Edgecombe Community College math and religion instructor Paul Tolbert recently spoke to the Tarboro Kiwanis Club about his two-week experience in India last summer.

The World View service at UNC-Chapel Hill coordinated Tolbert's trip. Tolbert said World View's purpose was to expose K-12 and community college teachers to economic globalization forces and world culture learning. Teachers are responsible for bringing lessons they learned from their trips into the classroom.

Tolbert talked about his education and military background. Tolbert is a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves since he recently completed a 13-week course at Fort Jackson, S.C. He is now a deployable reservist and serves as a chaplain with the 108th platoon.

Tolbert began his presentation with a rhetorical question: "Why should we even bother" learning about other cultures? he asked.

Tolbert first spoke about the shift of the world's population over a 100-year period, from 1950 to 2050.

In '50, Tolbert said one-third of the globe's population lived in Europe and North America; the world's largest cities then were New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow and Paris.

In 2050, Tolbert said only one-tenth of the world's population will live in Europe and North America. In 42 years, Tolbert said the five largest cities in the world are projected to be Tokyo, Mumbai, India; Lagos, Nigeria; Daka, Bangladesh and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Also by 2050, Tolbert said the list of the world's 30 most populace cities will include several that American citizens know little about, and that are not especially friendly to the U.S., like Tehran, Iran.

Tolbert's global statistics, about China and India in particular, surprised many of the gathered Kiwanis.

Tolbert said China's population with the highest IQ, 25 percent, outnumbers the entire population of North America. In American schools, Tolbert said 1 million students study a language spoken by only 80 million people worldwide; French. He added that only 40,000 American students study a language spoken by more than 1.5 billion people; Mandarin Chinese.

For a country nearing a population of 1 billion, and growing faster than China, Tolbert said India's emergent middle class numbers 300 million people. Tolbert added that, according to Forbes, 60 percent of India's population is under the age of 32.

After Tolbert gave the staggering numbers for India, Ronnie Daughtry asked him if he had the image of Mother Teresa and the poor in his mind before he went to the country. Tolbert said he did, and that there certainly was a great amount of poverty there.

Tolbert said many people were still using camels for travel and work, and that panhandlers in several parts of the country make more money begging than they could working at a regular job.

He contrasted India's poverty with the strides it has made in technology and science, and how its capital, New Delhi, is one of the "most modern" and "technologically advanced" cities in the world.

He said he came away feeling that India "straddled between the 21st and 15th centuries" in every day life.