opposite for them. The elephants were a marauding menace, destroying up to a third of the crops in some places in a subsistence farming village. Fewer elephants meant a better chance of survival for them.
He learned his final lesson of the night while doing a story called "Munching Strawberries with Warlords." He said it taught him what an awesome, terrible, beautiful, ugly world he lived in.
In the early 1990s, Somalia was ravaged by civil war. The U.S. sent relief to the country — food, medicine, etc. — but it was repeatedly intercepted by warlords. The U.N. intervened and arranged a peace conference in a nice hotel and Zwerdling went to cover it. In the hotel's ballroom were beautiful decorations, intricate hors d'oeuvres and platters, "Amazing Grace" playing in the background and some of the worst people in the world gathering for a social event. At the same time, the warlords' armies were fighting and killing each other.
"And I thought, ‘What a crazy and wacky and wonderful world this is,'" he said.
Three lessons from Zwerdling:
1. The U.S. doesn't know what's best for the rest of the world
2. People need to learn to look at the world through the eyes of people in other cultures
3. The world is a crazy place with a mix of extremes everywhere
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