Cairo, July 15, 2008

Thank you very much, thank you Mr. Marquis, for your kind introduction, and welcome to all of you here.
It’s really a great pleasure to have the opportunity to talk a little bit to you all at this year’s participants and the regional Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant’s Pre-departure Orientation and Workshop. My thanks as well to the Institute of International Education and the Fulbright Commission for the invitation to come here today, and it’s wonderful to see you all here in Cairo and to see the large number of young men and women who are representing their countries, especially the new participating countries of Yemen, Kuwait, and the Palestinian Authority. And I have served in all three of these areas; I served in Sanaa, in Kuwait City, and in Jerusalem in my past, so I know you have a lot to bring to this program. I am sure Egypt’s own participants have provided you with a warm welcome to this great city and the hospitality that Egypt is so famous for.

Most importantly, I would like to congratulate you on being selected for the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant program. This is the 40th year of the program, yet it is more important than ever.

This particular program provides an opportunity for Americans to meet on a very personal and professional level with you, 115 outstanding young leaders from 15 countries in the Middle East.

This is what in the United States we view as a win-win opportunity here, there is something in this for everyone who participates in this--you will teach our students in your languages and culture; your presence on our campuses will be intellectually stimulating for our students, and you will inspire our young people to look beyond the borders of the United States and to consider themselves possibly coming to your countries to study. You will make a difference.

In the last 6 years, the number of U.S. students studying Arabic at American universities has doubled. Clearly, you are going to have excited students waiting for you who are eager to learn Arabic. You may not want to tell them at the outset that this is going to take years for them to get totally proficient, but they will really benefit so much from your experience in hearing native Arabic speakers in their own classrooms.

As fellows in this program, we hope you will benefit as well. We hope that you will be able to learn teaching techniques that will help you in your classrooms here in Egypt and in your own countries, and that you will gain leadership experience from this opportunity. We hope that you will come back and tell your family and friends about an America that exists beyond the headlines of the newspapers and beyond the television stories and will allow you to meet American faculty and students and neighbors who will introduce you to the richness that is American culture as well.

You are not only teachers, of course, but you are ambassadors of your own country, language and culture.
Since 1946, the Fulbright program has promoted mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchange while serving as a catalyst for long-term leadership development, partnerships, and a shared commitment to peace, prosperity and democracy.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Senator Fulbright and the U.S. Congress conceived the program so that "people would get to know each other as people." These leaders recognized that partnership built upon the free exchange of people and ideas was absolutely essential to a peaceful world order in the aftermath of the Second World War, and I think we believe that these concepts are as important today as they were fifty or forty years ago.

I am proud to say I am also your partner in this effort. But as a rising leader in the Fulbright program, you are going to establish many more relationships with colleagues and students in the U.S. We hope these relationships will form the foundation of successful and mutually beneficial cooperation and friendship between our countries, that they will help you personally and professionally in the years to come, and that you will create contacts and networks of associates that you can continue to communicate with in the years ahead.

This is a very simple concept but we do believe that it works. Everyone in this room knows that if we can dispel the misconceptions of who we are as people, we can further our mutual respect and understanding of each other and accomplish even more together.

I know this not just as a diplomat, but because I was a Fulbrighter once, and I know first hand how valuable this experience will be to you your whole life.

As George mentioned when he introduced me, I studied history at the University of Tennessee, my own home state. I noticed that one of the Egyptian participants, Ehab Abdelrahman, is going to MTSU, Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee—is he here today? Yes he is. I know you will find a very warm welcome from the people of Tennessee. The South is known for its hospitality and I know they will welcome you very much and they will probably get you involved in many activities--one of the mottos of Tennessee is that it’s “The Volunteer State”, so I’m sure they will get you involved in a lot of community and university activities.

I hope all of you will experience America at its best and that you will give your best in return. I hope to possibly to meet those of you who come back to Cairo after your year in the United States to hear from you as to what you found useful about the program, where it might be improved, and to share with us your experiences in the United States. Again, I wish you all the very best success. I hope you have a pleasant trip. I hope that your introduction to university life in the United States is worthwhile for you and that this is a wonderful experience for all of you, and we thank you very, very much for taking a year off from your careers to go to the United States and work on these issues of mutual understanding, of the sharing of language, as this is obviously the most basic, only form of communication that we have. So thank you all very much and I hope you have a good trip.