Jasmine McBeath arrived in the heart of Brazil’s rain forest this year to take up her post as an English teaching assistant at the Federal University of Amazonas, in Manaus.
She soon suspected that her role would be bigger than she had thought, however, by the way her faculty adviser kept talking about “her” class.
“The day of the first lesson, she introduced me and then left the room,” Ms. McBeath says. More than 50 students turned up, so many that there were not enough chairs to go around.
“It was nerve-racking, but I wasn’t going to say, ‘Hey, I was only supposed to be the assistant!’”
That was an eye-opener for Ms. McBeath, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Arizona, with a degree in Spanish and ecology.
She arrived in February on an English Teaching Assistant fellowship, one of the more popular programs run by Fulbright.
Her job: Provide intensive English lessons to college students from 10 Amazonian tribes. In a required side project that she developed, she also teaches English to teenagers at a nearby public school, through poetry that she helps them translate.
Two years ago Ms. McBeath spent six weeks learning Portuguese in Fortaleza, the largest city in northern Brazil. She loved the experience. So when a friend told her that the Fulbright program offers students a chance to live and study abroad, she rushed to apply.
“It was perfect for me, as I had spent some time here and spoke a little bit of Portuguese, and I wanted to learn more about Brazil and the culture,” Ms. McBeath says via Skype from a dormitory she shares with dozens of students.
Some of them come from towns so small that the nearest middle school was an hourlong bus ride away. A few traveled to the university by boat, down the Amazon River itself.
Many had saved for months to afford the entrance exam. “A lot of people have given up because it was just so hard just to stay afloat,” Ms. McBeath says.
The ones that stayed have made her feel at home.
Their customs are a world away from hers—she has learned to fish for piranhas and catch caimans, a small cousin of the crocodile. But the commitment of her students has inspired her to teach not just as part of her Fulbright commitments, but also in her spare time, to students in her dormitory.
That commitment has also helped her deal with daily challenges. Manaus is sprawling city that is always humid and often grimy. Ms. McBeath had to sleep on the floor at first, because the dormitories were being renovated. Random power outages and bus strikes can make simply getting to class an achievement for many students.
“It’s very hard to prepare anything here,” she says. “There is always something going wrong.”
Given half a chance, though, she’d do it all again. In fact, the initial misunderstanding about her job helped her decide her next career move. When she returns home, she plans to earn a Ph.D. in international education.
“I went from assistant teacher in an elementary school to almost college professor,” she says. “There is no doubt that it has been a wonderful experience. I want to do this full time.”