Reprint: My Fulbright Specialist Experience

India, fall 2018

First, a quick plug. I have a new article, “Fad & Fashion in Science Fiction,” which just came out with Trollbreath Magazine’s issue #2 this past weekend. You can read it for free at their website.

Cover art by Brian Quinn.

As a small boost to them, I include a link to The Sample, an automated newsletter referral service.

In other news, I’m giving a photo/slide talk on my India trip today at Crescent Rotary Club’s weekly meeting. If you can make it, great.

Below is the article I originally published with Saathee magazine, as background and reference for that talk. I’m sending Saathee another one about a homeopathic hospital I visited in India, which may eventually appear here too.

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.

— Senator J. William Fulbright

Just after World War 2, in the same spirit of “never again” that led to the founding of the United Nations, the US government sold off some of its surplus war property and set aside funding for a group of international exchange programs. Each year, about 8,000 people travel to or from the USA — students, scholars, and professionals of all kinds — to study, to perform research, or to exercise their talents in the service of their host countries. It is important to note that these are not professional diplomats, nor political appointees, but ordinary citizens of either country who have something to contribute, or something to learn. India is an enthusiastic partner in this exchange, hosting the various Fulbright-Nehru programs as well as a new Climate fellowship. Details on applying for these experiences are at the pages linked below this article.

The most famous and prestigious of these programs, the Fulbright Fellowships, send students and academics to live and work in host countries around the world — quite an honor, and quite a commitment, to take a full year away from friends and family, or to move one’s family around the world. Much less well known is the Fulbright Specialist Program, which requires just two to six weeks at a time. Applicants, who do not have to be academics, can join the roster for three years. Once approved, they can then search for short projects that match their skill sets. These “blind” matches are one way to get an assignment, but it generally works better to cultivate a partner in-country who can request one’s services more directly. Another benefit of this approach is that it allows you, the Specialist, to help shape the project from the beginning.

In my case, an American nonprofit here in Greensboro, Emerging Ecology, had a long-term relationship with another local nonprofit, the Institute of Cultural Affairs: India, which runs a boarding school for tribal children. These two groups raised money for my in-country expenses, like food, hotel, and rickshaw fares. This was a required part of the deal with World Learning (the nonprofit that manages the program by contract for the State Department), as the Fulbright funds only covered airfare and my salary.

As an aside for those considering applying, give yourself plenty of lead time. The Indian government approved the project almost immediately (probably in part because they didn’t have to pay for it, due to my partners’ fundraising efforts). The US State Department, however, took almost four months to reciprocate, which left only two months to make arrangements for the time period we had chosen (November - December 2018). A delay could have scuttled my visit completely, because my wife was due to have surgery in February. Fortunately, the good people at World Learning have a great deal of experience, as they arrange literally thousands of these trips per year. There were approximately 75 Fulbrighters in India at the same time I was, most of them for longer junkets than mine.

What did I do to earn my $200 a day? It seems that even when educated to the high school level, tribal students still have trouble finding work. This is not only simple discrimination. Students from rural areas often lack social networks of working professionals who can help them with references and interview skills, a problem we are familiar with here in the States as well. As a farm boy from rural Kentucky, I myself made good grades but had no idea how to ingratiate myself with my professors, or with employers. I never attended a single job fair during my four years in college. I was too busy studying.

I spent my first weeks in India being driven around Panvel (because there was no way I could navigate Mumbai traffic myself!) while I interviewed businesses about the skills that they find their new hires do not have. Some of these were expected, such as critical thinking skills or the ability to use mathematics to convert between systems of measurement. Newer machines use the metric system, but older ones may use other units, and there are many 50-year-old machines clanking away in small family owned factories. Being on time is a problem for young people everywhere. Others were more surprising. A cookie manufacturer wanted for her employees to take hygiene more seriously — not spitting, for instance, or not taking it personally when she asked them to shave their arms. It seems that culture is not only an issue between countries. Professionalism is a cultural construct, and it is difficult to teach in a classroom. More personal connections are necessary.

So I recommended that the school set up mentoring programs, beginning with its alumni, who would be more understanding of their students’ backgrounds, and expanding to local employers. Research has shown that at little as 15 minutes per week, engaging with students and answering their questions as they arise, even over e-mail, can be enough to awaken them to career possibilities outside what they see on television (doctor, lawyer, police detective, pop star). So many kids have never met an engineer, and have no idea what they do. Mentoring is something any reader of this newsletter could do, and it does make a difference.

I was there in November, during the dry season, so there was dust, and plastic trash that the monsoon hadn’t yet flushed into the oceans, and once an exploding electrical transformer that could have started a brush fire (but didn’t). In my six weeks there I saw three police cruisers and perhaps one ambulance. I saw a factory worker whose hand was caught in a machine; someone called the owner to get permission to take him to the hospital.

These things were so strange to me, a PhD in 2019, but they would not have seemed strange to my dad, living in rural Kentucky during the 1950s. He helped build Interstate 75 with a shovel, much as I saw Indians building roads by hand last fall, though as far as I know he never brought his wife and child to work with him as they do. In his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, statistician Hans Rosling likewise compared modern-day Egypt to Sweden in the 1950s, when he was a child. These thoughts helped me to dial down my American tendencies towards judgement when I saw things that disturbed me, like the unfamiliar tradition of Charan Sparsh. I was not prepared to have a twelve-year-old girl kneeling in front of me to ask for my blessing. I’m not in the habit of blessing anybody.

In fact there were four dudes there, in a line, and the children had to kneel in front of each one of us, so there was the additional discomfort of being part of an assembly line of devotional practice.

Other disturbing sights were trash dumps being deliberately burned, right on the banks of a river, and naked children sleeping next to campfires in the gigantic slums of Mumbai. No matter how bad you think social and economic inequality is here, I promise you, it’s worse elsewhere. This is not an excuse; it’s a statement of fact.

I also saw beautiful things: giant fruit bats feasting in the trees of downtown Talegaon, unmolested, and learned from a cab driver on the Bombay-Pune highway that Ganesh was not born with an elephant’s head. I met village children who neither knew nor cared about Star Wars and Harry Potter, and I listened to a podcast of twenty-somethings in Mumbai playing Dungeons & Dragons. And yet I never once left the relatively wealthy and liberal state of Maharashtra! That’s like saying you know the US from spending six weeks in California.

So much more to experience, so much more to learn …

A year later, as a Fulbright alumnus, I now have access to a network of over 1 lakh of fellow travelers. They organize meetings, and grant funds for development projects here in the US. I speak about the program to my students at the NC Governor’s School, and to anyone else who will listen. It is an incredible opportunity, and it is open to us all.

This piece was originally published, in a bit less detail, in Saathee magazine in 2019.

Updates as of 2024

I got this in a recent e-mail from the Director of the Fulbright Association.

The US elections may offer significant challenges for the Fulbright Program in 2025. In his first term, President Trump proposed cuts to Fulbright and other exchanges that were not supported by congressional members from either party. One reason for this was the action of Fulbrighters like you who signed petitions, wrote letters, and participated in advocacy days.

In the past these programs have not been a political football, but we’re living in a different world, and even venerable programs like the NC Governor’s School, which has roughly 30,000 alumni, can lose their funding with one vote from the Legislature. It happened in 2012 and almost again in 2017. Both times alumni saved it, so people’s actions do matter. The program is a shadow of its former self, though, running for only four weeks instead of 5 or 6, and serving perhaps half the students it did at its peak.

To return to the letter:

This suggests that we need to be vigilant, proactive, and prepared in the coming months and years.

What does that look like? The Fulbright Association, in partnership with the Alliance for International Exchange and other key stakeholders, and supported by our pro bono consultants at Venable, will continually monitor the budgetary landscape as it affects exchanges. We ask you to be vigilant, too, following the news and keeping informed.

We need to be proactive, as well, building on bipartisan relationships we have cultivated for many years. The Association will reach out to congressional staff on a regular basis and support our chapters willing to advocate locally.

For me, locally, that’s this one, which has seemed to me to be most active in the Triangle. I just missed their call to action for International Education Week,

so clearly I am one of those people who needs to be more vigilant. /:^{)>

Other programs

Rotary International has its own Youth Exchanges. Here locally, our district 7690 sponsors scholarships for study abroad, up to $30k.

Further Reading

http://www.usief.org.in/Fellowships.aspx

https://fulbrightspecialist.worldlearning.org

http://www.ica-international.org/

https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/

https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/24423.pdf

• ICA-India’s website is not up right now, but I found this somewhat more detailed description of their projects as of 30 years ago.