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Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Africa and Middle East Webinar, June,2009 - - Part 1

Africa and Middle East Webinar, June,2009 - - Part 1. Jermaine Jones gives an synopsis of the Fulbright Program in Africa and the Middle East and Maggie Fick recounts her experience as a Fulbrighter in Niger.

Africa and the Middle East Webinar, Part I

Tony:                Welcome to the Fulbright U.S. Student Applicant podcast. My name is Tony Claudino. This podcast is focused on our webinars that we’re having, our webinars series with alumni, the Fulbright Alumni Roundtable for applicants and this is Africa and the Middle East. It took place on May 11th. We had roughly about 70 people participating so we wanted to share with you the webinar. The webinar series, the quality of the audio or video might vary because it was a webinar conducted over the internet. So please keep that in mind as you are listening or viewing this podcast. Enjoy. We’re going to break this up into a few parts, so enjoy. Thank you.

Jermaine:          Hello everyone, and welcome to this afternoon’s webinar for perspective applicants to Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Near East and North Africa. My name is Jermaine Jones and I am the Program Manager for these two world regions and I just wanted to give you a few talking points in terms of things to consider before you proceed with your full applications for countries in any of these, either of these world areas.

                        I’ll begin with Sub-Saharan Africa first, and in terms of where one can apply, there are 26 countries in this world region that are open to applicants of all degree levels, bachelors, masters, and PhD. They all have full summaries that are given on are website as well as on the hard copy awards booklet. Rwanda and Sierra Leone also have country summaries on both the website and brochure, but you’ll want to bear in mind that these are countries that are only open to candidates at the masters and doctoral level. In other words, graduating seniors and other BA level candidates are not eligible to apply to these 2 countries. Finally, there are a number of other countries that don’t have summaries in the website or booklet that aren’t strictly off limits, per se. They may be available to advanced level graduate students on a case by case basis. And what that specifically means is that you would need to consult first with me here at IIE before proceeding with an application to these few unlisted countries.

                        In terms of affiliations, for Sub-Saharan Africa, it is the responsibility of each candidate to secure their own host institutional affiliation. You’ll need to review the relevant country summary for the guidelines on this and, generally speaking, it’s not necessary to have the affiliation confirmed by the October application deadline. But having the letter of invitation with your application can certainly help your chances in that it demonstrates your preparation and initiative, as well as the project’s feasibility.

                        In terms of language considerations for countries in this world region, I would say that even though English, French, and Portuguese are the official languages of nearly all the countries with Fulbright programs, you should really consider, never the less, really thinking through the requirements and objectives of your project and how far knowledge of these languages alone will take you. One other point as far as language is concerned, and that is since many African languages are not commonly taught in the United States, prior knowledge of them generally is not required at the time of application, although it may be recommended in some cases. However, you should really… applicants, I should say, with projects that require knowledge of an indigenous African language should make every effort to begin learning it before the intended start of their grants and ideally have some knowledge of it at the time of application. At minimum you should include plans for studying the language in the host country concurrently with your research and/or enlist the assistance of translators. However, you’ll want to keep in mind that the research allowance portion of the grant is fairly modest and may not fully cover the cost for a translator or interpreter’s salaries or fees.

                        A few other things to bear in mind with this world region and these are fairly new developments that you’ll need to bear in mind. The first is that multi-country applications are no longer accepted for the sub-Saharan African region, so you can only apply to a single country. And one final thing and that relates to the development of new English Language Teaching Assistantship grants. We are now able to offer these awards in Cameroon, Madagascar, and South Africa.

                        Alright, I’ll move on now to the Near East and North Africa. There are 11 countries in this part of the world to which one can apply regardless of degree level, bachelors, masters or PhD. This does not include Yemen unfortunately, as the program there has been suspended indefinitely due to security concerns. Lebanon is also off limits. I bring that up because I tend to get a fair number of inquiries from people interested in that country, and as of now it’s still a no-go. There’s been some discussion in terms of possibly opening up a program there, but I seriously doubt that will happen in time for the 2010-2011 academic year.

                        In terms of affiliations for these countries, host countries in this world region generally have final say in terms of placing Fulbrighters with the appropriate institution. However I think it still behooves candidates to do as much work as possible in advance on their own. As I mentioned before with Sub-Saharan Africa, this gives evidence of preparation and initiative and project feasibility, and these are clearly items that could be viewed positively in the selection process.

                        In terms of language requirements, these can really vary by country. So it’s really important, again, to read the relevant details on this in the country summary. Candidates interested in receiving additional language training prior to and perhaps during the first few months of the Fulbright grant term should consider applying for what are called Critical Language Enhancement Awards. And again, the full details on these are available on the website as well as in the brochure.

                        And, finally, there are a few developments, new developments, to bear in mind for this world region as well. Once again, as with sub-Saharan Africa, multi-country applications are no longer available, or accepted I should say, for the Middle East and North Africa. We’ve also introduced English Language Teaching Assistantship Awards, or ETAs for short, in Egypt and Jordan.

                        That finishes what I have to say, so I’ll hand things over to Tony and our alumni. Thanks a lot.

Tony:                Alright, exactly. We wanted to thank Maggie Fisk. Maggie will be the first person- Maggie are you online?

Maggie:            I am indeed online.

Tony:                Even though it says that you’ve been muted, but I can hear you talk. You’re showing some stuff, right? So I’m going to make you the presenter.

Maggie:            Alright.

Tony:                You have to click yes.

Maggie:            Can you see me?

?:                      Maggie are you there?

Maggie:            I am indeed there. Do you see me?

?:                      Maggie, can I ask you a question. Are you using a telephone?

Maggie:            I am using a telephone yes.

?:                      Make sure your audio mode has “use telephone” clicked.

Maggie:            Ooh, I don’ think it does, hang on, sorry everyone. Oh, use telephone, ok. Is that better?

?:                      Excellent.

Maggie:            Excellent. OK. So, can everyone hear me alright?

Tony:                Yeah, I think you are good to go.

Maggie:            OK, I’m good to go. Well, thanks so much Tony and Jermaine, for having myself and Michael and Robinette here on this webinar. It’s a pleasure to talk to all the people on the line out there in cyberspace or wherever you are. As you can see there’s a photo of me, so you can get a little visual. It’s actually kind of an old photo from Cameroon, where I studied abroad, but I’m here to talk a little bit about my time in Niger. I was a Fulbrighter in Niger from around September 2007 to June 2008, and as it says on my little blog thing there I was researching the role of women in the Taureg ethnic group. You might have heard of the Tauregs before- there’s a Volkswagen named after the Tauregs. And, just to bring up the Africa map again, I was in the beautiful country of Niger, a large desert nation in West Africa. Here’s a little bit of a zoom in on a Niger map. Some people say it looks like a grenade. It’s a nice large expansive country. You don’t really realize how big it is until you try to go across it and it takes a very long time. A couple more visuals on Niger. I thought it might look a bit more, let’s see,  like that but actually the places where I was looked a lot more bare and desolate when I was out doing my research in the Tenere Desert but the people I was with were really wonderful. And I’m just going to try to move along, show pictures. This is one of my favorite memories from the trip, that photo of myself with some really wonderful Tuareg people that I met when I was out doing research in the Tenere region which is out in eastern Niger, near Chad.

                        But, I’m going to back up a little bit, and go back to why I decided to go to Niger, what it was that made me want to apply for Fulbright. As I mentioned, I studied abroad in Cameroon—I’m looking for the photo of my study abroad, I’m trying to keep this nice and visual—so I decided to do the School for International Training program in Cameroon because I wanted to use my French in Africa and I sort of fell in love with studying African politics and wanted to find a way to get back to Africa after I finished my schooling at Pomona College. Here’s another photo, and now back to the blog. At any rate, I really wanted to find a way to do more field research because I found that I really loved spending time talking to people about their lives, their opinions, about politics, about the role they played in their own societies, so I tried to find a way to tie in my interest in African politics by studying a slightly less controversial aspect of a topic because- and this is sort of just a piece of advice I’ll throw in- you’re not likely to get your grant or research topic accepted by either the U.S. government or the host country government if you’re saying, “Oh, I want to study the Niger delta oil insurgency politics.” Because it’s pretty controversial it could potentially be dangerous. So instead I looked into the role of women in Tuareg society. And the Tuaregs are a very interesting ethnic group. There’s a Tuareg woman that I met while I was traveling as well- let’s see here, going to some more photos down here of a family I lived with. So Tuaregs, the thing that’s interesting about their society, they’re matrilineal so women play a large role in their society but they’re a desert people so it’s different now because of urbanization, modernization. They’re being forced to move to cities, their camels are dying off. So there’s sort of a lot of geo-political concerns, but I was trying to look at sort of the role that women play in gender roles within a city like Niamey, so the capital city of Niger. There’s really only one large city in Niger and I wouldn’t really even call it a large city- Niamey. And so I was planning to spend about half my time in Niamey and half my time in the North in a city called Agadez, but because of political concerns, namely a rebellion that the Tuaregs were launching while I was there, I was unable to travel to that region. So I ended up spending more time than I thought I was going to in Niamey, sort of working at a women’s rights NGO. I can talk a little bit more about how I got the affiliation with that later, but as Jermaine mentioned it really helps to have sort of some connection set up before you get there but as you might guess, if you’ve ever been to Africa, or even if you haven’t, plans change, research changes and that’s part of the adventure. And so I would just sort of warn you of that, but it was one of the most exciting parts that I really didn’t know what was going to happen all the time. Things changed from week to week and from month to month. But kind of an unexpected thing that I ended up doing was I started doing some freelance journalism so for example I wrote this article that appeared in the Washington Post in April 2008. And I wrote a story about a woman that I came to be friends with names Zingaboo who sold some sort of meaty couscous dish that I loved to eat at lunch. So I ended up interviewing her and hanging out with her in the market everyday as she did her shopping. So that’s what I wrote that article about. I also wrote an article about the Tuareg tea ceremony which is a pretty cool thing you might experience if you’re anywhere in West Africa but it’s a really great way to get to know people.

                        So I might just back up a little bit and show you a couple more photos. I wanted to show you a picture of Tobaski which is a pretty exciting holiday where—you can see it’s a little gruesome, sorry about that—but it’s an important Muslim holiday where they sacrifice sheep, so that’s a little photo there, and this is out in the desert, some camels. And this is probably the person in Niger that was most special to me and important to my time there. That’s xxx xxx xxx. And that was at a Fulbright reception we had at one of the Embassy outreach folk’s house. So they had invited Fulbrighters who had gone to the U.S. who were Nigerian and then myself and the other Fulbright grantee from this year. So I lived with her family, with xxx’s family, her little son is below, pretty cute little guy and I ended up spending a great deal of time just sort of observing her as a modern Tuareg woman living in Niamey and also participating in her NGO, her non-governmental organization that she had started designed to give women the power to learn different skills, like sewing and knitting and different things to that they could have their own petite business, small businesses, and make a little bit of money on their own. And so I had a lot of fun spending time, just getting to know this family who I’m still in touch with and like to send little presents along to and hope to visit again someday.

                        So I don’t know how much time I have left, but I guess I’d just like to emphasize a little bit more the challenges, rewards, what this experience taught me. As I mentioned, my research goals changed throughout the course of my grant because I wasn’t able to do the sort of urban/rural Tuareg comparison that I had hoped to do, but I ended up getting to, like I said, getting to know this family, spending more time with them in the capital city, getting the chance to do freelance journalism, which was really special to me, I really enjoyed getting to do that and am considering doing that again someday for sure. And just the rewards were.. hard to measure. I just love being in West Africa. I love getting to be in a place for a long enough time to get to know people. I love studying the local languages; I studied Tamashek which is the Tuareg language and I also studied a little bit of Hausa which is a very useful, widely spoken African language spoken by, I think, a couple hundred million people. I really think my French got a great deal better during the course of the year. And I guess now talking about how the Fulbright sort of shaped what I do today, it certainly consolidated my interest in continuing to work on African issues, continuing to research aspects of African politics especially, as Tony mentioned I now work for the Enough Project which is based in Washington, D.C. Here’s the website. We’re an anti-genocide advocacy organization. We work on these countries over here, Chad, Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and the Lord’s Resistance Army. So, I sort of used the experience of doing field research, I think it gave me more credibility going into the job I have now. I’m a researcher on our policy team and I’m going to be traveling back to Africa soon to Sudan and Uganda and Kenya. So I think a Fulbright is a great thing for someone who’s sort of, fresh out of college, has a passion for any kind of aspect of study of Africa because it allows you to get right back in the field which is difficult to do at a young age. It’s not easy to get a field job with an NGO, with a humanitarian organization. But getting your feet wet, getting to do some of your own research I think is just a great, great learning experience and I can’t recommend it highly enough. So I hope I’ve given you a little bit of an overview and I’d be happy to answer any specific questions. Oh- there’s me with my home stay sister, Raisha, who I liked a lot. So, there we go.

Tony:                We’re going to save questions for Maggie at the end. When you do ask questions at the end, just specify at the beginning of your question when you type it in, you know, is it for Maggie, is it for Robinette, or is it for Michael. Or is it for Jermaine. So I can sort of… it’s easier for me to go through it.

                        Maggie, one quick question. It’s May 11^th, and people are formulating a project .If you can go back to the days when you were formulating your Fulbright proposal, any advice that you want to give them in putting your application together?

Maggie:            Absolutely. That’s a great questions. I think I would look into… I guess I’ll approach the question from if you’re already someone who studied Africa in college. It’s not a necessity, I’d say, but it’s something that helps you to get a better idea of what you’re interested in. So sort of the history of myself choosing this topic was that I’d studied abroad in Cameroon. I ended up doing my thesis as a comparison between an ethnic group in Cameroon and the Tuaregs in Niger. So I had already learned a little bit about the Tuaregs but I wanted the chance to, you know, go there and talk to them. So it was kind of a natural progression to choose some aspect related to the Tuareg in Niger, but I guess I can just emphasize the point that you need to think about the fact that it’s a U.S. government grant, so like I said it’s good to think about what topics interest me and then how can I transition them into something that would be safe for me to do, would make sense in terms of promoting the goals of Fulbright- promoting cultural understanding and those kinds of things. I’d also run it by people like your professors, get their, kind of, feedback on whether it seems like a feasible project. And then above all, it’s great that it’s only May and that you have time to really try to make those connections on the ground. It took me a while to do that because I didn’t have connections in Niger. I also thought about going to Mali because there are a great deal of Tuaregs there as well. But as it turned out, after just doing, frankly, a lot of internet surfing, I found out that Boston University had a study abroad program in Niger, so I ended up contacting the person who was in charge of that program and had lived in Niger for 30 years, an American woman, and she was the one who put me in touch with this family, with this organization I ended up working with. So, I just can’t say enough, use your time now to sort of look into connections you can make in these places and I think it will make for a lot stronger application if you can say,  “look, I talked to this person on skype,” or, “Look they wrote me a letter.” If you look into, maybe, the programs at the university- I contacted some anthropology professors at University Abdou Moumouni which is actually the only university, sadly enough, in Niger, but it made it a little easier to contact people. Does that sort of answer some of the questions?

Tony:                Absolutely.

Maggie:            Great.

Tony:                Thank you.