Madrid Update No. 8

Final reflection in the World Forum on Migration held in Madrid. I appreciated the many intelligent panelists I heard…especially those working on difficult issues on the front line day after day. I appreciate conversations I had with a number of individuals on a casual basis…a reporter who told me that more than 15% of the immigrants to Spain are from Latin America…Manuel, one of the conference photographers who shared an orange with me during a cloudburst…he explained how he learned a few words of Mandarin visiting Beijing a few years back, and how Spain is second only to France in the world´s destination for tourist…mostly from Britain and northern Europe.

As I heard many of the panels on development, I was reminded of a great Chinese educator who, prior to the Japanese invasion of China in the late 1930s, then prior to 1949, taught thousands and thousands of peasants how to read. James Y.C. Yen remind us that ¨we must not think of nations as units–we must think really internationally of peoples. The world is the unit–any other planning is futile. . No movement that is of any significance in one nation can be carried out successfully and effectively without having it linked to a smilar movement in every other country, so that all peoples are marching along together.¨

bh