RESPECT International Blog

by Linda Salim

In this day and age when war is rampant and ethnic discrimination against one another is less and less discrete, there are some people who provide a cooling wind of change. One such person is Mary Hughes Lee, a literature teacher at South Stokes High School in North Carolina.

Marc Schaeffer, RESPECT International’s founder and international coordinator, calls her a dynamite teacher, and having gotten to know her in the process of writing this article, we at RESPECT e-Zine couldn’t agree more.

Ms. Lee’s interests and involvement in letter exchange between students started before her collaboration with RESPECT Letter Exchange Program a few months ago. In the past, she and an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in a school in Memphis, Tennessee, organized their own letter exchange between Ms. Lee’s students and the mostly refugee ESL students.

Unfortunately, the Memphis school curbed the program over security reasons. Ms. Lee began looking outward for an alternative when she found RESPECT Letter Exchange Program.

On the first exchange, her students received and responded to 25 letters from high school students in Liberia. Ms. Lee expected nothing from the program except unwrapping pleasant surprises, one of which is the excitement her students show when it comes to discussing and connecting with their new Liberian friends.

As Ms. Lee puts it, she has to make sure that this program continues if she doesn’t want her students to protest. The young Americans show tremendous interests in knowing more about the world, nothing short of Ms. Lee’s dedication in planting in the students’ minds that every human being is as worthy as they personally are.

Being a fan of President Obama, my first impression of Ms. Lee is close to the image I have of the President himself. She radiates the peace she offers to those she meets for the first time, no matter how different they are from her.

Having always been devoted to creative writing, Ms. Lee started developing her interests decades ago. The dedication continued years after through educating her students to be tolerant and curious about the rest of the world.

Last year, she took her students on an educational trip to Great Britain. Another student of hers spent her last year of high school in Australia as an exchange student. Both Ms. Lee and her husband are passionate about the exchange students program and they dream of hosting exchange students at their home in North Carolina.

When asked about her views on the new American leadership and policies, she’s very supportive despite the facts that she believes some of President Obama’s decisions aren’t the most effective ones.

In general, she’s excited about the world changing its view about the Americans. The evolution in immigration issues and the new government’s attitude toward immigrants and refugees are what she’s most excited about.

Voicing her opinion strongly, she believes in empowering refugees, which also means eradicating all kinds of deportation. In her view, deportation is a kind of ethnic cleansing, which is very un-American. Ms. Lee believes that America has always thrived on its variety of cultures, languages, ethnicities and belief systems, among other things.

Instead of sending illegal aliens home, Ms. Lee believes the more effective way to reduce the amount of funding and resources spent on refugees is through eradication of poverty, oppressive government and increased education in developing countries.

She strongly believes that most immigrants, both legal and illegal, would prefer to remain in their homelands, given the choice. Providing them with a safe and comfortable environment back home is much more effective than driving them away from host countries.

The world obviously needs more Ms. Lees. Many people might disagree with her stance on political and world issues, but the fact that she encourages her students to be open-minded and tolerant, and that she welcomes opinions different from her own to co-exist, makes the world simply a better place.