Safe travel advice when visiting the Middle East

• Source: Market Watch

Recent events in the Middle East have put travelers on edge. Here are some tips on staying safe if you plan on travelling to the region in the near future.

‘Maintain a high level of vigilance’ — travel security experts advise caution when traveling to the Middle East

Jan 8, 2020 

By MEERA JAGANNATHAN and ANDREW KESHNER

The State Department says Americans should maintain ‘situational awareness’ in the region following the Baghdad airstrike

Tourists at the Khazneh, or Treasury, in Petra, Jordan. The popular destination is in a region of the world where tensions can be expected to rise after an U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq, killed a top Iranian military official.

Iran and Iraq are obviously not destinations for most U.S. tourists, but experts say U.S. citizens should exercise caution when traveling to other countries in the Middle East following the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad’s international airport last Friday.

Iran, which has several armed allies in the region, retaliated Wednesday by firing a volley of ballistic missiles at two American military bases in Iraq. The Federal Aviation Administration banned U.S. airlines from flying over Iran, Iraq and waters of the Gulf of Oman and Persian Gulf, and Reuters reported that a number of non-U.S. airlines, including Emirates and Lufthansa, had canceled flights around Iraq and Iran.

Meanwhile, a Ukraine-bound Boeing 737 BA, -0.77% operated by Ukraine International Airlines crashed Wednesday after taking off from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. Ukraine’s embassy in Tehran said the crash was under investigation by a commission, and that any statements about its causes before the commission’s decision were “not official,” the Washington Post reported.

Iran and Iraq are listed as Level 4, meaning do not travel to them, by the State Department, while Israel and Jordan are deemed Level 2, calling for increased caution.

Travel experts advise caution when visiting the Middle East. “Any of those places in the Middle East, I would have a heightened level of concern,” Tim Bradley, managing partner of IMG GlobalSecur, a Tavares, Fla., a firm advising companies, nongovernmental organizations and mission groups on safe travel across the globe, said last week after Soleimani’s killing.

The State Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment Wednesday, but it urged all U.S. citizens last week to leave Iraq “due to heightened tensions” in the country and surrounding region.

The department sent out a string of notices on Twitter TWTR, +1.25% cautioning American citizens in countries including Morocco, Lebanon, Kuwait to maintain “a high level of vigilance” and “good situational awareness” in light of the tensions in the region. American citizens in Bahrain should also be on the lookout for demonstrations or unrest, the State Department said.

“While we have no information indicating a threat to American citizens, we encourage you to continually exercise the appropriate level of security awareness,” a department tweet stated.

The State Department regularly issues travel advisories on a 1-to-4 scale; countries rated at Level 1 are places where travelers should “exercise normal precautions,” while Level 4 is a warning not to travel to a country so designated.

For context, Iran and Iraq are listed as Level 4 countries, while places like Israel and Jordan are deemed Level 2. These are countries where the State Department says travelers should use “increased caution.”

Travelers should be especially aware in public squares, and should also recognize that U.S. embassies and Western-branded hotels can face increased risks of attack, Bradley added.

The State Department’s ‘Smart Traveler Enrollment Program’ is a free service under which travelers send their itineraries to the department.

What about Americans planning travel to lower-risk Middle Eastern destinations like Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar?

“Don’t cancel your plans,” said Matthew Bradley, the regional security director for International SOS, a medical and travel security services firm (and no relation to Tim Bradley of IMG GlobalSecur).

That said, travelers to those traditionally lower-risk regions might still minimize their movements to reduce the risk of being a victim of circumstance, he said, and maintain a heightened sense of awareness.

Trust your gut, said GlobalSecur’s Bradley, a former FBI special agent. “If you don’t feel comfortable somewhere, it’s time to leave.”

Tim Bradley said there are other ways to plan ahead:

• Enroll in the State Department’s “Smart Traveler Enrollment Program,” a free service under which travelers send their itineraries to the department. The program gives updates on a country’s safety conditions and enables government officials to get in touch in case of emergencies.
• Brush up on current events before traveling, even if it’s just to know when holidays are approaching, he said.
• Travelers should be in touch with family and friends back home as their trip proceeds. It’s also smart to leave a hard copy of the trip itinerary at home with someone.
• Arrange transportation from the airport to the hotel ahead of time. Hotels typically can provide a car service, he said.

Life-changing Volunteer Vacations

• Source: Chesapeake Family Life

For many people, family vacations create the longest lasting, happiest memories that are carried and shared for a lifetime. A family volunteer vacation has the added element of a new country, community and culture and changing personal outlooks as families give back while receiving a profound, eye-opening experience. Here is a fantastic article in a recent edition of Chesapeake Family Life

Volunteer Vacations that Give Back

November 1, 2019

Taking a family vacation can be a great way for families to relax and reconnect. But what if your family wants a more meaningful experience than the annual trip to the beach or a theme park? Enter volunteer vacations, a popular alternative to the traditional vacation that allows families to give back while also getting away.

Volunteer vacations have been on the rise for the past decade, and volunteer tourism or “voluntourism” is now an almost 200-billion dollar industry. It’s a trend that continues to grow as more families search for ways to make a concrete impact on the world around them.

“I think more people are seeking this kind of vacation because they have a personal desire to connect with a cause they support,” says Kimberly Haley-Coleman, Executive Director of Globe Aware, a nonprofit organization that pairs families with volunteer vacation experiences. “We are living in such a digital world that it can be hard for kids to gain perspective on the world around them, and parents want to give their children the experience of making a difference in a direct way.”

Many organizations, like Globe Aware, Discover Corps, and Together for Good, are helping plan vacations that directly impact a community in need. Globe Aware’s popular Cambodia trips have families build wheelchairs for land mine victims, while its Guatemala trips focus on a local mountain community where families help improve housing and plant vegetable gardens for single mothers.

Though many volunteer vacations focus on global experiences, travelers can also make a difference closer to home, like the trips offered by the American Hiking Society during which participants repair trails at national parks.

Volunteer vacations also take the hassle out of planning, as trips are completely planned by the organization and almost always include housing, food and real-time training. “A volunteer vacation takes the legwork out of planning and it’s a great way to vacation while doing good and working toward a common goal,” says Libby Wile, Senior Director of Programs at the American Hiking Society.

While volunteer vacations are aimed at making a difference for others, the experience is just as impactful for those doing the work. “When a family experiences this type of vacation, the effects can be felt long after the trip is over,” says Haley-Coleman. “It can give kids a sense of appreciation for what really matters, and it can be empowering for them to know that they’ve truly made a difference.“

Read on for five volunteer vacations that offer a variety of experiences from exotic travel to far-off locales, to one-day Caribbean opportunities, to nature-based trips closer to home.

Globe Aware
For almost twenty years, Globe Aware has been connecting families with volunteer opportunities around the world. With 20 international locations, Globe Aware offers a variety of experiences for families who want to make a difference. Travel to Thailand and work with endangered elephants or help rebuild in hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico. Globe Aware’s planned trips last one week and include food, accommodations, medical insurance and bilingual translators. Additionally, Globe Aware also offers customized experiences that can be added on to existing vacations.
globeaware.org

Volunteer Programs Helping Companies Connect Globally

• Source: Stratfor Enterprises

Corporations of all sizes have international suppliers, manufactures, agents and customers. Learning about the countries, communities and people is important in understanding how best to manage these business relationships.Kimberly Haley-Coleman of Globe Aware has decades of experience leading groups around the world on short-term volunteer experiences and creating and managing volunteer abroad solutions for groups and companies of every size.

Managing Risk and Reward When Volunteering Abroad

Nearly every public company in the world, and an increasing number of smaller companies, have some level of international engagement linked to their core business. It's part of the globally connected present. Industries ranging from medical, tech, import-export, energy, and finance to agriculture, production, construction, manufacturing, marketing, executive and risk management need to be alert to how geopolitical events could affect their people, product and profit.

At Stratfor, we believe success in working internationally can be developed with the application of geopolitical know-how: understanding the implications of historical, social and cultural mores, business practices, geography, politics and infrastructure of the countries where you choose to do business.

Tracking and managing those geopolitical risks can be nearly unmanageable for smaller companies, unless they have strategies and partnerships in place to complement what they can do themselves.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman has firsthand knowledge of what's at stake. She is founder and Executive Director of Globe Aware, a non-profit company that develops short-term volunteer programs in international environments. The company's goal is to provide an immersive volunteer experience for busy professionals who want to make a difference in a short amount of time doing projects that are actually requested by the communities they serve. Ventures in giving range across continents, from Southeast Asia to South America to Eurasia and beyond. Globe Aware works with communities on projects they identify and volunteers in both service work and learning more about the people with whom they are working. Globe Aware links volunteers with ventures and people all over the world.

I'll say it's sort of a mini-Peace Corps experience. While the typical Peace Corps experience is a 2 1/2 year commitment, this is a one week intensive immersion.

Globe Aware volunteers immerse themselves in service and in a community. Projects range from building schools in the Andes to building irrigation projects in Southeast Asia to teaching students in Guatemala to working at an animal rescue in Costa Rica or preserving elephant habitat in Thailand.

"I'll say it's sort of a mini-Peace Corps experience," Haley-Coleman explained. "While the typical Peace Corps experience is a 2 1/2 year commitment, this is a one-week intensive immersion. It's similar in the sense that you're giving back to the community, side-by-side with locals, as equals, on some project that they've chosen, that's important to them, that will hopefully make a really big impact in a short period of time."

Prior to launching Globe Aware, Haley-Coleman led a distinguished career in a broad number of private sector fields tied together by a central theme: helping internationally-focused businesses succeed. As both a for-profit and non-profit leader, Haley-Coleman has a deep appreciation for the value of global awareness.

She told Stratfor that when she decided to launch her company, it became apparent on where she should focus in providing a potentially life-changing experience: awareness and mitigation of risk, and the need to understand at a deeper level the place where you are working.

First and foremost, while we're looking for communities that have need, we also want them to be communities that are culturally expansive... It doesn't mean we're necessarily in the communities of the greatest need, we have been asked to have programs and places like Somalia, Darfur, Afghanistan, Syria, and in terms of risk and liability we just aren't in a position to go into war-torn countries… We really have to watch in terms of safety where were putting our volunteers, and then the projects we work on have quite a few criteria. We're not operating heavy equipment and machinery, we're not high on ladders, we're not Doctors Without Borders, so we are not handling bodily fluids and things like that.

But confounding and complicating efforts is a continually shifting menu of issues that face most developing regions. These changes can be disruptive to people and business as well as potentially dangerous. Or they can be rich in opportunity, if you are knowledgeable and poised to take advantage of change. Haley-Coleman said:

We are very actively monitoring the state department sheets that come from Canada, the U.S. and England. They do a pretty good job of any even minor possible situations, such as an expected protest or strike. Then we also monitor the CDC… alerts relating to health and things like dengue fever, Ebola, Zika. This is another thing that's always changing. Avian influenza and H1N1, when those things came out they really impact who's willing to go where, and who's allowed on a plane and what is deemed safe or not. However, we also are staffed locally by people who are based there looking at that situation. Those can change too. For example, in Puerto Rico it's not just about, "Hey is there a hurricane coming, is there a protest, is there a war?" It's also, "Can we get the materials right now to even put roofs on houses, given how difficult it is to get donations delivered in Puerto Rico?"

The rapid pace of change from one project to the next and from one country to the next takes careful pre-planning and close attention during trips. There are always challenges to managing multiple projects across multiple continents from the home office to the field: including, sometimes, evolving in-country laws and even some level of corruption. Haley-Coleman says she enjoys navigating it all.

If materials are expected and needed at a particular location, the idea is all the materials are there before the volunteers get there. Well, there have been times when we've been asked for bribes to get materials there on time.

These are the kinds of things that are always changing so this is an area where it is helpful to have somebody who is notifying our volunteers of what's going on, what to expect, how much to pay for this or for that, where to get the best value for your money in terms of bringing money into a country. Because that's changed too, there was a time when travelers checks were the primary safe currency, and I would never tell anyone to do that now… While we have seen, in terms of bribes, where we're more likely to encounter that, the volunteer, it might be invisible to the volunteer. For example, if materials are expected and needed at a particular location, the idea is all the materials are there before the volunteers get there. Well there have been times when we've been asked for bribes to get materials there on time.

Haley-Coleman loves what she does, and enjoys the challenges presented by constant change and the constant need to stay updated. But those challenges have also become central to most businesses in the digital age. The same skills needed to juggle projects and secure the safety of supplies and people are critical elements for success — whether your business is local, national or global in scope.

Volunteer travel to Lake Peten Itza, El Remate, Guatemala

• Source: Globe Aware

A family’s tradition of sending grandchildren, once they reach the age of 16, on trips to introduce them to different cultures and people and around the world continues. Here is a travelogue entry by Zeth to Guatemala with Globe Aware. Previous grandkids selected volunteer work in the Andes mountains of Peru, with the Roma people of Romania and in a small rural village in the West African country of Ghana.

Day One: Lake Peten Itza, El Remate, Guatemala

Moments like yesterday are why I’m a travel junkie. The guys still asleep, I took an early walk along a small road where we’re staying. What a treat! No city noise, only the idyllic sounds of nature: tropical birds unlike we hear at home … the occasional cry of a monkey, perhaps chiding her youngster … insects buzzing … and the crunch of my footsteps along the gravel-dirt road.

After a while a small older man walked in my direction, and I offered my best “Buenos dias, senor.” He offered me a mostly toothless smile and gently reached out toward me – but not his right hand, as if to shake hands, his left hand. He held onto my hand and we had this wonderful nodding and eye-to-eye exchange while he said something I couldn’t understand. Had he been an American in the U.S., I would have likely averted my eyes and pulled back thinking, “Why is he still holding onto my hand?” But he just continued to smile with old soul eyes and, as we parted, he blew me a kiss! For me travel is less about the big Eiffel Tower/Pyramids/Vatican imagery, and more these small, magical moments when we have real human contact with people we would otherwise never encounter. Blissful!

Day One was mostly orientation and a few hours of R&R. Globe Aware's local organization is Project Ix-Canaan, founded by Canadian Anne Lossing who came to Guatemala 20+ years ago toward the end of Guatemala’s long civil war. She wanted to empower the local Mayan community to protect their own rain forests, and identified the community first needed health, education and opportunity.

Over the years she and her Guatemalan husband, a doctor, have established a medical clinic and a dental clinic (at left) which is staffed largely by visiting clinicians from the U.S. and other places. (No patients on the weekend, so it was empty.)

They also have established an after-school youth development center and a women’s center, each of which we toured today.

We also visited a school where we’ll be teaching later in the week, and Anne pointed out shards of pottery on the ground – at least hundreds but easily 1,000 or more years old – that can be found in several places in this region called Peten. The Mayans believed that vessels had a kind of spirit and they would break most of their pots during sacrifices or in burials, and also every 40 years to start a new beginning.

Volunteer travel experience in Peru with Globe Aware

• Source: Fresno State

A Fresno State lacrosse player shares her eye-opening volunteer travel experience in Peru and living with and learning from the Cuzco community. Enjoy!

Two weeks in Peru with Lauren Kiszely

7/24/2019 12:00:00 PM | By: Savannah Stoeckle / Communications Assistant

FRESNO, Calif. - For many college students summer vacation is a prime opportunity to visit with family and friends, go on vacation, attend concerts, make memories and escape from the books and mile high piles of lecture notes.

It’s winter; any idea where your legislator is?

• Source: Globe Aware

By MARTY TRILLHAASE
May 15, 2019

It’s admirable that Sen. Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, and Reps. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, and Joe Schmick, R-Colfax, compiled a perfect attendance score in Olympia this year.

But when you’re following strict rules, it’s easier to be diligent.

Schoesler, Dye or Schmick operate under a less-than-forgiving system: If they don’t show up to vote, their constituents back home in the 9th Legislative District will hear about it.

Not so in Idaho.

Spending time in the Legislature interfering with your business?

Get yourself a temp.

Legislative service interfering with your vacation plans?

Hire a sub.

Want to get an early jump on campaigning for office?

Appoint a fill-in.

You can’t find a more lenient system anywhere else.

It’s almost as if the legislators wrote this law for themselves — which, of course, they did. After all, this is same group that had to be dragged kicking and screaming before relinquishing a lucrative public pension perk. This is the same collection of politicians who won’t submit to outside ethics reviews or disclose minimal financial conflict of interest information about themselves.

In Congress and in most state legislatures, you vote or you don’t. You either resign or you don’t. Even grave illness is no excuse. For instance, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., stayed home while he was suffering from terminal brain cancer last year.

When Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures, looked into this a few years ago, she found a handful of states, including Washington, that allowed legislators to get a temporary substitute if they were called up for military service. The rest made no exception.

But in Idaho, a lawmaker can take time off “for any reason,” nominate a designated replacement and have the governor make the appointment “until the incumbent .... shall be able to resume the performance of his duties. ...”

This year, 11 state representatives — nearly 16 percent of the House — and six senators — 17 percent of that chamber’s membership — took time off and relied on a temp.

The first one to take a break was Rep. Thyra Stevenson, R-Nezperce, who on Jan. 17 relied on Morgan Lohman of Lewiston to serve as her substitute. By the end of the session last month, there were so many temps on the House and Senate floor that you might have trouble keeping them straight.

Some absentees, such as Sen. Dan Johnson, R-Lewiston, had medical reasons. Johnson required shoulder surgery and departed on March 27 — about two weeks before final adjournment.

Then there was Senate President Pro Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg. A scheduled trip to Vietnam beckoned and the highest ranking member of the state Senate left his post on April 4.

“Through an organization called Globe Aware, we spent long days working at a school for deaf children, building a home for an elderly widow, teaching English and other activities, ” Hill explained to his constituents in a newspaper column. “Because Idaho’s legislative session persisted longer than expected, I finally asked Eric Erickson to fill in for me for what I assumed would be the last day or two, so I could keep my other commitment in Vietnam.”

Nobody elected Erickson.

Nobody elected Kay Maurin of Moscow, either.

She subbed for Rep. Caroline Troy when the Genesee Republican needed to be in Alaska at the end of February.

While Troy was gone, Maurin joined a narrow majority of House members in killing a bill that would have ended the practice of allowing children younger than 16 to be married in this state.

Troy was a co-sponsor of that bill. Somehow, she failed to convey that information to Maurin ahead of the vote.

Who knows how the outcome might have changed had Troy been in Boise that day? At least, the measure would have had one more vote. Possibly, Troy’s advocacy might have swayed other House members to join her in passing it.

There is no more egregious case than that of former Rep. Paulette Jordan, D-Plummer. Last year, she got the bug to run for governor and preferred campaigning to remaining at her job. Ultimately, Jordan resigned — but until she did, Idaho’s easygoing system allowed her to have Margie Gannon serve as her temporary replacement.

At some point, the system seems to feed on itself. If they operated under tougher rules, would legislators schedule vacations that could conflict with a longer-than-expected session? Would they take time off for business trips?

Or, if Idahoans weren’t so tolerant, would their elected representatives in Boise stay put? — M.T.