Portrait of My Anti-Buddy

Due Wednesday, February 10th by 5pm

Your anti-buddy is a fictional, but realistic character living in a part of the world that has strained relations with the United States. Your task is to imagine—as realistically as possible, and on the basis of solid information—how this person might think, act, and communicate under various circumstances and in interaction with you, the “outsider” or “American”.

In other words, your job is to (a) research the culture of a place and the conditions of life of the people in this place; (b) to fashion from these factual materials a fictional person with whom you would share some common ground and work together (If you can’t think of anything else, then your anti-buddy is a student from a lower middle-class background. But, be creative - you could work on a study project together, in a volunteer organization, in some inter-governmental training program, the military, or in a particular sport or club —wherever you might feel comfortable working/interacting)—but from whom you are separated by a cultural divide and by your anti-buddy’s anti-Americanism. For whatever reasons (you will find out why in a later assignment) he/she is one of the many people in his/her country who—at least until he/she met you—has “an unfavorable opinion” of America and Americans. That being said, please note that he/she is not violent, and you have to form a workable relationship with him/her.

Within this fictional but realistic framework of an intercultural relationship you can then use your anti-buddy as a thinking aide by consulting in your mind with him/her: What would he say? How would she act? What does he/she think about this matter?

For this first part of the project, you will:

• Research on-line sources about the country
• Write a minimum of 200 words in a blog post briefly telling your classmates about the country, current conflicts in which it figures, why it matters to America, as well as summarize info about public opinion in the country
• In a minimum of 150 words, name and describe your anti-buddy and his/her life. Give him/her about 7 characteristics—personal, social, cultural, religious and political. Explain each of these characteristics in a sentence or two (the characteristics may range from being the member of a radical religious organization to being a vegetarian or even that s/he is good-looking). Feel free to be creative and combine fantasy with realism, as if you were to write a “docudrama” film-script
• Cite your sources in MLA or APA format
• Name the newspapers your anti-buddy reads on-line and summarize (in a sentence or two) a story that he/she read this morning (this will be your first weekly press clipping).