Imagine all the People Sharing all the World

By Roy Campos, Costa Rica

Once upon a time, a group of scholars decided to change the world while struggling with their country’s challenges. As time passed, life put them together in unexpected ways. As Marvel superheroes, their multiverse converged at some crossroads called SUSI. It happened on July 2023, summertime, when Boston City was calm, but new ideas were yet to reborn. Thanks to Institute for Training and Development, practitioners from 18 countries get attached to a single vision: understanding how the United States managed the economy and sustainable development.

After six weeks of exposure to cutting-edge lectures and learning experiences, their lives turned around. Understanding sustainability as a broader concept, where human well-being and socio-economic development face their best challenges, they grasped enough knowledge to come back to their countries and endure those changes they had already begun ago.

A few words summarize these SUSI fellows’ travel: fascinating friendships, exploring knowledge, incredible diversity, and fantastic learning, among others. This quest also had a place during August 2023 in New York and Washington, and especially in their lives. Such an astonishing encounter inspired them to achieve ambitious goals with a new approach: American freedom, its political history, and worldwide leadership, among other principles underpinning.

Now, we are more than friends: we are almost a family. The cultural ties built in this immersion travel converted friendship relations into value chains strong enough to inspire us beyond what we could imagine. The best is yet to come because it is not the end of safe travel but the beginning of a challenging adventure.

Here we are, waiting to return home; however, now we feel a piece of our heart is in the United States. They were a shelter, a safe house, and a buffer zone to overtake personal and professional purposes. Here, we reframed some thoughts and biases, drove our underlying feelings, and examined our behaviors to overcome new outcomes and results.

Kindly say we are a privileged group that, as a team, will perform individually and, at the same time, together. How? “Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”