Of all the places in the world United States citizens would do well to increase their understanding of,  the occupied West Bank in Palestine would seem to be at or near the top of the list.

Dearborn resident Rasha Natour, 22, shown with youth in Mauritania during an internship, will travel to the West Bank for 10 months to teach English this weekend.

But when Dearborn resident and recent Wayne State graduate Rasha Natour applied for the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship program, which was created in 1946 to “enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries,” she was a bit surprised to find that Palestine wasn’t on the list.

Natour, a 22-year-old Palestinian American, had her heart set on teaching English in the West Bank, but had to settle for applying to teach in Turkey last October for the 10-month program, choosing the country over Jordan and Egypt, which she said had already been visited.

With no reply for much of early 2010, Natour started telling friends that she wasn’t chosen for the scholarship.

But then in June, the WSU graduate in the fields of Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies received an e-mail that would change everything. The program had added a full West Bank scholarship and wanted Natour for the position.

“When I got that e-mail I jumped up and down, screamed and woke up my parents,” Natour said. “It’s exactly what I wanted, I always wanted to live in the West Bank and do community and humanitarian work and just to see the situation with my own eyes.”

Natour will become the first-ever Fulbright scholar to work as a teaching assistant in the West Bank when she begins work at Birzeit University, which is located just outside of Ramallah.

She’ll have plenty of opportunities to teach, network, improve her Arabic, and work on community enrichment projects, but first she’ll have to find a place to live.

“I plan to stay in a hotel at first and then find another place to live in and make the move,” Natour said about her living arrangements.

“And I’ll have the embassy to stay in touch with, they assist you with day-to-day things at the beginning.

“A lot of things you need to learn on your own, but I’m sure everyone there is going to be willing to help me out.”

She also has family an hour away in terms of straight-line driving distance in an Arab village in Israel, but a wall separating the West Bank from Israel means that most trips  to Birzeit would likely take her between two to four hours because of military checkpoints.

Natour believes her past travel experience, including a trip to the African nation of Mauritania through an internship with the United States embassy, along with her teaching experience, Arabic language skills, and Palestinian background helped her receive the highly-competitive scholarship. Her 24-year-old sister Rhana also encouraged her to apply, as she recently returned from a Fulbright scholarship trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

The Fulbright Scholarship program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, awarded about 6,000 grants in 2008 at a cost of more than $275 million, to U.S. students, teachers, professionals and scholars to teach, study, and conduct research in more than 155 countries while also providing similar assistance to participating foreign countries to engage in similar activities in the United States.

In 1945, Senator J. William Fulbright introduced a bill in the U.S. Congress calling for the use of surplus war property to fund the “promotion of international goodwill through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture, and science.” President Harry Truman signed the bill into law in 1946.

Natour, who hopes to pursue a career with an organization that promotes social justice or human rights in the future, is part of a growing group of Arab American youth in metro Detroit with similar goals and designs on helping to alleviate suffering in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

She hopes that seeing the difficult humanitarian situation Palestinians face due to the Israeli occupation will give her a better grasp of the situation and the needs of the populace.

“Hopefully this trip will enhance my understanding of the conflict from a personal level and the things they experience, I’m mostly looking forward to experiencing the reality they face on the ground because you can only read about it so much but living it is a totally different experience,” she said.

“I also want to help the communities while I’m there or it would have been a waste.”

For more information on Fulbright scholarships or to apply, visit //us.fulbrightonline.org/about.html. Applications for the 2011-2012 academic year must be filed  electronically by October 18, 2010.