"Peace Corps Volunteers must be open to ideas and cultures different from their own. Give an example of a significant experience that illustrates your ability to adapt cross-culturally. You may draw from experiences in your work, school, or community in the U.S. or abroad. Please include the circumstances of the experience and dates."

Tennessee Tech, though a small school, has given me a variety of opportunities to experience other cultures. I have been to lectures and discussions on the Koran. I've seen Tibetan dancers, African drummers and eaten Moroccan food sitting cross-legged around a large communal dish. I've been to presentations on Asian torture camps and seen African-American art dealing with slavery. I spent time with students from around the world learning how they live.

These experiences, though important to me, were not major psychological events. They certainly expanded my ideas and ways of seeing things, but I already understood that the world was a big place with a rich variety of life. With most people I can see and identify with their values even if the rituals used to respect those values are different than mine.

The experience I would like to talk about to illustrate my ability to adapt cross culturally deals with a situation where I had a major conflict not with the rituals, but with the underlying concept of the world. It is one thing to respect something from a different culture when you agree with the ideas they are identifying with. They are speaking your "language," just in another tongue. It is another matter entirely to see how you deal with people who disagree with values you hold strongly.

It is the summer of 2000 and I am on co-op in Huntsville, Alabama. I have started going to a local church trying to find a group of people to connect to and it is at the weekly young adults meeting that I get to know Glen.

Glen is a racist. He is not the loud bigoted hateful racist that you would see in the movies. He is a quiet intelligent person who believes firmly that genetics are strong determinants of behavior and personality. He knows that being a racist carries a strong social stigma, but sees himself as championing a truth that exists regardless of people's willingness to recognize it.

This conflict would be called by many a philosophical one. Not a cultural issue at all. I think though that if they spent some time in places where racism is prevalent they would see otherwise. Racism is about how a person relates to other people in the world and values like that are invariably enmeshed in social conditioning. Any discussion trying to integrate the picture of America's founding fathers as great and noble leaders with the picture of them as slave holders almost always calls upon recognizing the culture in which they lived.

Personally, I am a strong believer in a person's right and ability to be self-determined. I believed Glen's position to be not only wrong, but also responsible for grave injustices and much needless suffering. However, I was able to separate the person of Glen, worthy of the same fundamental respect as myself, from the ideas of Glen which could be false and even dangerous. Also important was knowing the line between discussion and proselytizing; that there came a point when I had made my point and he his and no force of argument was going to change either of our minds. These qualities combined with an awareness of the breadth of culture I believe made it possible for me to interact with him and respect him as a person while not sacrificing my own values.