Both of my daughters got a passport when they graduated from the 5th grade.  I grew up relatively untraveled.  My family didn’t have a lot of money, and we had lots of kids, 4 in total, so “travel” was trips to South Carolina in our big Dodge van to visit my grandparents. But I had an experience in the third grade that exposed me to another culture. Some family members had a vacation home in Hana Maui.  My mom saved money for two years so we could go. At the time Hana was a remote area, with no phones, no TV, and other than my uncle, very few white people.  Tourists didn’t go to Hana back then because the trek along the (now) famed “Road to Hana” was treacherous.  But that didn’t deter the Earle family.  We had a free place to stay, so we went for a month during the middle of the school year. Which is how I, a skinny blond 8-year-old, wound up as the only white person in the 3rd grade class at the Hana school.   Most of the other kids had never seen a white person before, or certainly not one as white as me. For the entire first week, they kept reaching out to touch my long rather unkempt blond hair.  Oddly, I wasn’t freaked out at all.  They were really nice about it.  Once I realized how fascinated they were by it, I began flinging it around the class. School in Hana was totally different from school in Arlington Virginia.  We had hula lessons on the beach for an hour every day, no joke.  Our teacher played the ukulele during lunch, where every day we ate foods I http://www.mcleodandmore.com/2014/04/30/why-i-taught-my-daughters-how-to-be-ambassadors-in-the-5th-grade/