{"id":4051,"date":"2011-07-17T19:31:36","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T01:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4051"},"modified":"2011-07-17T19:32:11","modified_gmt":"2011-07-18T01:32:11","slug":"how-the-civic-groups-that-once-defined-america-are-thriving-abroad-and-what-it-means-for-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4051","title":{"rendered":"How the civic groups that once defined America are thriving abroad, and what it means for us."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonmonthly.com\/magazine\/julyaugust_2011\/features\/the_lions_of_lagos_the_rotaria030493.php\">John Gravois:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation\u2019s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering \u201cpractice and training in the art of public speaking\u201d along with \u201csociability and good fellowship\u201d since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n<p>Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city\u2019s sprawling six-lane boulevards\u2014past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme\u2019s \u201cRamadan Dozen\u201d special\u2014to reach the campus of a local women\u2019s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi\u2014a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee\u2014harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Gravois: One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation\u2019s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4051"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4053,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4051\/revisions\/4053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}