Transcriber: Giacomo Atzeni Reviewer: Robert Tucker
So, this is me,
and this is me as well,
just that the picture on the left is my imaginary me.
This is the person that I could have been today.
This is the person that I could have been
if I had taken another path in life;
if I had taken the more regular path in life.
So let me tell you a bit more
about the person that I could have been today.
This person is also 30 years old.
She has an average university degree.
She probably got a decent job by now.
The job is probably an office job connected to her education.
She is getting up every day at 7 probably.
She goes to the job at 9, she comes back home around 5 or 6.
When she comes back home, she is usually quite tired
because all of what she has been doing is following a job
that she followed for no other purpose than earning money.
She also has some great friends, so she spends great weekends,
she has nice talks, she goes for a beer,
she takes some great trips.
So it doesn't look like a really bad life - and it isn't.
I would have enjoyed that life.
Except for one thing:
that I would have probably always been dreaming of doing something else,
secretly dreaming of something else
while at the same time,
not having the courage to follow that dream.
So, this is not who I am.
This is who I am today.
And the person who I am today is different.
The person who I am gets up whenever she wants.
She goes to sleep whenever she wants.
She didn't have a regular job for six years,
but she actually lives from her ideas and her projects.
She taught herself how to fund her projects,
and she made so many great friends and met so many great people,
that she would have never met in her old life.
So this is me today.
I don't earn much money, but I enjoy every minute of my life,
and I found something like a meaning in my life.
So, what has made me become this person today?
If I think about it,
what has made me become this person?
We usually tend to think
that the educational institutions that build our personalities, or schools,
that schools are the institutions
that build our careers and determine who we are.
But this has not been the fact in my case.
Actually if I think about it,
I've spent 30 years on this planet,
of which I spent 19 years in schools:
19 years in primary school, secondary school, university.
And yet, school has not made me learn all these things
that I need today for my actual job.
School has not determined who I am,
but it has been other opportunities, also educational opportunities.
It has been something that I call 'an extraordinary learning opportunity.'
And today I want to talk
about how to create these extraordinary learning events.
When I traveled to Namibia for the first time in my life,
I knew nothing about the world.
I was 19 years old, and I had never left Europe.
And this was the first time I've actually left Europe,
I didn't even dare to go out.
But it was due to my friend, Leonard,
who had the courage to go abroad for one year to Namibia.
We thought about it, we wanted to visit him.
So, we decided to go there to visit him.
When we went there, we also took
some students and some teachers along from my former school,
so we made it a school trip.
What did I expect when coming to Namibia,
when first traveling to Africa?
I actually probably expected
something like what everyone expects when they first travel to Africa.
I expected to meet some traditional cultures,
to learn about the traditional cultures in Africa
that would be so different from Europe.
I expected to learn so many things about other circumstances in life,
and this is actually what I did.
We had so many great opportunities within just these two weeks.
We've been taking walks, we have been invited for talks.
I've been invited to traditional dinners, ate some things I never ate before.
I have been going to school classes.
I even made a film about this whole event, and it has been a great experience.
Yet, by the time I figured out
that the most important thing
that I had actually learned back there in Africa
was that I learned who I am and where I come from.
It has been far away;
10,000 kilometers from Europe down to southern Africa,
that I, for the first time in my life,
had the opportunity to look at my life back home,
to look at the little bubble I had grown up in,
and to see this was not all in my life.
I discovered how I am, who I am, and why I have become that person.
I discovered that I'm actually much more German than I ever thought.
(Laughter)
I always thought I wasn't that much German, but I was.
You know all these things about Germans,
like Germans are always on time,
they have rules for everything, everything is in order,
they make a plan for everything.
So, I am that German person.
You know, Germans have insurances for everything:
like if a tree would fall down on my car, the car would be insured;
if right now back at home, my washing machine would explode
and water would leak into the apartment of my neighbours,
my insurance would cover that.
I even had an insurance once
that would cover if I would drop my iPhone into the toilet.
So this is how Germans think,
and that's what I discovered back there in Africa -
that I had always been taught to live up for securities,
to get a decent school degree, to get a good university degree,
to get a good job, to save more money, to be more safe, to be prepared.
But back there in Namibia, life was so different.
I met people who had nothing compared to me.
And that was one of the most interesting parts.
I learned back there in Namibia
that there were people who actually lived in poverty,
and this was something that is still shocking me today.
And over the years,
I bitterly learned what it means to grow up in a developing country.
I have lost two very good friends at the young age of only 26 and 27.
They died in occasions that would have likely not happened in Europe.
But then there was this other side of the story.
And this other side is that throughout all these years
that I had traveled to Namibia,
and to other so-called developing countries,
I have never seen a person
who would be less happy than my people back at home -
I have never seen one person,
and that was for me the most important thing.
Why would we build up all these things, all these securities,
if, in the end, we worry more about losing all that
than people with actual needs worried at all?
So, that has been my learning,
that has been my extraordinary learning opportunity,
when I first went abroad.
When we came back to Germany after this first trip,
we were so eager to do something.
We were so enthusiastic.
We really wanted to start something and use our experiences for a good thing.
So we build up an NGO, this is today called "The Global Experience,"
and with that, we had so many ideas.
We didn't have a plan, like I am German,
but we didn't have much of a plan at the mission,
but we wanted to do all sorts of things.
We wanted to work in education, we wanted to create exchange programs,
we wanted to work for the environment, we wanted to work with media,
we wanted to help our African partners.
Wait, did I just say help our African partners?
Yes, indeed.
I feel even ashamed today to share that thought.
But that has been one of our main motivations back then,
when we came back.
It has taken us a while to learn
that our friends in Africa actually don't need help,
that people in Africa don't need our help,
and that if we would start fundraisings and all that stuff,
we would rather perpetuate the old images and the old roles
that had been there, instead of changing something.
But from all the events that we created,
we figured out that the most important thing that we could actually do
was to create opportunities for intercultural encounters,
to share and multiply this experience
that I had once made back in Africa with other people.
So we built up this community,
and we took our students abroad to different countries
like to Namibia, to Ghana, to Poland.
And we created a website,
because we wanted the people to have a place to stay in touch.
And this website that we had originally created for our partners,
it suddenly grew globally.
This was due to social media and the rise of social media.
After we put our first videos on YouTube,
suddenly, people from all over the world would join our website.
Even before most of us had a Facebook account,
we had created a community with over 10,000 members from 140 nations
who shared more than 5,000 photo stories and video stories
to learn about each other's lives.
So, that had all happened in our community.
Yet, the personal encounters
have always remained the most important thing for me,
taking actually people abroad.
And this is what we did.
We had this privilege to actually do whatever we wanted,
we could just try out.
We taught ourselves how to get the fundings for that,
so we started school exchange programs, international school meetings,
meetings for students and young adults, we started internship programs.
And every year, we would just create something new
because we had the ideas and actually the opportunities to do so.
I am really proud to share with you today
that, over the years, we have enabled over 500 people through this work
to have this experience, to have this global experience of going abroad,
and to take part
in one of our exchange programs or internship programs.
And 500 is just a number,
500 is just a number,
but between all these 500 people, there are single stories,
and these stories make this experience so rich.
So I just want to share one story with you today,
and this is the story of Momal.
Momal has been, or is, a young girl from Pakistan.
Two years ago, she came to us for the first time
to participate in an internship program.
So, she came to us, all the way from Pakistan to Münster in Germany,
and she lived with us.
When she lived with us, it was actually the first time of her life
that she had been abroad and independent of her family.
It has been the first time
that she didn't need to ask anyone to go out or do anything.
For the first days, she actually got up at 6 a.m. in the morning,
took long walks,
and after a few days,
I would call her and I would ask her,
"Momal, you are doing an internship here, when will you come to work?"
And she said,
'Well, I'm sorry, but I am so overwhelmed with this freedom I got,
I would just go out and walk for hours,
just because I have never been able to do this before."
Then later, we got her a bike, and she took it even further;
even though she had never used a bike before, she learned how to bike.
Every day, after work, she would set off for 15, 20, or even 30 kilometers
for a ride on her bike.
She came back to Pakistan,
and she founded a platform called "The Freedom Traveller."
On this platform, she shared not only her experiences
but also the ones of other young women traveling alone.
With her platform,
she is still today encouraging young Pakistani women and other women
to go abroad, to take a step outside,
and have the same experience that she once had.
So, this is just one story.
Later, she was actually awarded
by the United Nations, and by UNESCO in New York.
Four weeks ago, she came back to Münster,
and she shared this story with us at our local TEDxMünster stage,
and she got actually standing ovations,
and many more people came to her.
The University of Münster just called her, they saw her at TEDx,
they wanted to help her to run her project and boost it.
So you can see from this one story
that it is not actually one person that has an opportunity with a story,
but this opportunity can grow to a whole community
around this one person.
So, why do we need opportunities for extraordinary learning?
People have actually always laughed
when I tell them that I have been a shy person.
But, in fact, I am.
Even as I am standing here now, I am super nervous.
When you come to a school class in school,
there has always been the smart ones,
the cool ones, the nerdy ones, the shy ones.
I have always been among the shy ones.
I have always had good grades,
but I never dared to say anything in class.
Once, my teacher told me that I would not make it anywhere,
not in school, not in university, and not in my job
if I wouldn't change that attitude.
It turns out that he was right -
just that school never taught me how to change that attitude.
And this is why I want to encourage everyone
to take opportunities outside schools,
because there are a million things that we can learn
that we would never learn inside schools,
and maybe these are the opportunities that would create your future,
your job, your career, or whatever determines your life.
So as I stand here today, I would like to encourage you:
don't wait for schools to create the person you are;
don't wait for school to build your careers or your personalities,
but go out and experience yourself.
Thank you.
(Applause)