Peace through International Friendship 

        In 1961, as the Eichmann Trials were concluding in Israel, I sent a letter to People to People, founded in 1956 for the purpose of “promoting peace through understanding.” To do my part in promoting international peace, I asked for a pen pal in Germany. They sent me two my age: Lothar the sailor in Lübeck and Renate the xylophone player in Dusseldorf. All three of us were just about to start high school. Every four to six weeks for four years, we avidly exchanged postage stamps and letters, initially in English and later, after I began studying German, in a German/English mix. Their handwriting was tight, small, neat, different from ours.  
        In the summer after my junior year of high school, a group of students and two teachers spent two months in Austria studying German and history. We mostly stayed in Vienna.  Reneta knew I was going.  When her father suddenly died, she pressured me to make a side trip or to extend my stay in Europe to visit her. She said my visit would lift her spirits.  I tried to explain, I wanted to go, but didn’t know how to travel on my own in Europe, and had no idea how visiting her would impact my roundtrip group rate. I clumsily said no. That was more than merely disappointing to her. I felt I had let a friend down in her moment of need.  We kept writing just as often through the end of high school and with lesser frequently thereafter.  Within two years of starting college, we stopped writing entirely except for a blip after we both turned 35.  
        After college, even while many of my friends travelled to Europe, I didn’t. In fact, after spending a summer in Austria with my high school classmates, I didn’t get back to Europe for 34 years. Suitably, when I returned, it was for a trip to Vienna.  This time I was traveling for work, to attend my first meeting of the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study.  HBSC is a collaborative cross-national study of adolescent health and well-being under the aegis of the European Region of the World Health Organization. The survey, administered in schools, is undertaken every four years using a questionnaire for 11-, 13- and 15-year-olds. I’d been working on a U.S. variation on the HBSC for four years, but it was loosely compliant with protocol, and the United States hadn’t yet been accepted as a member country. When I attended the Vienna meeting in 1998, the U.S. was officially voted in as a member.  Twenty-six European countries, Israel, and Canada were already member nations.  Belgium participated as if it were two countries, one French speaking, the other Flemish (or Dutch) speaking.  
        What struck me at the meeting in Vienna was that it redefined cordiality compared to every work-related meeting I ever attended in the United States.  It seemed that everyone treated each other as friends.  Hugs more closely resembled embraces.  As a representative of the United States, I had to put up with occasional snide remarks expressed in a jocular way, especially by a certain representative of France (with whom I later became close friends).  No doubt, such relationships existed between some of the other countries too. 
        I looked forward to future attendance at HBSC meetings.  However, I did attend such meetings in Stockholm, Edinburgh (switched from Israel when war broke out), London, Galway, and Toulouse.  My wife Ginger came along to Edinburgh, where her Dad’s family is from, and to Toulouse, where by now I had a close friend.  My family also met up with a member of the Danish team while on travel in Denmark.  My being part of the U.S. team ended in 2006.  
        I chose to avoid competing for a contract to continue our involvement in the U.S. team beyond 2006 because I foresaw what was in store.  When the new U.S. government representatives to the HBSC attended their first meeting, they proved me right, and they did so again in subsequent meetings, and in communications in between meetings.  I’m told they didn’t behave like friends.  Instead, they attacked the scientific integrity of many aspects of the HBSC protocol and tried to strong arm members of the HBSC to conform to the U.S. will.  Doing so didn’t go over well.  During that cycle, Ginger and I were visited by the head of the Irish HBSC team and her family.   By the end of that cycle, for whatever reason, the U.S. was no longer a member. Meantime, over time, many other countries applied and were accepted into the HBSC.  Instead, I began serving as a member of the French team by helping to write articles based on the French HBSC in English.  Even as I did, I watched how members entrusted their children to enjoy extended stays with the same-age children of members in other nations.
        At some point, the HBSC began planning 2013 meetings in St. Andrews, Scotland to celebrate 30 years of international friendship.  Based on urging by the team heads from France and Ireland, both Ginger and I were invited.  In addition to sessions, we also partook in celebratory dinners every night.  At one, the dinner speakers were the “three guys in a bar” who in the early 1980s came up with the idea for the HBSC: to promote international friendships, and maybe to produce some scientifically valid work as a byproduct.  I wasn’t the only “old timer” there; Ginger wasn’t the only life partner.  You could feel the love all night.  And when four of the Czech men came dressed in kilts, it gave ideas to other people, including Ginger.   So, at the gala on the final night, I was one of 18 men who wore kilts.  My kilt weighed 20 times what my attire for the prior evening weighed and was infinitely itchier.  The gala ended with free-wheeling hours of dance in which everyone was constantly changing partners.  
        After the 2013 meeting, Ginger and I traveled throughout Europe, ending with a stay with the head of the French team and her new life partner.  In the subsequent decade, even as the world has coped with war and pandemics, my friendships within the HBSC have strengthened, based on in-person, email, and social media contacts.  For a while, I kept writing articles as part of the French team.  Five years after the gala, Ginger and I visited a former member of the Flemish speaking Belgian team at her family’s country place in Slovenia.  We had never met before, but five years of virtual friendship fed by sharing many HBSC friends led to her inviting me and Ginger to stay with her and her family.  Hours after we arrived, a Slovenian friend of theirs with whom I had already developed a virtual connection came by with a gift basket of freshly-picked wild mushrooms.  Every morning, we picked from their trees unimaginably delicious figs, bursting to enter our mouths.  As we walked their street, neighbors appeared bearing bottles of home-made wine and an appropriate number of glasses.  
        The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put great strains on the HBSC.  Due to the war, Ukraine could no longer field a team; Russia as the aggressor was not allowed to participate.  I happen to know a member of Russian team because at the Gala in St. Andrews we appointed ourselves the event’s unofficial photographers.  Until the war placed an embargo on mails in both directions, I used to enjoy exchanging small gifts with her.  During these difficult years, even as my friend became the mother of two, she maintained many of her HBSC friendships.  And last week, she received a birthday gift from a beloved HBSC friend from Ukraine, now living half a world away.  Instead of going through the mails, this gift reached my Russian friend via relay, one hand to the next to the next.  “It took teamwork,” she smiled virtually, as she described this joyful highlight of turning 40.  
        Long ago, as a teenager, I felt I got to play a small role in promoting international peace through People to People.  I’m convinced that I’ve seen how the HBSC promotes international peace through international friendships.  Although the design of the HBSC is premised on countries looking at each other as incubators of change and, thereby, as offering each other models for promoting the health and wellbeing of young people, it meanwhile builds international peace not organizationally but in the same manner as People to People, one loving friendship at a time.  The HBSC has grown to include 50 countries and regions across North America and Europe, with over 400 researchers in the HBSC international research network. 

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Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding research career. He’s since published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, plays, hybrid and interviews in 200 journals on five continents. Publications include Barrelhouse, Hippocampus, Kestrel, Lunch Ticket, NWW, The Atlantic, Typehouse, Wordpeace. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.