ASU alumnus Caleb Barclay and friend Bill Taggart visited the Middle East this September hoping to network with different organizations for their nonprofit group The Peace Frame.
They were successful in networking as well as gaining more perspective of the Middle East.
The Peace Frame is a nonprofit organization Barclay started in hopes of dismissing the misconceptions of different cultures around the world.
Barclay aims to educate people of different cultures by telling the stories of people within these cultures through film.
“We want to use film in a way that captures those individual stories so that people can see a different side that they might not ever see in the media,” Barclay said.
One of the driving forces of Taggart joining the organization was his bias against Muslims and people in the Middle East.
After 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq war, Taggart, a young New Jersey kid in school, was convinced from what he saw in the media that all Muslims wanted to kill him.
It wasn’t until years later when he got older and moved to Phoenix he discovered this was not true. Taggart volunteered in a Phoenix community of Somaliland refugees who were mostly Muslims and it opened his eyes to the hospitality and kindness of the people.
“It completely rocked my world, because I am sitting here thinking all Muslims are the same,” Taggart said.
From that transformation Taggart left his job as a stockbroker and started to work with Barclay full-time on The Peace Frame project.
During Barclay and Taggart’s trip, they visited Jordan, Israel and Egypt to network with the Arab American University in Israel and several companies involved in film and production.
With the networks the Peace Frame gained during the trip it will help them provide stories for their first project, the Seven Stories.
The Seven Stories will tell the stories of seven aspects of different cultures. For now, the project will focus on the cultures that Barclay and Taggart visited including American culture.
“The goal of this is to empower them and have them go out and make their own films and their documentaries,” Barclay said.
Barclay mentioned that it’s better for each individual country to tell its own story rather than him telling the story.
So far the project is focusing on Jordan, Israel, Egypt and America.
For Barclay and Taggart this trip was also an eye opener for how people in the areas they traveled to perceived Western culture.
“One of the biggest revelations for me on this trip was other people’s perception of the West,” Barclay said. “And how we need to be a part of fighting that ignorance as well.”
Barclay mentioned it was also hard for both men to explain to people the word “peace” in the organization’s name, because of how people within Arab Nations perceived peace.
“We were pretty shocked to find hesitation with that; those are like money words here in the U.S.,” Taggart said.
Taggart said it was explained to them that in the Middle East the words peace and reconciliation mean there is a pain one must face first —meaning one must identify the pain experienced first in order to accomplish peace and reconciliation.
The most revealing moment for Barclay and Taggart during the trip was when they met a young man who had traveled to the U.S.
Barclay said that originally the young man’s parents did not want him to go to the U.S. because of what they had seen in Hollywood films.
“It was really funny because I said that’s the same thing my parents experienced, when I came here,” Taggart said.
Taggart said that seeing the Middle East perspective on their trip gives The Peace Frame more incentive because their mission is to change people’s perspective about each other.
Reach the reporter at shurst2@asu.edu
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