A website created by Landmark Education Graduates with news about other Landmark Education Graduates and the difference they are making around the world
Fuel (see below) is on tour across the country, with special one-time shows at promiment theatres. The Chicago showing, coming on Friday, October 9th at the AMC Lowes Pipers Alley 4 (see poster below), is offering free tickets to Landmark Education graduates who rsvp to fuelChicago@thefuelfilm.com. That showing is at 7:15pm and is hosted by Peter Fonda. There will be a Q&A session there along with the film.
Here is the film tour schedule:
tonight, October 1st, New York, NY, AMC Empire 25
tonight, October 1st, Philadelphia, PA, Ritz at the Bourse
tonight, October 1st, Toronto, ON, Muck Film Festival
Friday, October 9th, Chicago, IL, AMC Pipers Alley
Friday, October 9th, Tucson, AZ, The Loft Cinema
Friday, October 16th, San Diego, CA, Landmark Ken
Friday, October 23rd, Sacramento, CA, Crest Theatre
Friday, November 6th, Cleveland, OH, Cedar Lee
Friday, November 6th, Kansas City, MO, Tivoli Cinema
To get tickets and more details, go to http://www.thefuelfilm.com/theaters.php
Original Story:
Fuel, the criticially acclaimed environmental documentary about oil and alternative energy created by Landmark Forum graduate Josh Tickell, was labelled a ‘critics pick’ by the New York Times ‘critics pick’ last week. In her review, Jeanette Catsoulis describes Fuel positively:
"Thanks to an informative, buoyant tone and the director’s own restless intelligence, the film preaches to the unconverted with passion, energy and graphics so clear that they would make Al Gore weep all over his PowerPoint.
Bustling with politicians, scientists and card-carrying green celebrities, “Fuel” reveals the terrifying complexity of our energy crisis, as well as Mr. Tickell’s commitment to the truth."
Here’s an interview Tickell gave about the film earlier this year:
Landmark Education News has received links to what appears to be a Self-Expression and Leadership program project taking place in the Central subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. The videos show a large number of talented couples engaged in a variety of different dances.
Shortly before this past mother’s day, Landmark Forum leader David Cunningham appeared on the Daily Buzz television program to discuss the best ways to appreciate and honor one’s mother. The video and transcript of the interview are shown below.
Interviewer: Okay. The official celebration for mom is just two days away; do you know what yo’re going to get her this Mother’s Day? Well, our next guest says, "Flowers are nice. Candy, yeah, that’s all right. But that’s not what she really wants." Landmark Education Communications Expert, David Cunningham is here to talk about what tops Mom’s wish list. Thank you so much David for coming in.
David Cunningham: Good Morning.
Interviewer: Okay, let’s do it. Flowers just don’t get the job done according to a recent survey out there. What does get the job done?
David Cunningham: Well, moms love the flowers and they love being taken out to dinner. What tehy really want is a special thanks. They just want our thanks. They like to know that they’ve got our appreciation, our gratitude, our respect.
Interviewer: A simple thanks, so I can call my mom and say, "Mom, I love you, thanks," and that’s it.
David Cunningham: Well, that’s a beginning. There’s really – we found three things in all the thousands of moms that are in our Landmark Education programs around the world. We found three things they really want.
Interviewer: Okay. Say "thanks," I guess, for a specific moment. Thank you for giving birth to me.
David Cunningham: Thank you for – if you look back over your life, you can relive some very special moments. There’ll be some special moments, simple things like maybe when your mom cheered you up when you were blue. Or she stood beside you when maybe it looked like nobody else was. If you can think back on even one of those specific moments and then relive it with her, she’ll love that.
Interviewer: Whey should you be so specific with that "thank you"?
David Cunningham: Because it really brings up the presence of it. It has the mom know that you remembered and that it was special because people like to know that they got to contribute to you.
Interviewer: Okay. Number two, do something just for her.
David Cunningham: That’s right. On Mother’s Day, there’s things that moms like to do. It doesn’t even matter if you like to do it. It could be as simple sometimes as sitting down and talking over coffee. It could be something more elaborate like planning a trip for her. The important part is that it’s something that she would like to do.
Interviewer: Let mom go to the beach alone and read a book.
David Cunningham: Exactly. That’s the one you’d like, right?
Interviewer: I think moms just want some "me" time, but you don’t want to say, "I just want some ‘me’ time on Mother’s Day." People expect you to be with the kids.
David Cunningham: Yeah. It’s important to listen and know what your mom would like for her.
Interviewer: Okay. Number three, let mom know she’s getting the job done.
David Cunningham: That one may be the most important. For moms to know that your life works. To be able to say to your mom, "I’m okay. My life works." I was talking to one young woman recently. She said that she used to fight with her mom a lot as a teenager. Now every time there’s a little bit of tension all she does is she looks her mom in the eye and says, "Mom, I’m okay, and my life works. I have a great life." She says every time she does that it dissolves the tension and her mom gets tears in her eyes and there’s love right there.
Interviewer: That’s a perfect way to do it. David, thank you so much.
Recently, one person’s experience of Landmark Education and the Landmark Forum was featured on the Canadian television program Positive Living. Additionally, the show has featured interview segments with Landmark Forum leader Nancy Zapolski about different topics of importance to people. The segment featured below gives coaching related to careers.
The Canadian television program Positive Living (positivelivingtv.com) recently featured one person’s experience of the Landmark Forum. The program features segments from inside the Landmark Forum, which is led by David Cunningham and Nancy Zapolski. The episode also contains interviews with featured participant Mark Holmes and Zapolski.
In the Landmark Forum, aspiring Los Angeles Actor Sarah Culberson realized that she was terrified to find her biological father. Culberson was adopted and grew up in West Virginia, and in the Landmark Forum she decided that she would find him. The story of what happened next was told on CNN, and written about in Reader’s Digest.
The Lost Princess – A phone call from 7,000 miles away changed everything.
Reader’s Digest, November 2007
By Kenneth Miller
In April 2004, Sarah Culberson got a call she’d spent nearly 30 years waiting for. She was eating dinner with a friend at a noisy beachside café and could barely hear the person on the other end, 6,850 miles away, in Africa.
“This is your father, Joseph Konia Kposowa,” said the voice. Sarah asked him to hold on, then hurried down the crowded street in search of privacy. She found it in a vintage clothing store, among racks of faded dresses.
“Please forgive me,” begged the caller. “I didn’t know how to find you.”
“Please forgive me,” Sarah replied. “I’ve been blaming you my whole life. I’m not going to anymore.”
Sarah, then 28, had had no previous contact with her birth parents; she’d assumed they wanted it that way. Her adoptive parents, Jim and Judy Culberson, had told her what little they knew: Her biological father had been an exchange student from Sierra Leone, attending Salem College in West Virginia. He dated a young white woman who worked at West Virginia University. When she became pregnant, they decided to give the baby up. The couple separated, and Sarah’s father returned to his homeland.
Now he was urging his daughter to come visit. “As a member of a royal family,” he told her, “you could be chief here someday.”
At that moment, Sarah knew her life had changed forever. From now on, she would be inextricably connected to a small, war-ravaged village halfway across the globe.
Sarah Culberson grew up in West Virginia as a normal American girl. Jim, a professor of neuroanatomy at WVU, and Judy, a special ed teacher, showered their youngest daughter with love and encouragement. Sarah caught turtles in the woods behind the house, rode her bike around the neighborhood, and enjoyed vacations with her parents and two sisters.
Still, she could never quite shake the sense that she didn’t belong—in her fair-haired family or in Morgantown, a leafy college community with few minorities. Worse, she felt the simmering anxiety shared by many adopted children: If one set of parents abandoned you, why wouldn’t another? “I would think,” she says, “I’m gonna be a really good kid so they don’t ever want to give me back.”
Sarah was an A student, a star athlete, student body president and homecoming queen. “She really enjoys people,” says Judy. She majored in theater at WVU and went on to graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
It was there, in 1999, that she took the first step toward investigating her origins. Because of a clerical error, Sarah’s adoption papers listed the names of her birth parents, but she wanted to know more—“who I looked like, medical history.”
When she told Judy that she was ready to try to track down her birth mother, Judy divulged the one piece of information she’d kept from her: The woman had died ten years earlier, of cervical cancer. Disheartened, Sarah found herself hesitant to then pursue a search for her biological father.
In 2001 she moved to Los Angeles and landed some bit parts in films and TV. Between gigs, she taught dance to seventh and eighth graders. But as she reached her late 20s, she began to feel a building frustration. Whenever she grew close to a man, her fear of abandonment drove her to sabotage the relationship.
Early in 2004, Sarah took a leadership training course. During one session, the instructor asked, “Where are you holding back in your life? Tell the person sitting next to you.”
Sarah turned toward an old friend named Art. “I’m terrified of finding my biological father,” she confessed. Art assured her that the search could bring her peace and said he knew a private investigator who could locate her father for less than $100.
The detective, after just three hours of sleuthing, turned up a Joseph Kposowa in Maryland. Sarah labored over an introductory note and nervously sent it off. Soon afterward, she got a phone call from a woman with a lilting accent. “Sarah? This is Evelyn, your auntie. I was there when you were born.”
Sarah broke down in sobs. Once she’d composed herself, she learned that this Joseph was actually her uncle. He then got on the phone and asked, “Do you know you are a princess?”
Sarah, he explained, belonged to a ruling family of the Mende tribe in southern Sierra Leone, a nation of six million on Africa’s Atlantic coast. Her grandfather had ruled a chiefdom with 36,000 subjects based in the village of Bumpe. When the old man died, Sarah’s father could have nominated himself for the office, but he opted to keep his job as headmaster of the local high school. Another uncle was now chief.
The information made Sarah’s head spin. But it wasn’t until her father called, two weeks later, that she began to understand its full significance.
While Sarah was attending school and starting her career, Joseph Konia Kposowa was surviving one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars. Between 1991 and 2002, guerrillas of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)—many of them abused children or young teenagers—sowed terror across Sierra Leone. An estimated 50,000 people were killed; thousands lost limbs to the machete-wielding rebels.
Joseph had started a new family before the war began. In 1994, when the insurgents entered Bumpe, he fled with his wife, their two young children and a handful of relatives. The group spent four years hiding in nearby towns, crammed into small houses with dozens of other refugees.
Overwhelmed by Emotion
When a rebel retreat allowed Joseph to return to Bumpe, he found devastation. The RUF had burned down much of the village, including the Kposowa family compound. One of Joseph’s sisters had been killed in the fire. At Bumpe High School, the rebels had taken the zinc roofs to make weapons, used the desks and books for firewood, and smashed the lab equipment and dormitory cots. Founded in 1963 by Joseph’s father, the school had once been a magnet for 600 students from across Sierra Leone and neighboring countries. Now it was a charred hulk. Joseph and his neighbors began rebuilding, but progress was slow.
When his relatives in America forwarded Sarah’s letter, in 2004, it was a ray of light after a long stretch of darkness. Joseph had long dreamed of reconnecting with the daughter he had forfeited, but he’d had no idea where to begin looking. Now, somehow, she had found him.
He used his cell phone to call Sarah, and when he heard her laugh, it reminded him of the woman he’d loved so many years before. Joseph told Sarah how he and her mother had agonized over giving her away, and how they’d finally decided it would be irresponsible for a couple in their situation—a penniless freshman on a student visa and the cafeteria worker he’d been dating—to try to raise a child together.
He also explained the line of chiefly succession and recounted the tragedies suffered by Sarah’s kinfolk. “When she said she’d come visit,” says Joseph, speaking on the phone through the hiss of intercontinental static, “it was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
That December, after a 20-hour plane ride, Sarah, accompanied by her good friend and acting coach, John Woehrle, landed at a tiny airport near Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. Her father, whom she’d always imagined as tall and exotically handsome, stood by the baggage carousel. He was, in reality, a small man with a sensitive face. “I looked in his eyes,” Sarah says, “and he seemed so vulnerable.”
The two shared a long, warm embrace. Seeing—and touching—seemed more urgent than talking. Joseph seized his daughter’s hand, and they went to meet the dozen family members waiting outside.
The night was dark, and Sarah was too overwhelmed by emotion to register much about her surroundings on the way to her hotel. The next morning, she, Woehrle and her father set out in Joseph’s battered Range Rover. Then she saw it all: the city’s squatter camps and bullet-pocked buildings, the ragged children selling oranges along the road, the lush countryside carpeted with trash.
Bumpe, five hours away, was a cluster of thatch-roofed houses surrounded by fields of yam and cassava. At the edge of town, hundreds of locals swarmed the Range Rover. Joseph translated the song the villagers were singing: “Sarah, you have come to your homeland. Welcome home.”
“This Is My Family”
As she wiped away her tears, Sarah stepped from the car and swayed to the music. The women in the group led her to a red-dirt plaza shaded by huge trees, where she was seated at a banquet table with her father, her uncle the chief and other dignitaries. The speeches and ceremonial dances lasted well past sunset.
During her 17 days in Bumpe, Sarah bonded with Joseph’s wife, Mary, as if they were old girlfriends. Sarah’s half sister, Jeneba, then 20, and half brother, Hindo, 15, proved to be bright and thoughtful. Joseph, it turned out, possessed a talent for impressions and foreign accents. (British colonial to bartender: “Gin on ice? Ab-so-lewtly!”) Relatives dropped by often, bearing live chickens because Sarah had said chicken and rice was her favorite dish. Only later did she learn that poultry was a rare delicacy, reserved for the most honored guests.
“I’d spent most of my life feeling like I needed to do something really great to be accepted,” says Sarah. “When I got to this village, there was complete acceptance and love.”
There was also great pain. Sarah met adults and children who’d lost limbs to the rebels. One of her aunts, who’d survived an attempted decapitation, was missing a chunk of her neck. Clean water and modern medicine were in short supply. Among Bumpe’s 2,000 residents, no one but her father and uncle had access to electricity, and even they could afford to run their generators only on special occasions. Joseph’s house was made of cinder blocks rather than mud bricks, but the mosquitoes made no distinction, and he and his son—like many of the villagers—suffered recurring bouts of malaria. During Sarah’s two-and-a-half-week visit, three funerals were held.
At her father’s school, 200 students were pursuing their studies in roofless classrooms, determined to improve their lives. “These people had been through hell,” Sarah marvels, “and they were like, Okay, what’s next? Let’s get our education going.”
Sarah returned home to Los Angeles wrestling with questions of responsibility (especially when distant kin called from Africa, asking for money). “She was trying to figure out her role in all this,” says John Woehrle. How much time, energy and cash could a struggling actress and part-time dance instructor spare?
Woehrle agreed to help with the cause. He and Sarah established the nonprofit Kposowa Foundation to channel aid to Bumpe, and they set as their goal raising $200,000 to restore its high school. Sarah raised the first $850 with a carnival at the school where she taught dance. A concert of African and Appalachian music at West Virginia University brought in $16,000; her adoptive parents helped organize the WVU event and now work regularly with the foundation.
Last March, Sarah and Woehrle returned to Sierra Leone to set up an NGO enabling the villagers to run their own reconstruction projects. By then, the foundation had funneled $24,000 to Bumpe High School; the money went toward new roofs and windows, library books, and bright paint on the classroom walls. Today attendance has risen to 450. Dorms are being repaired, to be followed by improvements on the home economics building.
Sarah hopes the work will be mostly finished when she returns to Bumpe in December with her adoptive parents. “Sarah likes both of her fathers quite a bit,” says Jim Culberson with a smile, “and she thinks we should meet.”
Joseph Kposowa agrees. “I owe them a lot,” he says of the Culbersons. “The way everything has worked out, it’s a very big blessing.”
No one feels more blessed than Sarah, who never expected she’d be a key supporter of an African village. “Sometimes I think, I don’t know how to do this,” she says. “But what I do know is that this is my family.”
Mehmet Ak is a restaurant owner, chef and Landmark Forum Graduate who lives in Chicago. He has been in the restaurant business for most of his life. First arriving in the United States at the age of 23, he worked his way through the various jobs of the food service industry until 1990 when he was able to open his own successful restaurant owner. Over the years he became very well known as a Turkish chef; his various restaurants being written up in newspapers and magazines frequently.
Along with success came lifestyle changes and as a result of as he says: "love of food", he began to gain weight. By 2001 his weight had reached 250 lbs and he had developed dangerously high blood pressure. It was around that time that he became interested in personal development and first participated in courses at Landmark Education. As he began tackling various issues in his life he eventually made a commitment to deal with his health. This commitment led him to try a 28 day raw food detox program. The program had a profound impact on his health. Within a number of months he had lost an enormous amount of weight and today he weighs 160 lbs.
Having had such a radical result in his health and using what he learned from his participation in Landmark Education programs he set about a complete re-invention of his restaurant. Now named Cousins IV, his restaurant has become the home of a leading raw food community, attracting visitors from all over the world.
