With the exception of a couple of bars in Montreal, Devin Foxall '03 had never traveled outside the country before graduating from Dartmouth.
Three years, 30 countries and hundreds of travel logs later, Foxall has travelled throughout the Middle East to areas ranging from Egypt to Kashmir. Most recently he traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan for a two week expedition with a group called Nation at a Crossroads.
Crossroads is a company that helps clients experience world events and the United States' impact on the rest of the world firsthand by leading trips to developing countries. It also speaks with women's organizations, human rights groups, schools and peace education programs. Its ultimate goal is to reconstruct war-torn areas through education and economic support.
Foxall was not always interested in traveling to such a dangerous and war torn nation like Afghanistan, but his time at Dartmouth convinced him that he had the power to change the world.
"I met many students that had spent their off-term traveling to exotic parts of the world to spearhead charity projects. It got me thinking maybe I could do that too," he said.
When Foxall landed in Afghanistan this past September, he had one burning objective -- to witness firsthand American rebuilding efforts.
"My country had made a promise to Afghanistan that we would help rebuild their decades of destruction. I wanted to see if promises were kept," Foxall said.
He said that unfortunately the U.S. effort fell short of what he believed was needed to rebuild this devastated nation.
"I think most Americans believe that the Afghan war is over and that we won," Foxall said. "It's not close to over and is dangerously close to being lost."
Most of Kabul is still strewn with rubble and ruins, according to Foxall, and an "ineffective and corrupt government" is providing inadequate access to schooling, electricity and security.
While traveling with Crossroads, Foxall wrote a series of newspaper articles investigating how Middle Eastern youth perceive the United States.
"I learned that they did not hate us," Foxall said. "In fact, far from it. [I learned] that they loved and hoped for our freedoms, but they were angry that the only exchange between our two cultures was fire and destruction."
Afghan citizens often have very different perceptions about what the removal of the Taliban actually accomplished as compared to what is reported in the U.S. news media.
"It sounds unbelievable," Foxall said. "But there is a large portion of the population who believe that the Taliban will take over the capital in the next year. I don't think this is likely, but if they think the Dark Ages are soon coming back, they are less likely to cooperate with us, less likely to build."
Despite overwhelming Afghan pessimism, Foxall is still intent on reconstructing a country that has been politically and economically devastated by what he calls "the forgotten war."
"Each day we met with local-run charities, human rights lawyers or female members of Parliament. More than anything, we talked. We asked them what they foresaw for their country," he said.
Foxall has proposed a Dartmouth-headed partnership with Kabul University as one effort to help rebuild Afghanistan. Currently, with inadequate government funding, the university must rely on textbooks from 50 to 60 years ago. This problem that could easily be resolved with Dartmouth funding, he said.
"I remember Dartmouth students as globally aware," Foxall said.
He also feels that it is this spirit of curiosity among Dartmouth students that jump started his traveling ambitions.
"It used to be that to complete your personal education you had to go on some type of quest, discover new knowledge about the world and yourself and bring the pearl back home," Foxall said. "In America today, that belief is looked at as somewhat ridiculous, but I think that attitude is still encouraged at Dartmouth."
