Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

RICHMOND, Ind. — Prospective presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) should be glad, perhaps, that Earlham College junior Jawad Joya — as a citizen of Afghanistan — is ineligible to vote in U.S. elections. Recently faced with a choice between Clinton and another potential 2008 Democratic presidential contender Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Joya went with Bayh.

With the help of an Italian doctor and an Italian journalist he met through the Red Cross hospital in Kabul, Joya was able to leave war-torn Afghanistan in 2001, shortly after the fall of the repressive Taliban regime. He studied in Europe for two years before arriving at Earlham in the fall of 2004. Some of his experiences have been reported on earlier in USA Today.

He’ll work this summer as an intern in Bayh’s Washington, D.C., office after receiving invitations from both senators to join their staffs.

Although he admits observing at close range Clinton’s current bid for re-election to the Senate (and, according to many political pundits in the media, her first steps on the 2008 presidential campaign trail) held some attraction for him, Joya decided that working with less “noise” in Bayh’s office promised a better chance of achieving his goal for the Senate internship: to better understand American society by better understanding its legislative process.

“And that hope is really part of a bigger hope, which is to understand how global issues work,” adds Joya, a Davis Scholar who also appreciates Bayh’s more moderate political stance and that he represents Earlham’s home state. (No partisan, Joya hopes to secure another internship next summer in the office of Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, presently chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) “You can say, ‘The United States is the most powerful nation in the world.’ But, that is such an abstract thing.”

More to the point, Joya says, is “knowing how that power works for good or bad in Afghanistan, for example, or Iraq … which means understanding who is making the important decisions (in Washington), and the influences that affect them.”

In his own way, Joya hopes to be something of a new influence among the “movers and shakers” of policymaking in the capital or, at least, within the circle of the junior senator from Indiana’s Capitol Hill staff.

Especially now, with the U.S. still waging the War on Terror, the senator’s memberships on the Senate Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence suggests to Joya that there “is a lot going on” in the senator’s office to which he might bring a fresh and distinct perspective.

“This is going to be an experience for me, but probably for them, too,” he says, describing his upcoming two-month tour of duty in Bayh’s Russell Senate Office Building suite as “internship in form, but also kind of fellowship in content.”

“I hope to share my thoughts about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” offers Joya, “and I’d like to think it would be helpful for them to have that view.

“For me it’s an opportunity, as well, to connect my Middle East experience with my European and American experiences and try to decide what might be helpful from all of them if I want to go back to Afghanistan after graduation to work in strategic and/or public policy.”

Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, a 16-year-old and largely self-taught Joya — also confined to a wheelchair because of polio — escaped war-torn Afghanistan through the efforts of an Italian doctor and an Italian journalist he met while serving as an informal interpreter and computer programmer at a Red Cross rehabilitation facility in Kabul. For two years he attended United World College of the Adriatic, located in Trieste, Italy, before applying for admission to colleges in the United States and Canada.

Offered full scholarships at a number of academically rigorous institutions, including Earlham, Dickinson and Lake Forest, Joya enrolled at Earlham in the fall of 2004. He’ll begin his Senate internship in July, shortly after returning from his first trip home in more than two years.

The sociology/anthropology major says that while in the Afghan capital this summer he’ll be participating in discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s staff on “the possibility of building a national institute for strategic research.”

“They don’t have that kind of apparatus to help government leaders learn about and think about and talk about strategic issues,” Joya reports. “They’re going to need that kind of resource if they want to effectively rebuild Afghanistan and its relationships with the rest of the world.”

Although his Senate internship is unpaid and he’s responsible for arranging for his own housing in tony Washington, Joya is looking forward to the assignment with enthusiasm.

“You can’t put a price on that kind of experience,” says the young international student who has never taken a course in political science. Regardless, he explains that among the other subjects he hopes to explore with his new colleagues in government is the currently “hot” issue of lobbying.

“There are 28,000 registered lobbyists on K Street,” Joya says. “That’s a pretty big force, and I want to understand how that force influences lawmaking.”

His time in Washington is only the beginning of an extended off-campus engagement for Joya, who after the summer will take part in the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) semester-long work and study program in the birthplace of American democracy — Philadelphia.

“I assume myself to be a post-modernistic model of a global citizen,” says Joya; last year he represented Earlham as a delegate to the annual Japan-America Student Conference (JASC), the world’s oldest bilateral, student-run cultural exchange program. “As a global citizen I want to be as knowledgeable as possible about the many issues that influence my world. I’m fortunate to have had so many opportunities already to live and learn in so many different places. But, each experience has only been like one pixel in a bigger picture.

Contact:
Kevin Burke, director of media relations
765/983-1323 — E-Mail Kevin