How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Fulbright

Team Ecuador English Teaching Assistants
(note the creepy Senator Fulbright photo in background)

I receive a worldwide Fulbright newsletter every month. Usually, they feature a grantee that is eradicating some awful illness in Indonesia while simultaneously saving baby dolphins off the coast, preparing their manuscript about how to preserve indigenous knowledge, and redesigning curriculum in 17 elementary schools during their spare hours.

I don't do that. I teach my optional English classes, which sometimes are attended by real-life students. I camp out during my 10 "office" hours (I don't have an office) per week and hope people come chat with me. My side projects are vague and scattered around different areas, resisting one coherent "look what I did" summary. What I do accomplish-- and pretty well-- is living my 22nd year of life in pursuit of things that make me happy. I attend a lot of birthday parties, drink coffee with my friend’s grandmothers, and do things like figure out how to grill meat in my laundry pit (this has hands-down been my proudest accomplishment over the past 7 months).

Finally found the best way to use that pit.

I recently attended a conference in Quito for all the 2010-11 English Teaching Assistants in the Andean region. In addition to learning how to teach English a little better, it was a good opportunity to get feedback from other ETAs during the long middle-of-grant months. I learned that most grantees want to attach a narrative to what they do. We have Fulbrights because we are smart, highly-motivated people who were able to unify our entire past/present/future of intellectual pursuits into two 1-page essays. Our lives are stories, and we're good at telling them.

I also learned that the ETA experience can be most challenging for the exactly type of personalities that tend to win ETA grants. We enter hoping to make huge linguistic/cultural inroads. We learn along the way that most of these inroads are quiet, and we may never see many of them. (this is probably generalizable to the teaching profession as a whole). We start projects that we never finish, we spin our wheels in Ecuadorian bureaucracies, and we waver between inspiration and desperation.

Part of our mid-grant conference took place in a jungle resort.

Let me go Oprah for just a second here. I had a mentor in college who helped me enormously to change my orientation from results-driven to process-driven. In other words, he introduced the idea that almost all of my dissatisfaction stemmed from the relentless need to see huge results and talk about them. There's another possibility-- emphasizing the input/process rather than the output/results. This goes for school, work, spirituality, relationships, whatever.

Quito's colonial center/ virgin statue from afar

I love my Fulbright because it has become a test in that. And I think I'm doing well. I appreciate my work and I love my students. I love that when my students see me in public, they come and talk to me in English (even if it’s mostly to show off). I love grilling meat in my washing pit and wasting time with friends, as well as hearing those friends pick up my random English colloquialisms ("no Kim, he hasn't got a popsicle's chance in hell"). I'm having fun in the process, and during my last 10 weeks, plan to continue that.