What’s an Oceanside basketball coach doing atop a camel in Mongolia?
“I’ve asked myself the same question,” said Bruce Hoskins, a sociology professor at MiraCosta College and assistant coach of the Oceanside High School girls varsity basketball team.
The answer to that question is that he was seeing a bit of the country during a coaching stint in Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital. Hoskins visited in June to help local basketball coaches and girls perfect their skills.
“People in Mongolia are not very tall, but they love basketball,” he said. “That passion really transcends and connects. That’s what I loved about it”
How did Hoskins land in the world’s most-sparsely populated country?
You could blame Lee Wakefield, Oceanside resident and board member of the Global Neighborhood Project. The nonprofit, founded by San Diego lawyer and journalist Martin Kruming, grew from a visit to San Diego by teachers from Azerbaijan. The project now comprises a small group of dedicated San Diego County residents who believe in fostering cultural connections across continents on an intimate scale.
“We focus on countries that are off-the-beaten tourist path — places where people don’t go,” Wakefield said. “We want to match communities and people around the world and use common interests to get to know one another.”
This citizen diplomacy has generated, among other things, an annual chess tournament with Azerbaijani youth; a storytelling festival and pickleball tournament with Botswana citizens; and chef and organist exchanges with Latvians. Current projects include two in Fez, Morocco: helping establish the Medina Children’s Library, and aiding the Fondouk Equine Hospital obtain a hoist, necessary for moving large working animals post-operatively.
“The vet could care for twice the number of animals if he had this hoist,” Wakefield said.
And then there is the basketball camp in Mongolia.
The trip had its genesis three years ago when Hoskins had a random encounter with Wakefield at a gym.
“He was happy and had a smile on his face,” Hoskins remembered.
Eighteen months passed before Wakefield popped the question.
“He said, ‘What would you think about going to Mongolia and holding a basketball camp?’ I didn’t think he was serious until he was.”
The experience was singular. For one thing, there was a language barrier, but Hoskins had plenty of help.
“I had a lot of interpreters that were young,” he said. “(They told me that) they took English classes, but they really learned English by playing online games. I thought that was fascinating.”
In addition, Mongolian youth “know Japanese, Chinese, and they have three scripts they have to read: Russian, Roman (like the English alphabet) and Mongolian. The population grows up knowing they have to know more than one language. They are very cosmopolitan.”
Wakefield was in Mongolia simultaneously to train law enforcement officers. (He is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and CEO of Sentir Global, which specializes in threat recognition and threat awareness training.)
Through his contacts, he was able to introduce Hoskins to the Mongolian Sports Association, just one instance of his many connections because of his world travels. He and his wife, Kim, a life-long world traveler who taught Spanish at Carlsbad High School for 25 years, have visited more than 40 countries. (Asked how many times they’ve packed their suitcases, the closest estimate they could provide was “hundreds.”)
“Global Neighborhood Project doesn’t raise money, but we help find the people who assist in our citizen diplomacy efforts,” Wakefield said. “We help find people who want to help.”
Hoskins paid for his airline ticket to Mongolia, but the government paid for his housing, food and transportation within the country. He came away from his trip with some simple but strong convictions.
“The biggest — and I thought about this deeply — is that cultures are different but people are the same,” he said. “We are all essentially the same.”
