Northfield Teens Bound for Norway

Call it a coincidental foreign exchange program.

Within hours of the goodwill visit to Northfield on Friday, a dozen local teenagers will depart for the royal couple’s native land with ambitions to promote cultural understanding abroad and at home.

Twelve students will attend a week-long international “Build Bridges, Not Walls” conference in Drammen, Norway, a city located 25 miles southwest of Oslo. The United States will be represented at the conference by the Northfield teens and 10 students from Red Wing; the rest of the 350 attendees are from 10 European countries including Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Although the Northfield teens will have one day of sight-seeing in Oslo, their focus is to attend workshops on human rights, peaceful conflict resolution and intercultural understanding, with an emphasis on building relationships through the arts. Upon their return home, the students plan to implement what they’ve learned through projects they initiate or by working with existing community groups.

“It really is an opportunity to go and learn about building bridges between different cultures and different people,” said Sarah Swan McDonald, a Northfield High School social studies teacher who’s chaperoning the trip.

Swan McDonald said Drammen is known as a city that embraces its multiculturalism; about 16 percent of the city’s 63,600 residents are immigrants, including a number of refugees from Bosnia. The city first hosted the Building Bridges conference in 2005. The conference also has been held in Bosnia and in Red Wing, which has a longtime friendship with Drammen.

McDonald said Red Wing students were hoping to find two Northfield students to join them, but there was so much interest they ended up with 12 students, most of whom are sophomores. The students were nominated by teachers and had to write essays explaining how they could make their school and community a more welcoming place for people of different cultures, races and economic classes.

“It’s a pretty phenomenal thing about these students—they’re going to Norway to learn, and they will be going to meetings, with the hopes of coming home to do something even better,” Swan McDonald said.

Sophomore Helen Forsythe said she’s excited about the opportunity because she loves to travel and interact with people from different cultures.

"I’m interested in carrying my experience in Norway back here and hopefully making a difference in our school, where there’s separation between different groups of people,” she said.

Sophomore Ian Iverson said he’s interested to hear what the Norwegian students say about multiculturalism, just months after Norwegian right-wing extremist and confessed mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb in downtown Oslo and went on a shooting spree at a youth camp.

Iverson is passionate about social justice issues, and he expects that he and the other students will give presentations about what they learn to local civic groups and churches. He’d also like to engage members of the town’s Latino community.

“My big hope is being able to reach a lot of people when we get back, and making sure it has an impact,” he said.

Senior Sofie Scheuerman said she hopes the students gain and hone skills that will help them address local issues like the student achievement gap, racial inequalities, and the separation between the white and Latino communities.

“I’m super-pumped. We have such a great group of students, such an energetic bunch. I know we’re going to make great change for our community, and I can’t wait,” she said.

The other students going on the trip are Daherik Agapito-Romero, Isabel Bilek, Scout Gregerson, Margaret Kennedy, David Kreis, Cliff Martin, Margaret Miland, Carmela Ortiz-Menendez and Meredith Reese.

The students have received contributions from local groups like the Sons of Norway and The Rotary Club of Northfield but are still seeking additional donations to cover the flight costs for some group members. Interested donors can write a check to Northfield High School (designated for the Norway peace conference) and either mail it to the school, at 1400 Division St. S., or drop it off at the school office.