Language leads to Middle East
Knowledge is power for one local woman, whose passion for language has landed her the trip of a lifetime.
Tiffani Humble, a 2010 Seneca Valley High School graduate, was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program fellowship. As part of the program, she will travel to Amman, Jordan, in September to spend 10 months teaching English to secondary school students.
“I'm not nervous at all. I'm 100 percent excited,” Humble said. “I have a lot of knowledge of the Middle East. I have friends from all over. Knowledge is power. The more you have, the less you have to fear.”
The Fulbright Program is the nation's largest international exchange program that sends students abroad to teach English or perform research. It is overseen by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
Humble was one of 1,700 students nationwide to be accepted into the program. While in Jordan, Humble will primarily speak Arabic, a language in which she is conversationally fluent.
Humble graduated from the University of Pittsburgh this spring with a degree in sociology and a certificate in global studies.
Her love of language started young. Humble said she first remembers going through books at the Evans City Elementary School library and settling on three foreign language books. While she couldn't understand the writing, she enjoyed pronouncing the words and making connections with the illustrations.
In seventh grade, Humble was exposed to four languages through the school's middle school world languages program, something that further fueled her passion.
She ended up taking five years of French and four years of Spanish in high school. Humble studied sign language and self-studied other languages while at Butler County Community College's campus in Cranberry Township.
“She has really a keen sense of place and keen sense toward culture,” said Alex Gladis, retired director of BC3 @ Cranberry. “She's very interested in understanding other ways of life and culture.”
Gladis was Humble's academic adviser and wrote her a letter of recommendation for the Fulbright program. He said Humble is a kind, gentle soul who is passionate about lifelong learning but also goal-oriented and organized.
“I always found Tiffani to be an individual who sets tremendous goals and moves toward those goals to achieve them and realize that it'll take a number of years to do that,” he said.
When Humble moved on to Pitt, she took four semesters of Arabic, a language she was already familiar with thanks to an Arabic-speaking friend. Her friend helped her practice the Arabic alphabet and learn basic words.
“I learned a lot from my friend, about the language, the politics, Middle Eastern culture,” Humble said. “It's a very beautiful language, a very poetic language.”
Her upcoming trip to Jordan is not Humble's first trip abroad. She spent three weeks backpacking solo through Europe two years ago. She visited Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy and France on a budget of $3,000. Humble said half the budget was spent on plane tickets.
Humble will return to the United States in June 2018. As for the future after Fulbright, Humble said she doesn't have hard and fast plans. She's thought about pursuing a law degree or perhaps going into teaching.
“I will always be happy as long as I have my languages and can associate with different cultures,” she said.
