I spent the last two years of my assignment in Vietnam trying to make a difference. I helped the U.S. Department of Defense build health clinics and schools in poor communities, worked diligently to make Vietnam’s equivalent of the Coast Guard become more effective at saving lives on the high seas and responding to natural disasters, managed U.S. State Department programs to help the Vietnamese clean up unexploded ordinance (UXO) left over from the Vietnam War, and coordinated some of the largest sea-based humanitarian medical assistance missions to visit Vietnam since the end of the war in 1975. In my free time I ran an outreach program to improve the quality of life for elderly leprosy patients living in remote areas.
I became a vegetarian, too, and yet something was missing. I had not truly begun to make amends for my cowardice on the road to Lai Chau.
In August 2008, my wife and I returned to the Monterey Peninsula, where we had first met and fallen in love as students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). She became a professor at the Naval War College branch at NPS, and I began an assignment as the Assistant Provost for Continuing Education at the Defense Language Institute (DLI).
We bought a house in Pacific Grove, I went vegan, we adopted a second cat, had our first child, and I made the decision that I would end my Marine Corps career here on the Peninsula.
It was also a time when I began to lay the groundwork for my return to Vietnam, in an effort to right a wrong that I had been part of.
Last year we established the Kairos Coalition, a tax-exempt, non-profit charity based in Pacific Grove with the mission of employing innovative and culturally-normative approaches to deliver humane education in developing countries.
We strive to use traditional creative arts to promote reverence for all life and respect for the dignity of each person, while also fostering a deeper understanding of the power of empathy and mercy in the compassionate exercise of personal responsibility for achieving a cruelty-free and sustainable world. Humane Edutainment
The Kairos Coalition’s approach to humane education is called “Humane Edutainment,” a pedagogy that draws primarily from “Forum Theatre,” a type of participatory theater rooted in Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.”
Forum Theater performances are comprised of a number of short dramatic vignettes that portray ethical dilemmas in which a protagonist is put into a position of being oppressed or of being an accessory of oppression.
Thorough interactions within the context of ethical vignettes, members of the audience are forced to free themselves from the limitations of merely being spectators of an unfolding drama; instead, they are forced to confront these dilemmas by joining in the action in order to satisfactorily resolve the crises themselves.
The Humane Edutainment approach facilitates the experiential learning process and creates cognitive conflict, an important vehicle for stimulating behavioral modification.
Humane Edutainment also employs an approach distilled from centuries of Vietnamese cultural tradition. Traditional art forms, such as water puppetry, dance, poetry, painting and improvisational theatre are called upon to convey important Humane Education messages.
This “culturally-normed” approach has historically been very effective in reaching audiences of broad composition, ranging from those with little formal education to those who are highly educated.
The tradition of roaming teams of performers and minstrels such as these dates back centuries in Vietnam and China. For example, during the 1940s and 1950s, the Vietnam Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh relied extensively on traveling “Culture and Drama Teams” to propagandize Marxist-Leninist ideology throughout rural communities.
We are currently working in collaboration with diverse array of domestic and international public, private, and non-profit stakeholders to coordinate the development and delivery of a Humane Education curriculum in Vietnam using the Humane Edutainment methodology.
During a nine-month proof-of-concept pilot (December 2010 to August 2011), a mobile training team (MTT) comprised of entirely of youth volunteers will be trained, equipped, and sponsored to conduct Humane Edutainment performances at various secondary schools and universities in the Hanoi Municipal Region, an area of approximately 1,300 square miles.
The Hanoi Municipal Region is comprised of ten urban districts, eighteen rural districts, and one township with a total population of just over six million, including more than three million school-age children.
An initial cadre of “performers,” comprised entirely of volunteers, participated in a Humane Edutainment Practitioner Workshop that I led in November 2010 with two other volunteers from the United States.
During this workshop participants gained a more nuanced awareness of issues related to animal welfare and environmental ethics in Vietnam through presentations and discussions with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from various NGOs working in this field in Vietnam and throughout the Asia Pacific region.
They also learned and practiced the fundamental skills of Forum Theater that form the core of the Humane Edutainment approach. Finally, participants and facilitators together explored the use of other traditional creative and dramatic arts as potential delivery vehicles for humane education.
From December 2010 through August 2011 the MTT will conduct Humane Edutainment performances at local schools and universities located throughout the Hanoi Municipal Region. Youth participants attending these events will receive take-away literature, including fact sheets and a four-page newspaper that addresses Humane Education themes and outlines steps that individuals can take in their communities to advance Humane Education objectives at the grassroots level.
Five times during the pilot, youth participants under the stewardship of volunteer and organizational mentors will have the opportunity to undertake small-scale community projects with a Humane Education theme.
Throughout this pilot, youth will be encouraged and empowered to get more personally involved in furthering the humane agenda by becoming volunteer participants in the Humane Edutainment troupe and/or becoming active members of community-based youth clubs established to carry out local community projects.
Time travel
Someone asked me recently to describe in a single sentence the vision of the Kairos Coalition. I answered that I could do better than that. I could do it in two words—“time travel.”
That response got a pretty funny look. But if you think about it, what we are talking about is very reminiscent of those 1980s Back to the Future movies—the ones with Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.
Let me explain what I mean.
In the last decade or so, westerners like we Americans have really just begun to wake up and appreciate the horrendous consequences that our public policies and individual consumer choices over the last fifty years or so have had on public health, the environment, the social fabric of our communities and families.
Dare I even mention what horrors we have inflicted on the animal kingdom in the name of our gluttony, greed, envy and sloth?
We are now paying a terrible price for our unchecked consumer appetites and our stubborn unwillingness to look ahead to where the road we have chosen will inevitably take us—towards a poisoned environment, crumbling communities, economic instability, a public health crisis and an increasingly decimated and endangered animal kingdom.
What if you could go back in time, and, like Marty McFly, personally intervene in order to alter the course of history?
Vietnam today stands at the same developmental crossroads where the United States stood a half-century ago. Soon they will face similar challenges and decisions about the nature of industrialization and modernization in their own country. And the choices they make will have consequences that will remain with them for generations, whether for good and ill.
Our hope is that by introducing culturally-relevant humane education programs—and by helping to create a vanguard of educated, skilled advocates today—perhaps we can help Vietnam’s next generations re-imagine different solutions to the most pressing development challenges. Perhaps we can help them choose ways that could curtail the decades of unnecessary and destructive abuse that could result from rampant commercial consumption and misguided public policies.
Of course, this is a long-term strategy. For the time being, I will be happy to save some dogs’ lives!
The future begins now.
“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” - Aristotle
Please check this page again for an update on Kairos and Lt. Col. Lucius.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lucius was commissioned a Second
Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1989 and has since served 22
years on active duty in a wide variety of command, staff and diplomatic
assignments. He is a specialist in Asian foreign languages and cultures
and is now assigned as the Assistant Provost, Dean of Educational
Support Services and Dean of Students for the Directorate of Continuing
Education at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in
Monterey, CA. Lt. Col. Lucius graduated from Norwich University in
1989, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in History. He also holds a Master
of Forensic Science degree from National University, a Master of Arts
degree in National Security Studies from Naval Postgraduate School and a
Graduate Certificate in Community Advocacy from George Washington
University. In 2009, Lt. Col. Lucius founded the Kairos Coalition to
pilot experimental humane education initiatives in developing economies.
Editor's note: As an additional distinction, in 2008 Lt. Col. Lucius won an award from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for "Sexiest Vegetarian Marine.
