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Erich arrived in NZ in January 2000 on a US Fulbright Graduate student Award and completed a Masters in Science at the University of Otago in 2001. Erich is a student of geology and has been mapping the Papanui Canyon - one of six submarine canyons on the other Otago shelf. Erich returned to the US in July 2001 and hopes to embark on a career in public policy. I originally hail from Boston, Massachusetts... I came here in January 2000 to do a Masters Degree at the University of Otago... I was trying to think of how I could sum up in five minutes what Fulbright means to me and there are so many ways that it's impacted my life both on personal levels, professional levels in terms of my career, my education. So I decided that it was impossible and I'm just going to share with you a story that I think personifies what I consider to be one of the most important aspects of what being a Fulbright means to me. I'm studying down in Dunedin, which is on the coast in the South Island, and a few months ago some friends and I decided to camp out for a night at one of the local beaches, a beach called Long Beach. And this beach is special because at one end of the beach it's quite long as it implies, but at the other end there are three caves and during the summer months when it's sort of warm in Dunedin the students will get into groups and go and claim a cave in a sort of a first come first caved sort of set-up. So usually there'd be three groups of students there and we got there early and got the biggest cave, which was quite nice. It was getting pretty late, it was round eight o'clock getting towards dusk, and there were two groups, but nobody had showed up to claim the last small cave. Suddenly there was this rather interesting group of students that arrived...it was a group of four students, three of whom were Chinese students and one who was a Kiwi student. And the three Chinese students, it was quite clear just from looking at them that they hadn't spent a whole lot of time sleeping on beaches, whereas the Kiwi student it was quite clear that he hadn't spent a whole lot of time sleeping anywhere else. They couldn't have been more of a dichotomous group. So anyway a few hours later we were sitting round our campfires and I decided with some friends of mine that we were going to go campfire hopping and meet some of the people in the other groups. We went over to this strange group of Chinese and the young Kiwi and ended up striking a conversation with one of the young Chinese men. I found that he had just arrived in New Zealand about two weeks earlier and that it was actually his first trip ever outside of China and that I was the first American who he had ever met in his entire life. We started talking and I found out later that he was one of the leaders of the student communist party at his university in China. I had never really met a communist, to be blunt. There we were. His English was quite broken but it was far better than my Mandarin and so we just sat around this camp fire for hours talking about comparisons between our nations, talking about how we see the other's nations and acknowledging fully the biases from our own cultures. Talking about how the media portrays the others. Talking about the pros and cons of capitalism and communism. I mean here were the capitalists and communists sitting round a camp fire in the middle of a beach in New Zealand and those are the kind of experiences, the conversations that I've had with people. Speaking with people from different nations, but also speaking to the other Fulbrighters. People like Bernida.... we have such different cultural backgrounds even though we both come from America.... That's really to me what the Fulbright has meant. It's talking to these people and seeing things from their perspective. Seeing America through their eyes has been quite interesting and.... that has changed me more than anything else I think ...
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Updated: 9 June 2004 |
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