The Foreign Service Journal, November 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2016 25 patrolled the streets. The Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods of West Belfast were divided by a 20-foot-tall barrier called the “peace line.” On both sides of the barrier, local residents had painted massive murals of masked, gun-toting paramilitar- ies. This world fascinated me. I wanted to understand why a people who shared a common ancestry with me were so bitterly divided. So I applied for the Fulbright grant; and, in September 2001, I was getting ready to return to Belfast when the second event occurred. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was asleep in my parents’ house in Queens, New York City, when the phone rang. It was my mother, calling from her office in lower Manhattan. “Jerome, a plane just struck the World Trade Center,” she told me. A short while later, as the twin towers were collapsing, my mother and her colleagues—and thousands of others—fled Manhattan on foot, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge shook, as if there had been an earthquake. Everyone close to me survived. But so many others were not as fortunate. About 90 people from my community in Queens died that day, including many police officers and firefighters. I had been scheduled to depart for Belfast on Sept. 15. But how could I leave behind my family, my community, when we were at war? My family was unequivocal, however: I had to go. I had worked so hard for this opportunity. So I went to Belfast, and I studied the U.S. government’s role as a mediator in the Northern Ireland conflict and contrasted it with our efforts to broker a peace agreement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Fulbright Program opened the world to me at a time when that world—and the U.S. role in it—were changing dramati- cally. I developed a lifelong commitment to understanding why we as humans are capable of inflicting such pain and suffering on each other, and what we can do to change that. After a seven-year career as a journalist, I joined the State Department in 2010. I first served in Ciudad Juarez and then went to Jerusalem, where I worked on people-to-people pro- grams that brought together Palestinian and Israeli youth. Until July of this year, I was a special assistant in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, in the office that oversees the Fulbright Program. It has been a great privilege to work on the very program that set me on this path, helping another genera- tion of Americans and people from other countries to benefit from the vision of Senator J. William Fulbright. Jerome Sherman is a public diplomacy officer in the second-year FSI Arabic language program in Amman, Jordan. A U S T R A L I A , 2 0 1 1 – 2 0 1 2 M A R V I N A L F A R O T he Fulbright Program introduced me to the world of diplomacy, giving me a platform to collaborate and exchange research project ideas with renowned Austra- lian scientists. In 2011, I was awarded a grant to study the impact and impli- cation of the movement of a particular ocean boundary located in the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean) and its effects on wind patterns and earth’s climate. My research goals were to combine remote sensing data of ocean tempera- tures from satellites with high-resolution data retrieved as part of a marine science research team. I had the opportunity to live onboard Australia’s Aurora Austra- lis icebreaker for about five weeks as we traveled from Tasmania into the Southern Ocean and on to Antarctica, the earth’s coldest, driest and windiest continent. I witnessed firsthand the impor- tance of international cooperation for the safety and security of our environment, and saw the urgent need for diplomacy to Marvin Alfaro and his colleagues on a boat in the Antarctic Ocean, with penguins splashing in the foreground. Once best known for its awards to U.S. artistic luminaries, the program now also makes about 30 percent of its awards in scientific fields. COURTESYOFMARVINALFARO