Lake Murray-Irmo Rotary Club Final Presentation

Rotary Presentation to Lake-Murray Irmo Rotary Club, August 19th, 2009

*I had a slideshow with pictures showing the individuals I spoke about.

Good morning. I have thought about this time with you all for many months now and I’m thinking about how much has happened since the last time I saw you and I’m already sensing the impossibility of conveying to you what 10 months in Ireland as an Ambassadorial Scholar has meant to me. Since it is an impossible task, I will simply say thank you with the greatest sincerity.

I want to thank Rod Funderburk particularly for his continued support since fall 2006 and to this day. As a small gesture of gratitude I have framed a photo that I took at the church where William Butler Yeat’s was buried just outside a town called Sligo in Ireland. Rod, for all of the time you have spent helping me prepare for interviews before the committee, for sharing helpful hints before going to Ireland, for reading my blog and asking how things are going by email, and for helping me reconnect with you all, the Lake Murray-Irmo Rotary club, my sponsor club, I thank you.

Today I am going to tell you stories rather than give a presentation. Ireland has a rich history in both written and oral storytelling, and so it seems appropriate for me to share about this year and Ireland through telling you about the people who have impacted me the most and through the stories that will be with me for the rest of my life. The most important part of the Rotary Ambassadorial scholarship is the relationships that build trust, understanding, and friendship between people. I want to tell you about a few of these relationships and also the experiences I have had. I will show a brief slideshow at the end, and take some questions if you have them.

I want to start by telling you about a couple that I met in my hometown of Lititz, PA just before I left for Northern Ireland. I was working at a café and John and Eleanor Smyth came through the door and asked for a cup of tea. I noticed their accent and asked where they were from. No only were they from the same county in Northern Ireland that I was about to move to, but John was the treasurer of the Cookstown Rotary Club. You can imagine that we had a conversation at some length at that point. Before I had even left the United States, I was already invited to come speak at their Rotary club and invited to their home. I did visit their Rotary club at Christmastime and I also attended their annual Fundraiser Rotary Ball where I met their daughter who is my age. When I stayed with them for a weekend it turns out, that John and Eleanor are very fascinated with my hometown, Lancaster County PA. It was strange but neat to see little things from ‘home’ in their house and to talk about Lancaster as all three of us were locals. They picked me up the night before I flew home from Belfast and they took me out to dinner and then dropped me off as a family at the airport and waited with me before boarding my flight. They plan on visiting Lancaster in the near future and I am hoping that myself and my parents can welcome them as they had welcomed me.

This is John and Anne MacCrossan. John was my Rotary host counselor. He and his wife Anne gave me a lovely welcome when I arrived and since John is the Assistant District Governor and lives in Derry where I lived, I was lucky enough to drive with him many times to visit different Rotary clubs. John seems to know every rock, tree, hill and church in Ireland and he would tell me the stories of so-and-so’s farm or who got married in that church and what the name of that town means in Irish. John and Anne also shared about their life experiences from the Troubles with me, which they said they hadn’t really started talking about until a few years back. One of the many he told me was about a day in his life during the Troubles as a bank manager. One day he watched as a man came out from the pub across the street and left a parcel lean against the bank wall. He came in and said, “I found this in the pub across the street. It’s a bomb. I put it outside but you might want to tell your people.” John notified the police and he said they watched as the British army shot the bomb into a harmless oblivion the rest of the afternoon. He laughed as he recounted, “It seems to me that the man in the pub made it pretty clear where his priorities lie.” Some of the stories did not end so well. But John and Anne helped me understand more about life in Northern Ireland, the good and the bad, and showed me Irish hospitality.

These are my classmates. There were about 16 of us and I really appreciated how our diversity enriched our classroom discussions and weekly interactions. About half were Irish (Protestants, Catholics, North and South, younger and more experienced), there were 5 of us from the United States, and one person from Japan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Canada. We got to meet John Hume, the Nobel Peace Prize Leaureate for his work with David Trimble in bringing their two political parties to the table to sign the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Belfast. I’d run into John Hume sometimes in town. He has Alzheimer’s disease but is still active in the community, which I find very inspiring.

This is Heather. She was in Oakland, CA as a counselor for 10 years before joining the program at Magee. She was a Rotary Scholar in Argentina 10 years ago. When I first met her, I didn’t anticipate that we would become great friends because our personalities were so different but in the end, we not only became classmates, but we were also roommates and eventually coworkers! I can now call her my sister and she has inspired me to think in new ways about social justice, education, young people, and oppression. We frequently had long chats while walking along the River Foyle, that runs through the center of Derry City. We enjoyed the ‘craic’, which means “the fun” or “what’s good”, in Ireland.

This is Adriana. She is from Colombia and was also in the Peace and Conflict Resolution program. She has a 9 year old daughter named Isa. We shared similar tastes in music and the love of philosophies and theories. She became an invaluable friend and I appreciated how she just embraced Northern Ireland as her own and enjoys life.

This is Nora and her partner Tim of 30 years. Nora just celebrated her 64th birthday before I left. She was also in my program but this is us in her home in Donegal across the border. I view Nora as an elder and a personal mentor as well as a friend. One of her lifelong passions is critical feminism. Growing up, feminism was the other “F” word, so I wrestled with a long time about what she was trying to say to us as her classmates, to me as her friend, and to the world in general. When I concluded that she is interested in recognizing the strengths of all people, from within their gender as well as without, and empowering those people to understand and utilize their strengths in more equal and just societies that recognize difference as strength, I decided that I may just be a feminist of sorts as well.

I made many other valuable friendships in my class, but these I wanted to mention specifically.

This is Kevin. He is from Derry, born and raised. I didn’t intend on finding a relationship while overseas, though everyone else seemed convinced I would. We dated for a the better part of my time in Ireland. I have to say that I think I’ve learned more about peace and conflict resolution from being in a cross-cultural relationship than I have in any class—which to me actually speaks to the power of human relationships. Kevin is 28 years old and an Irish Republican Nationalist, also a part of what is commonly referred to as the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. I spent many evenings with him and his family over a cup of tea by the wood stove talking about any and everything. I learned a lot from him and his family and cherished their company. I was also privileged to hear their own personal experiences during the Troubles of what it was like to be a Catholic during that time, stories that would break your heart or make you laugh or both. Sometimes Kevin and I would argue about the politics of Northern Ireland. You see, I was studying it full time in class, in books, in seminars and through personal observation about the city that I lived in that remains very divided to this day. But he would remind me, Sam, this is my history and this is my life. It is not as simple as your books make it. And he was right and I needed to be reminded of that. Life is not that simple. But we challenged each other and learned from each other and had lots of good times too, the highlight of which was camping down the West Coast of Ireland in May. It’s a trip I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

This is Dr. Jim Skelly. I met him at a conference in DC before I left for Ireland. He is a visiting Peace professor at Ulster, Magee, my university in Derry. He is also the Resident Director of a study abroad program based in PA near my hometown. Jim is my academic mentor and he will be one of my graders for my masters thesis due next month. But he has also become a personal mentor to me. We have shared many dinners and conversations about life and the work which we are both passionate about, namely, international education and peace and justice, which is the topic of my dissertation.

I traveled a bit while abroad. These are 2 other Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars with whom I spent a weekend in Nice, France with. I also visited a friend from Carolina who is in the Peace Corps in Morocco right now. As it turns out, I don’t speak Tashelheet but thankfully she does and because of that we were together able to spend time with the Moroccans and have dinner or conversations with the locals from Larba Sahel, Agadir, Marrakech, and Tiznit and they welcomed me as with warmth and hospitality as they have welcomed Hanneke. I also made it to Scotland and spent a week in London for spring break, where I trained part of the time for my summer job in Belfast.

Heather and I, through interesting circumstances, ended up working for People to People International this past summer in Belfast. People to People is a US based organizations that sends US students on study travel tours around the world. The purpose of their programs is similar to the Ambassadorial scholarship—peace through mutual understanding. This was the first summer ever that US delegations would be visiting Northern Ireland. Heather and I developed a pilot project called the Road to Peace, which I found a bit corny in name though the title wasn’t our choice. Nonetheless, we spoke with over 700 students this past summer and designed a 90 minute seminar to talk about identity, conflict, the Troubles, peace and the peace process in Northern Ireland. We had them read quotes from young people from NI and we also talked about how the issues discussed were every bit as important in the US context. We had two local speakers come in and share their story about what it was like growing up in Northern Ireland. One speaker was from a Catholic background and one from a Protestant background. They also doubled as my friends, housemates, or classmates back in Derry! The seminar was a success and I learned so much from the way that the students engaged in the issues, asked questions, and reflected with enthusiasm on their own experience on their program.

Now I am back in PA with my family. I am finishing my master’s degree, looking for jobs in international education, and keeping my eyes open for whatever is next. I recognize that so many people have poured into my life, particularly this past year, and I am hoping that I have given back and will continue to find opportunities to give back in the spirit of service that Rotary promotes.

There are so many other things I could say, but I will leave it at that and say thank you once again. It has been a growing year for me and one that I will be especially grateful for the rest of my life. Please continue to support the Rotary Foundation and Ambassadorial scholars because there is no substitute for face-to-face encounters, building relationships, and service to others. Here is a brief slideshow of pictures from my year, and if we have time, I will take questions if you have them.