Yearly Archives:

2016

U.S. Fulbright

The Story About Hiroshima and Nagasaki You Have to Hear

August 8, 2016
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Takeshi Miyata wanders through Auschwitz during his 85 journey around the world on Peace Boat’s 80th Voyage.

“Everything is connected,” exclaimed Takeshi Miyata as he walked along the railway at the Auschwitz death camps, almost 70 years after Jews were carted off to slaughter in the same location. “Jewish scientists escaped the Nazis, helped America build an atomic bomb, and it was dropped on me.”

Anyone who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki within two weeks of the release of the only two atom bombs detonated over people were designated as Hibakusha: “Exposed to the atomic bomb/radiation.” Miyata, and eight other members of the Peace Boat Hibakusha Project, had traveled halfway around the world from Japan. They shared their cautionary tales of nuclear power in each port of call along the way. Some spoke publicly for the first time in their lives. I was their web reporter.

Peace Boat, part cruise ship, part political lobby, was on its 80th voyage in 30 years. The Hibakusha Project was participating in a Peace Boat voyage for the sixth time. Our journey in 2013 started in Da Nang, Vietnam, where we spent the day with victims of Agent Orange who have experienced generational effects of the chemicals wartime use.  We confronted Japan’s own violent past in Singapore at the National History Museum. We shared testimony with a Hungarian-Polish Auschwitz survivor at the center for Dialogue in Poland, and befriended El Salvadorian revolutionaries in Central America.

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Enrichment Foreign Fulbright Fulbright-Millennial Trains Project

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August 8, 2016
Yanoa

Yanoa Carrasco, 2015-2017, Peru, in front of one of the Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen “Shuttlecocks” sculptures at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri

Greetings from the 2016 Millennial Trains Project (MTP). You may be wondering what MTP is. Well, let me explain. It’s a train journey across the United States for a diverse group of young leaders and innovators. Thanks to the Fulbright Program, I am having a great trip experience and making new friends: millennials from different parts of the United States and two other Fulbright Foreign Students, one from Germany and the other from Malaysia.

I’m currently doing a master’s degree in museum studies at New York University, so when I learned about the MTP, I decided to apply to conduct research about community engagement in museums. Through my project, I want to create an awareness of the importance of collecting, preserving and interpreting local and/or regional history. One of the best ways to do this is to involve a local community and create engaging activities that will allow them to discover and interpret the world around them. Institutions like museums and cultural centers are currently evolving into spaces of knowledge and personal reflection; places where communities can go and discuss specific topics while creating their own narratives about them.

The goal of my MTP journey is to explore different participatory and engaging experiences offered by museums in order to spread the word about those activities and inspire others to create similar programs all around the world.

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U.S. Fulbright

From Flooding to Drought to the White House: A Disaster-Filled Journey

August 3, 2016
Ryan Alaniz

Ryan Alaniz, 2009-2010, Honduras attending the 2016 White House Water Summit

Like disasters, life is far from predictable. In 2009, during my Fulbright U.S. Student grant, I was living in a resettlement outside of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, populated by people who had been displaced by severe flooding from Hurricane Mitch (1998). Now, where I live in California, which faces the worst drought in 1,200 years, we are wrestling with too little water. My research on the social implications of drought builds on what I learned in the impoverished re-settlements of Honduras, and has led to recognition by the White House.

My invitation to submit a policy brief on drought, and a subsequent invitation to the White House Water Summit, came as a surprise. Hundreds of water/drought academics and organizers are conducting excellent research and implementing creative programs to address water scarcity concerns throughout the nation. Why would they choose me?

When I posed this question to my contact at the National Security Council, he expressed his admiration that I had hosted the Disaster by Drought Summit, co-sponsored by California Polytechnic State University, the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU),  and MunichRe Foundation. For a week, UNU affiliated scholars from around the world came to California to discuss the drought with counterparts from the Western United States. Participants listened to lectures from engineers and architects, businesses and non-profit organizations, farm owners and laborers, and also visit a local vineyard to see the impact of drought. Not only were new collaborations formed, we also produced a policy brief for the White House and the California State legislature.

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U.S. Fulbright

Social Entrepreneurship and the Fulbright Program

July 29, 2016
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Alex Counts, 1988-1989, Bangladesh, crossing a bamboo bridge at the time of the 1989 monsoon during his Fulbright year

From my earliest days contemplating my responsibilities as a global citizen, I have believed that entrepreneurship, and in particular social entrepreneurship, had major roles to play in realizing a better world. For this reason, I was attracted to the idea of microfinance and one of its earliest and most successful examples: the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. This innovative financial institution, which served and was owned by this nation’s poor women, was both an entrepreneurial venture itself that made a modest profit most years, but was also an engine of spurring micro-entrepreneurship on a massive scale through the hundreds of millions of business loans it has provided.

Indeed, I have come to believe that one of the surest paths to sustainable and large-scale social change is to incorporate the discipline of the private sector into empowerment strategies. The Grameen Bank and, later, its affiliated companies, was a shining example of this. During my studies at Cornell, I began a correspondence with Professor Muhammad Yunus, Grameen’s founder, about how I could join forces with him to promote his success model at the international level. He welcomed me to come to Bangladesh after graduation to begin our collaboration.

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U.S. Fulbright

Reflections on a Fulbright-Clinton Fellowship

July 27, 2016
Katelyn

Katelyn Leader, 2013-2014, J. William Fulbright – Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow to Haiti (second from left), with her colleagues from the Haitian government’s Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation

I believe that mutual understanding is the foundation of tolerance and peace; it can only develop, however, when people are willing to listen to and learn from one another. This is such a simple notion, and yet time and time again, we see the consequences of it being forgotten by leaders and individuals.

In September 2013, I arrived in Haiti as a J. William Fulbright – Hillary Rodham Clinton Public Policy Fellow. I was placed in the government’s Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation, where I was assigned to the Division of Territorial Planning and Local and Regional Development. Over the course of my fellowship, my primary responsibility was to design and implement a study examining urban expansion in an area north of Port-au-Prince known as Canaan. Unpopulated at the time of the 2010 earthquake, Canaan now hosts more than 100,000 people. Many live in substandard, makeshift shelters without access to basic services. My colleagues and I conducted over 100 interviews with individuals living in this area, and the perspectives and information that they shared offered valuable insight into the country’s housing and urban planning challenges.

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