Once in a Lifetime 2.0 is the second blogtrip organised and run by twenty students from Technion and Haifa University who take part in the StandWithUs Fellowship. Now in its fifth year, the Fellowship, selects and trains 150 student leaders from six Israeli universities to become life-long ambassadors for Israel. The year-end Hasbara project is designed to portray a positive aspect of Israel to the world and builds on the success of last year’s blogtrip for four bloggers from the UK, China, and the USA.
“We are a group of students studying various academic fields such as engineering, medicine, law, political science and more. We gathered as a group because we found it important to expose as many young people as possible, from all over the world, to our reality here in Israel, Israel behind the headlines”, says Keren Malamud, a member in the Haifa StandWithUs Fellowship program.
The five bloggers are…
- Chris Richardson (@theaussienomad) an Australian blogger currently living in London – known to many of us as ‘the Saint’ for all his efforts helping fellow bloggers with technical isuues – whose blog, TheAussieNomad has over 75,000 monthly views.
- Kaustubh Katdare – known as “Big K” – is from India and is the founder and CEO of Crazy Engineers, a web site with over 800,000 monthly visitors, aimed at promoting collaboration, entrepreneurship and innovation between engineers around the world. Big K is running a forum thread on the Once in a Lifetime blogtrip.
- Eunice Khog from Singapore writes the Travelerfolio blog in Singapore, with over 200,000 monthly views.
- Marcello Arrambide from Venezuela writes the Wandering Trader blog as he travels the world. His blog has over 60,000 monthly visitors
- Feng Yimeng from China is a business journalist, reporter and world traveler. She writes her Central Avenue blog which gets “hundreds of thousands” of views. Feng is a senior reporter for Ceocio.com an online business & tech magazine, and is also a technology and financial reporter for CBN Weekly and the Beijing News.
The bloggers will broadcast their experiences in Israel via their blogs on a daily basis, on Facebook and on Youtube, reaching audiences that aren’t traditionally exposed to Israel beyond the conflict. “You can read a lot about Israel online or in the newspapers, but nothing beats being up close and personal with the actual people. I think it will be very interesting to see the differences in our life styles”, says Chris Richardson.
During their 11-day trip, the bloggers will get a close view at Israel’s high tech industry and experience first hand Israeli culture and diversity. They will visit the “Save a Child’s Heart” Foundation and take a tour of “Better Place” to see Israel’s groundbreaking electric car system. The bloggers will meet VIPs including Ministers, Members of Knesset, famous Chef’s and artists such as leading Israeli singer and songwriter, Idan Reichel. They will finish off with a visit to the resort city of Eilat, near the Egyptian border.
I’d heard of this trip last year and I’ve been watching it this year. Not really sure how the organization can claim to look past the “stereotypical view of Israel” without taking them to tourist sites in the West Bank or visiting any Palestinian cities besides East Jerusalem. I can’t help but wonder that the trip is actually a bit of a one-sided representation of a very complex, multi-cultural region.
I’m intrigued by this trip, particularly this: “not just in culture and tourism, but business, technology and regional politics.” I’ll be watching to see how this trip progresses and how business, technology and politics tie into it.