"Where big ideas break through."
-Phelps Stokes, celebrating a century of doing so
...
At the National Mall with some of the participants and State Department Staff of the Study of the US Institutes on History and Government Program, my first task as Program Assistant at Phelps Stokes, the non-profit that brought me to Washington, DC
My Phelps Stokes colleague and SUSI supervisor Mónica Flores, Diego, an Afro-Colombian student and disabled citizens' activist, and I at the entrance to Phelps Stokes
Coming to Washington in the era of the modern Brazilian boom, and of a new age in US-Brazil relations, might just play out in history as the best decision I've ever made.
Why in the first place did I move to the that stuffy part-diamond-shaped piece of swampland tucked between Maryland and Virginia? As some of you know, I had come to know a non-profit called Phelps Stokes beginning in December 2010 at the Fulbright Colombia Afro-descendant Leadership Seminar. Their offer was to work as a Program Assistant for Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders on US History and Government (SUSI), a US Department of State-sponsored educational exchange program in which around 55 Latin American students came up north to learn about US civic affairs and polish their English during six weeks of the US summer. While the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Social Affairs (ECA) financed the program, my new employer, Phelps Stokes, administered it. The students, divided into three different country groups and English competency levels, studied at North Carolina Central University in Durham, George Mason University, in Virginia just a short drive from DC, and Wheelock College in Boston. In the program's sixth week, the students gathered in Washington for a culminating seminar and large-group exchange. SUSI was a major success, allowing me to mentor and make friends with students from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, and other places. For me the greatest highlights were watching the students marvel at US historical and cultural sites in Washington, rave about their time in New York, and begin to understand the US civil rights movement--how it makes the history of race relations in the US very different from that in Latin America. Perhaps more satisfying, still, was witnessing the students' improvement in their English, both in terms of vocabulary and confidence.
Orienting the SUSI students with the US capital on Day One of the SUSI Washington Program
Upon opening of the SUSI Summer Program, of course I immediately gravitated toward the Afro-Colombian students. These guys came a long way to get here, and I am so proud of them.
SUSI students from Mexico and Nicaragua deliberate about their final group project presentation during their introductory day of the SUSI's culminating week in Washington
SUSI students from Ecuador work on a US history scavenger hunt challenge before the National Museum of American History
At the SUSI 2011 Closing Dinner with Bernardo "Nando" Meneses, an International Relations undergraduate student and SUSI Participant from the University of Panama
After half a year of professional development and academic exploration in Washington, I must ask: was Phelps Stokes my thought incubator for my career in international education, development and business-diplomacy? I reckon it was a darn good one. Once SUSI had wrapped up in early September, I transitioned from my position as Program Assistant with SUSI to Program Assistant with Phelps Stokes's Programs for Latin America and the Caribbean (PLAC) unit, to oversee education development programs in Colombia and work toward launching Phelps Stokes's presence in Brazil. In addition to enhancing my interpersonal skills through interaction with diplomats, investors, entrepreneurs, and a wide array of movers and shakers in the world of Western Hemisphere development, this experience allowed me various moments of strategizing about my upcoming graduate school applications...
Of course one of the great perks of living in Washington was occupying my mind for large number of hours attending my favorite of all wonky Washingtonian policy discussions, panels and guest presentations at a few of my favorite thinktanks: the Latin America Initiative at Brookings Institution, the Washington Office on Latin America (which specializes in Colombian affairs), and the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Among the most rousing lessons I learned is that though Brazil has very recently started to experience some dips in its breakneck growth pattern, my home region, the Northeast, has the country's highest growth and new consumer potential, with an explosion of new credit, massive new investments in infrastructure, and growth rates in certain pockets and cities upward of 5%. It was particularly at the Wilson Center's Brazil Institute that I was able to immerse myself in these issues. The chance to interact with some of Brazil's most reputable policy thinkers, and reflect on strategies to improve Brazil's development prospects there, became one of my favorite sideline pastimes.
As a result of my interactions at the Wilson Center, I've come to find it important for those interested in Latin American and Global Development to all stay briefed about the upcoming Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Why? Because, for one, there is intense speculation about the meaning and function of this upcoming conference amid Brazil's boom. A Wilson Center panelist once posed aloud the very tough question, "ask yourselves, what is more important: the Olympics, the World Cup, or Rio + 20?" One thing is sure: there is enormous potential for the transformation of the way business and international governance are conducted with respect to environment protection and to social inclusion. And that will all be spearheaded right in Rio de Janeiro, the supposed environmental capital of the Country Of The Future, Brazil. But, in business-as-usual fashion, international policymakers and business leaders are not sufficiently on track to realize this potential, and that disturbs me... Perhaps more striking, still, is the fact that large communities of favela residents in Rio are being uprooted by real estate developers in the name of making more valuable the city's most primely-located terrain. This video makes all too compelling the case for us to all follow the happenings in Rio...
Aside from my day-to-day adventures in Washington's outlets for critical thinking, the most relevant new professional relationship I formed while in Washington was with the visiting Hubert Humphrey fellow Paulo Rogério, an Afro-Brazilian progressive media activist from my home state of Bahia, Brazil. Paulo's story is remarkable and inspiring. Born and raised in one of Salvador da Bahia's most marginalized neighborhoods, Paulo Rogério founded the Instituto de Mídia Étnica, a social media agency that seeks to empower Afro-Brazilian journalists and advocate for affirmative action in Brazil's schools. After essentially teaching himself English, Paulo gained admission to the Catholic University in Salvador, probably the most prestigious private university in Salvador--a true feat, as he was the first student from his neighborhood of some 20,000 residents to go to college. He soon won the US State Department's Humphrey fellowship against all odds and against Bahia's still-persistent structural racism in education and employment. (If you don't believe me that Brazil still suffers from structural racism, please do yourself a favor and read this article or watch this short video.) In the summer of 2011 Paulo arrived in the Washington area to study in a cutting-edge postgraduate media program at the University of Maryland. In his spare time, Paulo has become a prolific online commentator, tussling to shed light on the difficulties that still confront Afro-Brazilians not only in his own multiple blogs, but also in the site for 'Americas Quarterly.' Paulo and I have teamed up to connect the most effective activists in our networks who are dealing with matters of economic development, expansion of educational opportunities, and overcoming racism in the US and Brazil. Case in point was our arrival along with other members of US civil society at the State Department's early November meetings on the US-Brazil Joint Action Plan to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Equality and Promote Equality (JAPER). There we had the chance to share our ideas for progress in combatting Brazil's racism ahead of the World Cup and the Olympics with decently sized panel of US diplomats, Brazilian diplomats, Brazilian cabinet-level ministers, and other NGO activists based in Washington. But above all else, over the course of our several month--and continuing--collaboration, Paulo and I became especially concerned with the matter of enhancing economic rights and market opportunities for Brazil's Afro-descendant entrepreneurs. (In Brazil, he has linked me with the Incubadora Afro-Brasileira, about which I am sure to elaborate in a later post...) To provide but one example of Paulo's important work, this article does decent justice to introducing to a popular audience the obstacles that exist to Afro-Brazilians' intensive engagement in the private sector.
As my great friend, Hip Hop partner, and peer-mentor Jacob Harris once rapped, "Making my points like pyramids do:" convincing an audience of policymakers, diplomats, and members of US civil society of the need for more coordinated collaboration between Afro-descendant-led business in the US and Brazil, in preparation for the World Cup and Olympics
Members of the two delegations at the US State Department's US-Brazil JAPER conferences
Keeping ourselves busy on weekends: Paulo Rogério and I arriving for a cocktail reception at the Brazilian Embassy compound, Ambassador Mauro Vieira's guest residence, in Washington, culminating November's two-day meetings on the US-Brazil Joint Action Plans to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Equality
...
A tidbit I feel the need to inject about standardized tests:
In December, I had to get a little chore out of the way: arranging to fill the last criteria of my graduate school application material. This was after taking a three-and-a-half-month preparation course for the country's most standard standardized test for graduate admissions at Graduate School USA, a professional training center in Washington offering night and weekend classes. The GRE is a decently rigorous 3.5-hour exam that essentially evaluates a student's competency in responding to verbal and mathematical situations that generally involve the application of logic. There are two essay responses, an Analyze the Issue and an Analyze the Argument task, that both measure the respondent's degree of facility defending his or her perspectives and assessing the rationale behind another individual's assertion, either real or hypothetical. Each of those tasks must be completed under the intense time constraint of 30 minutes. In this time a student must read and digest the prompt, map out a cogent response, and then write five to six paragraphs of fluent English. The Verbal section involves word analogies, fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, and a range of all other questions designed to test a student's knowledge of college-level vocabulary. Other questions test the student's capacity to make sense of short, academic reading passages. The math section covers student's high-school-level grasp of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis. While the math involved is not overwhelmingly complex (it requires no trigonometry or calculus) the questions are essentially designed to trick students by taking advantage of their minor errors in timing or calculation, or of their ability to weed out logic flaws and "red herring," or distracting, questions. To provide a quick review, my final frustrations with the test have to do with its rather random incorporation of the questions for which the student has actually spent time preparing. To give an example, though I probably studied GRE vocabulary for at least 30 hours since September, constantly flipping through flashcards via BlackBerry while on buses and standing in lines, I estimate less than 5% of the words I came to learn by heart actually appeared on my particular test. In reality I'm very annoyed with a system that even in the year 2012 still assumes equation between one's performance on an overly pressure-filled test, crammed with arbitrary and irrelevant-t0-real-life questions, and his or her academic insight, workplace skills, creativity, vision, and global street smarts. As a result, I'd be in favor of the construction of a new graduate-level admissions exam designed for folks pursuing careers in international business-diplomacy that tests their:
a) Abilities to effectively communicate;
b) Capacities to build social coalitions for the realization of common goals;
c) Abilities to manage teams; and...
d) Street diplomacy, which allows them to avoid getting advantage of, robbed, or killed when living in developing countries.
To those ends, and especially to the end of criteria d), I will gain ten times more living for a year in Northeast Brazil than I ever would studying for and taking the GRE. To my knowledge, there is no admissions exam that holistically satisfies these dimensions of being a responsible global citizen in the world today. Alas, I fear because of that, we are wasting a great deal of talent.
...
Conclusions of my DC experience? First, I am excited and see nothing but a world of potential. My heart and mind are swelling with resolve to instill some radical changes into the status quo of race relations in Brazil and its neighbors--and to do so this decade, while Brazil's economy is still growing at 3.5-6%, and the world's attention is turned toward the emerging markets. Anything less will be the terrible waste of the grandest opportunity of our lifetime as Brazilians and as student-activist-practitioners of Latin American development. For sure I know that the time for the two most powerful countries in our hemisphere to effectively unite for economic and social progress is now.
Perhaps my most recent stint in DC has been an outlet allowing my skills to somewhat catch up with my ambition. One way or another, my most recent tenure in my (second) nation's capital provided a tremendously educational and relevant segway into my second residency in Latin America in as many years. At this moment, my most burning question is: how does a young Afro-Brazilian political economist, eager to engage business-diplomacy relations between the US and Brazil, break into the racist and highly inequitable system of Brazilian politics and commerce? And how does such a person, also an aspiring social entrepreneur of the Americas, attract foreign investment capital to Brazil in a manner that not only creates new jobs and professional development opportunities, but spreads the new benefits across more demographics and a more distant time horizon? How does one encourage development to be more racially equitable and environmentally sustainable in the long-term? This is what I will spend my next 10 months as a Rotary Ambassador to Brazil trying to answer.
Thanks for reading, and paz, tranquilidade and abraços to all,
SCE
SCE
No comments:
Post a Comment