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thousand students. In the last decade, Slim has sent a staggering 165,000 students to college. Every year, he brings ten thousand of his best scholarship students to Mexico City for a “Mexico in the 21st Century” day to hear from well-known political, social, and cultural figures, including Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of Spain Felipe González, Madeleine Albright, Lance Armstrong, Pelé, Magic Johnson, and Alvin Toffler. When I spoke there a couple of years ago, Carlos asked me to talk about big global issues, not about Mexico. He believes if young Mexicans understand the world beyond their borders, they will make better decisions about Mexico’s future.

I began and now end this chapter on giving skills with education, because in the twenty-first century, education is the ultimate skills gift. While few people can give as much as Carlos Slim, almost everyone can be a reading tutor, or mentor a young person trying to decide what path to take in life, or give a bike to a schoolchild in a poor rural village, or contribute something to giving low-income kids at home and abroad the chance to go to college. Remember Oseola McCarty, whose story is told in chapter 2. Almost everyone who reads this book has a higher income than she had. If she can give so much, all of us can give something.

SIX

Gifts of Reconciliation and New Beginnings

SINCE THE END of the Cold War, most of the world’s political violence within and between nations has involved people of different religious, ethnic, and tribal groups. While there are always underlying grievances of varying degrees of legitimacy, political leaders have exploited them to harden group identities and demonize, even dehumanize, the “others,” in order to increase popular support in their struggle for power, land, or resources. Regardless of the root causes, once violence driven by group hatred begins, the vast majority of the victims are civilians, often women and children. They have been subject to military assaults, suicide bombings, rape, dismemberment, torture, starvation, and mass slaughter.

In the aftermath, even the most open-minded people find it difficult not to become hard-hearted. Yet in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Rwanda, or any other place torn apart by group violence, the ability to see the “others” as people—to respect them, communicate with them, work with them, live alongside them, and yes, forgive them—is essential to putting broken communities back together and moving on with life.

Of course, the most revered example of reconciling leadership is Nelson Mandela, who invited the men who guarded him in jail to his inauguration as president of South Africa, put leaders who had supported apartheid in his cabinet, and set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to give people who had committed crimes during the apartheid era the chance to avoid imprisonment by confessing. Mandela decided that the only way he or the people of South Africa could be free to face the future was to let go of the past. Because of all that he had suffered, he had the credibility to do it.

There are many other good and visionary men and women who are working to promote understanding, reconciliation, and new beginnings across great divides. I wish I could chronicle them all. This chapter tells the story of a few, how you can learn about others, and how you can get involved in this kind of giving.

In September 1993, when the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was signed on the White House lawn, among the invited guests were a group of remarkable Jewish and Muslim teenagers from the Middle East. They were members of the first class of Seeds of Peace, a group founded earlier that year by the late author and journalist John Wallach, after the first attack on the World Trade Center. The first group included forty-six Israeli, Palestinian, and Egyptian teenagers. They met at a camp in Maine where they lived together, shared meals, and participated in athletic and arts activities. Most important, they had daily sessions in which they expressed their thoughts