The session on evaluating the effectiveness of reconciliation is incredibly interesting. Dr. Cole discussed multiple ways that we can attempt to see how people’s attitudes have changed. For example, we can use survey to quantify how the level of trust has changed. It is not surprising to hear that some of the short term reconciliation projects failed to work on paper, because changes in attitude don’t happen over night.  I find it interesting to reflect on the work that I’ve done previously with an NGO that does work on reconciliation between China and Tibet. They have a multifaceted approach which includes school-building that uses infrastructure as the base of their work. However, they also promote a mission-driven curriculum in school so that these Tibetan students will come back and devote to the own community that raised them. This is a very rare example of foreign NGOs that are able to operate and serve the Tibetan communities in China. Thus, in their outreach work, they use their own stories as an example to appeal to their audiences and spread the message that tangible change is possible in Tibetan despite the difficult circumstances. While this is not a project on direct reconciliation between the Chinese and Tibetans at first sight, it does build some sort of trust between the Chinese authorities who witness the good that they did through building this school and the Tibetans who might change their mind and believe in the future that will get better. However, it remains to be true that no matter how much reconciliation happens on the local level, if the larger structural change does not happen, meaning that if the government does not change their view on ethnic minorities residing in China or change their repressive policies, it is hard to scale up the ground work.