The silhouette of the towering saguaro cactus is the iconic image of the American Southwest. A hundred years in the making, the full-grown saguaro reaches the size of a most definitely unclimbable tree that provides temporary housing to creatures of the day and of the night attempting to avoid getting scorched by the merciless Southwestern sun. The saguaro is unique to the Sonoran desert that straddles southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, with shy incursions into California, and is completely absent from Texas, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, the other states historically associated with the badlands of the American South/West. In its thousand and one forms, the saguaro invariably stretches its long spear and numerous side limbs towards the sun, posing with a kind of comical and suspiciously phallic majesty. The saguaro lives all its century-plus-long life fastened to the arid ground, embedded in the desert or the sands that invade the towns of southern Arizona, soaking up what little water falls with infrequent downpours and challenging the relentless sun with stiff determination, every day. The saguaro is a symbol of surviving and thriving despite a hellishly difficult environment, defying the oppressive, destructive heat with ambition and greatness bordering on grandiosity. It knows no other reality, but has championed the art of surviving in the reality it's literally buried in. Who knew a cactus could be such an inspirational story.
The saguaro has decades to cope with the fact that it ain't budgin' and learn to stand all the punishment of the extreme conditions it's in. We humans are more mobile, and don't grow spines (although there are exceptions), and our life changes according to our determination, our stubbornness to pursue a goal and our innate capabilities - but also, we have the liberty of doing whatever the hell we want with our lives. Sometimes life does whatever the hell it wants with us. This page, starting now and probably ending at some hopefully distant point in the future, aims to provide an account of one experience that is part this, part that: the Fulbright Experience (that might be a ™).
What is the Fulbright experience and why is it special, and why the hell does this guy seem to be gearing up to writing a novel? As in any recipe that's worth its salt, the basics will come first: the Fulbright Program is an exchange program set up by a congressman with big ideas who came up with the ludicrous concept of receiving and sending out scores of people with a brain they're not afraid to use in hundreds of different directions, to hundreds of different countries, under the banner of one scholarship that would be attainable in almost every area of study imaginable. The Fulbright experience is supposed to be a forge, a training ground, a refinery of people whose ultimate aim is not fame and glory and showers of flowery praise, but contributing something useful to the world and themselves. And the idea is that their world is supposed to be Big, capital B intended. They're supposed to carry a flame and lead with their own example, and sit astride two or more cultures as the cultural ambassadors of their own nation in a foreign land. Wherever a Fulbrighter goes, those in the know will look at him as part of a competitive, barely reachable elite. The funny thing is, in my brief experience, the Fulbrighter disagrees.
When news came on a gloomy February afternoon that I had been admitted to the Ph.D. program in Government & Public Policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, my jaw dropped so low I felt I had to collect its shattered pieces from between the floorboards. The wild card had worked. After an education in Modern Languages and a naggingly incomplete supplementary program in regionally focused Anthropology, a change of tide was in store. While I was trying to express my happiness in anything but the incoherent babble that came as a natural reaction, it dawned on me that, for the first time, I would have the opportunity to cross something off my bucket list - and that Arizona, saguaros or not, was one place I had always dreamed of. For me, Fulbright is not at all about blowing my own horn - it's an unexpected chance to do something useful. So mine is also a tale of luck, of a string of fortuitous events that have led me to this sunstruck place, feeling invigorated, recalibrated and eternally grateful for having the chance to set out on this road without necessarily having any deity to be grateful to. But my story is not unique, and my achievements pale in comparison with the experience of future engineers extraordinaires, humble circuit designers with a deep-seated power in their minds, and radiant architects with a future as bright as the flaming sun of Arizona. This blog is as much about me as it is about them, and as much about them as it is about the entirely new reality that surrounds us. Its point is at once to break down reality - from the most practical to the most abstract - to keep track of my movements and those of others, and to scribble down notes that, when looked back on, should show some kind of transformation or progress as the months (and perhaps years) go by. Also, the entries will be shorter and less rambling than this, and so should work worse as a cure for insomnia. ;)
How special is Fulbright? Someone wrote that the Fulbright difference is not worn on a sleeve, and that few Fulbrighters fully realize the long-term, road-defining, self-transforming weight of the experience on a daily basis, just like few fish think about water. They don't see themselves as the cultural ambassadors they are to be, and yet feel a responsibility associated with maintaining the kind of image that doesn't involve intentionally breaking the law, stumbling in zigzags around the street in a drunken stupor, or bringing the house and the cops down because the dBs from their house party are deregulating the elderly upstairs neighbors' heart rate. As a wise young Brit recently said, Fulbright is something different for everyone: sometimes life-changing, other times life-saving.
And aside from a good academic record, they're looking for people with a story to tell - both in past and future tense. This point was driven home at an orientation in Oklahoma, attended by a ragtag band of some 60 people representing 35 different nations - a hodgepodge bucketload of world, what Mexicans would call a revoltura cultural. Soon after things got underway and each of us realized just how far (yet close) our respective countries were from each other, I noticed how underrepresented Europe was: there was no Spain, no Italy, no Belgium, no Netherlands, no Portugal, no Switzerland, a lone Scandinavian (Swedish here), a lone Pole, a lone Brit, a lone Bulgarian, a lone Macedonian and a whopping two Ukrainians. I felt like a piece of Europe breaking off the mainland and floating away to far-off lands with the fascination and naïveté of a kid on his first visit to Disneyland, soaking up everything that was being said, restructuring my mind to envelop the whole cultural cocktail that we were, regardless of our academic profiles. For a mere four days, we interacted with each other, creating bonds meant to last, sometimes even more frantic to use the little time that was available to us to connect - not, as one of the lecturers vigorously suggested, to network and fish for people who are useful to know, but as new friends bound by riding the common Fulbright wave. There was no blatant clique-making, no childish friend-picking - it just clicked. The 46° heat, complemented by a gentle breeze that mirrored the interior of a furnace and made breathing an unpleasant addition to our daily schedule, did not deter us from launching into the Oklahoman reality and cross-cultural bridge-building. Three days and nine t-shirts later, on the day of departure, it struck me that while the organizing team did one hell of a job keeping the strings all tied together, this orientation was less about seminars, workshops and events than it was about us. The sidewalk conversations. The dormitory revelations.
Personal bonds aside, Oklahoma was also a good place to start for the sheer extremity of its differences with regard to many of our cultures. The flatlands on the way to Norman, pockmarked by motels and partially convincing Mexican food joints, were alive with pickup trucks of extra-large sizes which I have since grown accustomed to, but which at the beginning seemed more a parody of the gas-guzzling local culture than anything else. Many a proud pickup owner had tossed in a hydraulic suspension system that transformed their trusty four-wheeler into a half-baked monster truck. The university itself, stretching far and wide, was no less of a revelation, and real proof of where the thousands of dollars are being poured into: lush green squirrel-friendly parks filled the space between buildings designed in a dozen classic styles, marvels of technology abounded (including an ever-popular hand-wash machine with two holes that might well have been a recycling bin after heavy tuning or a convenient hand amputator), and the famous university stadium was an elaborate maze and a more convincing shrine than most places of religious worship I have seen. (It is also worth noting that it must be peculiar to have one's own statue cast in bronze and standing in a public place at 25 years of age, as some of the university's accomplished athletes do.) We all saw it, we all appreciated it, and then we dispersed - but not to become anonymous to one another.
Each of us is different, each of us will serve a different purpose, and all of us are peppered throughout the whole country like randomly dropped marbles that keep on rolling with a sense of mission and that familiar electric, tingling thrill that accompanies the start of a new adventure, one that may make us veer off onto a road we never thought we would follow. The Arizonan saguaro is endemic to the southern, barren, parched reaches of the United States, and does not venture away. But Ann Arbor, Oklahoma, Boston, Berkeley, Ohio, North Carolina and a hundred other places all have their own utterly unique fauna and flora with surprising attributes that the saguaro will never know. It is in connecting the uniqueness and diversity of many that the strength of the whole makes itself known.
Loud and clear.
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