One of the things I love about my job is that I get to see the world through other people’s eyes. When exchange participants arrive in the US and encounter new things on campus for the first time, I get to see how my country looks to them and hear about what Americans are like from an outside perspective. When they return home, I hear about what they notice at home now – after their time in the US – that they never noticed before.
I’m lucky to have new windows to the world through exchange participants, but seeing the world from a new perspective is something that I had already learned to do through my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan [13]. Peace Corps allowed me to become a community member of a place that I previously knew nothing about, to live with and integrate into a completely new community, and to see myself and my world in a new way. The ability to see situations through multiple lenses is invaluable when working on diplomacy activities like international exchange programs. This kind of work requires that I be able to understand and explain the importance of the program not only to the participants, but also to the tax payers who fund it. Working with exchange participants also requires that I be able to understand and predict how they will perceive things in the US, as well as how the Americans that they meet will perceive them.
Through Peace Corps, I myself have been the foreigner in a community. As a result, I know how easy it can be to say or do the wrong thing, without knowing it. I understand the value in having people you can trust explain to you what you did wrong and how to avoid future mishaps. Moreover, Peace Corps provided my host community with the opportunity to have a foreigner (me!) in their community. Through my presence, my host community members learned things about their own language and culture that are confusing for a foreigner and had to learn to look at themselves from the outside, in order to help me understand.
The give-and-take that both parties – the host and the foreigner – must develop to get along is something that changes all parties involved and remains a part of them forever. I am grateful to my host community in Gurlen, Uzbekistan for taking me in and teaching me about their lives and cultures, and I am grateful that I could teach them about my life and culture at the same time. At IREX, I keep that learning experience alive [14], by providing the opportunity for exchange participants to come to the US and not only learn about my culture, but also provide my fellow Americans with the opportunity to learn about theirs.
I encourage you to find a way to see your world through someone else’s eyes and use that experience to inform your choices and decisions. You don’t need to join the Peace Corps – get to know an exchange student or immigrant in your home community; plan a trip to another state; or just take the time to let someone try to change your mind about something.
Kaia Benson [15] is a Senior Program Officer at IREX