Hello! ¡Hola! 你好！
Welcome to my blog!
I’ve decided that a great way to keep my family members and friends up-to-date on all of my adventures in Spain would be to start a blog. Not only a blog where I could talk about my experiences here, but also where I can discuss certain political, social and cultural issues that I come across. I am hoping that from this blog you will not only be entertained by my adventures, but also more culturally informed and maybe even inspired.
Let me give you a little background information on myself and what I am doing here…
I am here from the great United States of America as a Fulbright Fellow. If you live in America and don’t know any information about the Fulbright Program, I strongly encourage you to check out their website, http://www.iie.org/fulbright, because this is one of the best, if not the best, international programs out there. The Fulbright is a program sponsored by the United States Dept. of State that provides funding for students, scholars, teachers, and professionals to undertake graduate study, advanced research, and teaching in universities and primary and secondary schools. Each year, this program sends over a thousand of these individuals across the world hoping “to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries”. As a scholar in the U.S. Student Program, I am an English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Jávea, a small town in the Valencian community of Spain.
Being a Fulbrighter has so many advantages and I am so happy that I was chosen to be a part of such a prestigious organization. The ten months that I will spend here in Spain is fully funded by the Fulbright program and they have made sure that all of their grantees are able to live comfortably. However, with great rewards come great expectations. The Fulbright has invested in me to be a leader, to be an innovator and to cultivate new ideas and I am so excited to fulfill my purpose here. I look at the time that I will spend in Spain as an opportunity for me to travel to many different places, share my language and culture with others, learn more about the people of the world, and also involve myself in a project that I am very passionate about. Therefore, my time spent here Spain will be very fun but also very productive.
And now more on my responsibilities:
1. First and foremost, as an ETA in Jávea, my primary responsibility is to be an amazing English teacher. I work at a small primary education school where I teach children of 8 different grade levels. The youngest kids are in infantil, ages 3-5 (what would probably be pre-k in the U.S.), and the oldest are in the 6th cycle, ages 11 and 12. As an ETA I hope to give my students a different view of the U.S. than what they see in the media and also introduce them what I think to be some of the best things about American culture. And of course, I hope to greatly improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing English abilities.
2. Secondly, as a Fulbrighter, I am also expected to come up with an independent project that I will work on outside of the 16 hours a week that I am in school. I plan to work on two projects: one that is community based and another more personal project.
For my personal project, I plan to do more research on the literature of Equatorial Guinea. Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-colonized, and therefore the only Spanish-speaking, country in Africa and I became very interested in the literature of this country while taking a class in college. I also presented some work that I did on the literature earlier this year at the College Language Association Convention and I would love to expand upon my theme and share my research at the next convention. Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, a very famous Equatorial Guinean writer with whom I have had the pleasure to meet, lives in Spain, and I would love to get in contact with him.
As for my community based project, I hope to involve myself in some kind of community service, whether it be cleaning up the neighborhood or teaching English to adults. I would love to do whatever I can to help out the community and show Spaniards that Americans actually care about other people and about the things that go on in the world.
3. Lastly, It would be silly for me to live in the Valencian community and not absorb all that I can of the Valencian language, especially since I am always surrounded by it. So, while in Spain I am also taking Valencian classes 3 times a week at a school for adults. Therefore, by the end of my time here, I hope that my Spanish will be almost flawless and I will be at least proficient in Valencian. I have also studied and fell in love Mandarin Chinese for a year before coming to Spain and I plan to continue studying Chinese while I am here so that I will not lose what I have learned. As you can see, I am in love with learning languages.
There are also things apart from my grant that I plan to accomplish while in Spain, such as:
- Studying for the MCAT and preparing for medical school. For those that don’t know, I was pre-med in college and I am just as passionate about medicine as I am about cultural exchange. I plan to attend medical school in the next couple of years.
- Being an amazing maid of honor. My sister is getting married next summer and I plan to fulfill as much of my maid-of-honor duties as I can fulfill while I am abroad.
I hope that you have fun reading my blog and that you feel as though you are on this journey with me. As you can see, I write a lot and I hope that you do not develop a headache from reading all of my lengthy entries. Feel free to leave comments if you would like.
Love,
L. Oaks
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