Do you have three minutes to feel inspired?
I’ve just made a short video about the day that every single one of the Chavez Prep sixth graders was face-to-face with someone who had been to a nuclear disaster while the radiation was fresh and dangerously “hot.” (See video.)
Wait until you see these 11-year-olds listen…so serious, so eager to learn more. And, so respectful of Mike Edwards, a retired National Geographic editor who covered the Chernobyl disaster over several years for the magazine, and Carlos Miranda Levy, founder of Relief 2.0 with Stanford University’s Peace Innovation Lab, who has been several times to the Fukushima area.
Mike and Carlos are both good friends of mine. In fact,Mike was my journalism mentor from the beginning when he encouraged me to switch from PR to journalism. Carlos was a fellow Fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship at Stanford. (Carlos, who lives in the Dominican Republic, was a year ahead of me.)
What you’ll see on the video is the reality. To my delight, Mike was astonished by his experience. This was the first time he’d been in a DC public school, and of course, he’s read horror stories about them for years. He confessed afterwards, that he had expected controlled chaos. Instead, he found “courteousness” and “intelligence.” He was still praising the students the next day at our monthly NG retiree luncheon.