“You cannot know if you are not introduced,” goes a Malay proverb, “and you cannot love if you do not know.” It was in this spirit that Québécois publisher and civil liberties activist Jacques Hébert launched Canada World Youth, a unique experiment in global education, in 1971.

For more than forty years, Canada World Youth taught tens of thousands of young people from around the world how to live together and adapt to circumstances outside their comfort zones. Whether in a longhouse in Malaysian Borneo, a village in rural Québec, or a dairy farm in Uruguay, they went beyond seemingly impenetrable differences to a middle ground where the building blocks for a lasting peace might be recovered: respect, mutual understanding, friendship, and a shared sense of humanity.

This is a story about the people who brought Canada World Youth to life; the larger global movements, events, and disruptions they witnessed; and the organization’s struggle to survive in the face of the rapid changes and dislocations of the early twenty-first century.

Mark Dickinson teaches in the School for the Study of Canada / École d’études canadiennes at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. His work has appeared in different magazines, newspapers, and periodicals, including The Walrus and The Times of London. Originally from British Columbia, he was a Canada World Youth participant on the Québec-Indonesia exchange in 1994/95, and later returned to Indonesia to work on a sustainable development project in the Sumatran rainforest. This is his fourth book.

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