DATE=April 18, 2002

TYPE=Dateline

NUMBER=7-36195

TITLE=U.S. Impressions from Fulbright Visiting Scholars

BYLINE=Judith Latham

TELEPHONE=202-619-3464

DATELINE=Washington

EDITOR=Neal Lavon

CONTENT=

DISK: DATELINE THEME (:51), ESTABLISH IN FULL, FADE OUT UNDER:

HOST: The Fulbright Scholars program, named for the late chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, sends American scholars abroad and brings foreign scholars here. Fulbright visiting scholars from around the world recently gathered in Washington for their annual conference. They discussed their impressions of the United States before and after their Fulbright experience. Dateline focuses now on "U-S Impressions by Fulbright Visiting Scholars." Here's Judith Latham.

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JL: Dalia Farouk [DAHL-yah fir-ROOK], is a Fulbright visiting scholar from Egypt and a soprano soloist with the Cairo Opera Company. After graduating from the Cairo Conservatory five years ago, Ms. Farouk won a scholarship in vocal performance to the University of California-Los Angeles. She received her master's degree in June 2000, then returned to Egypt. [MUSIC OUT COMPLETELY] For her, the Fulbright scholarship was a dream come true.

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"I really noticed a difference in my performance after my experience at UCLA. I decided to do my best to get my doctorate and to get a grant to come back to the United States. So, I applied for a Fulbright non-degree program. I got six months of training in master's classes in vocal performance, and I'm going to start in May at Indiana University in Bloomington. I 'e-mailed' Patricia Weiss, the great celebrity soprano whom we all know. She's fabulous. It was one of my dreams to come here and have her as my professor."

JL: Dahlia Farouk says she prepared a special musical program . . .

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JL: . . .for the Fulbright Visiting Scholars' conference.

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"I selected a program that has variety. I chose six pieces. The first is a German song, a German Lied. It's called Allerseelen; it means All Soul's Day. It's sentimental. I'm wishing my lover would come back he has died. Just one more time in May."

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JL: Fulbright scholar and opera singer Dahlia Farouk is studying vocal performance at the University of Indiana. This is her second visit to the United States. Rajani Konantambigi [RAHZH-nee KOH-nah-TAHM-be-GEE], a Fulbright scholar from India, is doing post-doctoral research in educational psychology and special education at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Ms. Konantambigi says many of her impressions of the United States were derived from American movies and television. And some of them, she says, were erroneous.

TAPE B: CUT #3: KONANTAMBIGI [FM LATHAM] 0:38

"We have the image of a country of glamour, a country of opportunities, and a country where there is violence because the movies show a lot of violence, and where sex is freely available those kinds of images. It's also portrayed as a land where, if you work hard, you will excel. We think Americans are very aware of the world. But when we come here, we find that is not so true. A lot of Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world. American efficiency and respect for other people's time and taking responsibility for oneself these are the images that we also have, and I have found them to be true. People are responsible, and even children are very responsible."

JL: Ms. Konantambigi says, although Americans "work very hard," she was pleased discover that they still manage to devote considerable time to their families.

I'll be back with more on how Fulbright Visiting Scholars see the United States in a few moments. You're listening to the new Dateline heard 44 minutes past most odd U-T-C hours on VOA News Now. I'm Judith Latham. Coming up on the next edition of Dateline, Carol Castiel reports on the results and implications of the recent elections in East Timor.

Fulbright visiting scholar [AHR-tem HAH-rah-TOON-yan], a professor at Yerevan [YER-a-vahn] State University in Armenia, says he is doing research in American literature at the University of California-Los Angeles. Professor Harutyunyan says he has already translated most of the works of the 19th century poet Walt Whitman.

TAPE B: CUT #4: HARUTYONYAN [FM LATHAM] 0:59

"I'm doing translation and a critical evaluation of the poets. America is one of the leading countries of the world where there is experimentation in poetry and literary forms. In that realm, I see the creation of a new man. In poetry the United States has great achievements. [Walt] Whitman for me is a man who changed the map of poetry where sincerity to bring man in his naked position, not clothing him, not hiding anything. That's an achievement. I'm also writing poetry. There are many good things about a literature that gave us Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Alan Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound. I am translating them. I am bringing these values to the Armenian society. So I am doing a second volume. This is my second Fulbright scholarship. It will be 600 pages, and half of them I have already done."

JL: Artem Harutyunyan says the Fulbright visiting scholars seem to him like members of an extended family.

TAPE: CUT #5: HARUTYUNYAN [FM LATHAM] 0:24

"The Fulbright society here is a unique little society from India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Macedonia, and elsewhere. We are a family. Let's embrace the world. Let's love each other. By exchanging scholars, we will come more closely together. We must touch the skin of human suffering and become a unique tree with multiplied branches and roots."

JL: Artem Harutyunyan says that since the early twentieth century there has been what he calls an "Armenian colony" in the United States, especially in California.

TAPE B: CUT #6: HARUTYUNYAN [FM LATHAM] 0:55

"After the sad events in Ottoman Turkey, when half a million Armenians were massacred and deported, a lot of Armenians came to the United States. We have here fine artists. One of the greatest writers of the United States Faulkner and Hemingway always mentioned it was William Saroyan. He was a great dramatist, one of the initiators of the theatre of the absurd. And we also have a great painter, Archil Gorky Adoyan. These things incline me to appreciate America because it sheltered a million Armenians. And I like the wayward, boyish beauty of American politics -- to resist anything that is inhuman or that is totalitarian. The writer is given a huge opportunity to be himself, to express his opinion about current events. Why do we look to the United States? Because it is the symbol of freedom."

JL: Armenian poet and translator Artem Harutyunyan is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Kamal Abouchedid [KAH-mel ah-BOO-cheh-DEED] from Notre-Dame University in Lebanon, is a Fulbright visiting scholar in sociology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He says he is revising the impressions he had of the United States, which were also largely derived from American media and from some of his history textbooks.

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"When I was in Lebanon, my image of the United States was that it was a country of freedom, a land of opportunity, and a powerful nation. It has a lot of cultural resources and economic resources. I still have a positive image of the United States; however, I'm dubious about the extent to which the media in this country is contributing to a positive American image in the Arab world, particularly in Lebanon. And I wonder if the American media is the enemy of the United States or its friend by showing bias in reporting the news about the region."

JL: Kamal Abouchedid says he has had to make a lot of adjustments to living in American society.

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"There is a difference between American culture, which is basically individualistic, and the culture that I came from, which is mostly collectivist. Sometimes there is a clash between those two types of social relations. For instance, back home in Lebanon, if I had a visitor, my wife would wake up in the morning and start preparing food until afternoon. And then, the visitor would be embraced with all sorts of hospitality. When I came here, I didn't find that sort of thing. People are friendly, yes. But I don't think we can be very close friends because of course there are borders. And people have their privacy and this is what they like."

JL: Sociologist Kamal Abouchedid [kah-MAL ah-BOO-cha-DEED] says he expected that American students would be more cosmopolitan. And he has been disappointed by their lack of sophistication.

TAPE B: CUT #9: ABOUCHEDID [FM LATHAM] 1:05

"What stuns me is that some of the students at the university here are not really interested in what is happening around the world. Sometimes I feel they have a naïve perception of other countries and the way their people live. For example, I was invited by a friend who is teaching sociology at the University of Florida. He invited me to talk about the Arab world. Some students were confused between Islam and Arab people. They think the Middle East is backward, and that's not true. If you go to Lebanon, you will be shocked by how women live the miniskirts and the pubs and the music. I think people in Gainesville are conservative compared with college students at the American University of Beirut or Lebanese-American University, or even Notre Dame University, where I taught. For a great nation to strengthen its position as a country leading the world, it should be a model of mutual learning and understanding and building bridges with others. The objective of the Fulbright program is to have a kind of cross-national, cross-cultural understanding through research and lecturing. This is at the heart of the interest of your nation in fighting terrorism and in promoting global understanding."

JL: Lebanese sociologist Kamal Abouchedid says he hopes that American and Middle Eastern scholars may help in the process of bringing their countries to a deeper awareness of the need to understand each other.

Syed Hamidullah, a Fulbright visiting scholar from Pakistan, is a professor of geology at the University of Peshawar. He is now affiliated with the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Professor Hamidullah says this is his second Fulbright program in the United States. He spent two years at Princeton University in New Jersey and this actually helped him back home.

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"Even the first time, I knew a lot about America. The reason was that I was educated in the West. My Ph.D. is from Glasgow University, Scotland. When I went back to Pakistan, I worked with American professors in Peshawar. So, I knew a lot about the United States. I knew it was a land of opportunity. I knew it was a land of open-ness. It is a land where people have equal rights men and women, black and white. I knew that it is multi-cultural."

JL: Syed Hamidullah [sigh-EED HAMM-ee-DOOL-ah] says he developed a deep affection for the United States, derived from what initially appeared to be a family tragedy.

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"The most important thing that happened to me in the United States was because my son was born here. And he was born with a lot of defects in the heart and his body. They were corrected. He was also given an American nationality and passport because he was born here. Who would do that for a person who is coming from abroad? So, I think that is a great thing that the United States has been doing."

JL: Fulbright visiting scholar Syed Hamidullah says that he returned to the United States after September 11th. And despite warnings by his friends in Pakistan who feared that he might encounter prejudice in the United States since he was coming from a Muslim country, Professor Hamidullah says his experiences of America remain positive. And he says he enjoys working on environmental research with his university colleagues.

Approximately 800 Fulbright Visiting Scholars from the U.S. go abroad each year and 800 international scholars come to the United States. To date, nearly a quarter of a million people have gone through the Fulbright program since it began fifty years ago. The impressions of America the visiting scholars take back to their countries and the knowledge gained by Americans abroad may be critical factors in how our nation relates to the rest of the world in the next fifty years. For Dateline, I'm Judith Latham.

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