For Patrice and Bryce, Fulbright was never just an academic exchange—it was a bridge to communities, a lifelong commitment to ethical service, and a testament to the power of citizen diplomacy. Their journeys, though years apart, intertwined in unexpected ways. FA Vice Chair Leland Lazarus sat down with Patrice and Bryce to discuss their story of teaching, mentoring, and community building; a story that embodies Fulbright’s mission: fostering mutual understanding and empowering individuals to make a difference—one connection at a time. The interview has been slightly edited for clarity.
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Leland: First question is with regard to origins and motivation. Patrice, what first inspired you to apply for Fulbright?
Patrice: So I’m sure our answers are very different, because I probably did not know enough about Fulbright. Growing up in a rural area and going to a state school in Mississippi, I really hadn’t heard of Fulbright. I knew that it was prestigious, and I honestly was one of those people who never, ever in a million years, pictured Fulbright being something that would be a part of my life. I was doing some volunteer work following the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and I was there for a number of months, working with, what we call safe learning spaces. We were trying to put spaces together for children to have to learn following the earthquake after major devastation in rural areas where schools had been taken down the mountains in landslides and such. And so we were trying to build safe spaces for children to be so that parents could get to work to survive. And through that work, I met some people at the embassy there in Nepal, and there was one woman who had an incredible reputation for doing good. I had lunch with her, and at the end she was like, “Patrice, this work needs to continue. You need to continue what you’re doing, and you also need to be contributing to training young professionals here that can help here, but can also be leaders in the world. And you need to apply for a Fulbright. I’ll send you the paperwork and just fill it out.” You never know what’s going to happen. And I was just about to leave Nepal at that point, I came home, I filled it out, turned it in, and never expected to hear anything from it. I was so hopeful, so excited about the possibility, but never in a million years thought I’d hear back from it. And then I got word back that I was on the roster as a Fulbright Specialist, and that actually I’d had a request from Nepal to come in that direction being reviewed. I will never forget the day that I got that acceptance letter. It was incredible.
Leland: If I might just follow up quickly, so even before your acceptance, you had gone to Nepal, so way before your Fulbright, right? Or did you do your Fulbright the year after your first time?
Patrice: Our family started volunteering with a charity that I now sit on the board for, the Empower Nepali Girls organization. 2013 was the first time we went as a family over Christmas. We actually took Bryce there for Christmas. I remember packing the Elf on the Shelf and the Christmas pillowcases since we were going to be either in a tent or at a home stay. We didn’t have room to pack a lot of things, and for gifts we all just got things that we would need for the trip for Christmas, like warm socks. We were trying to create a sense of the holidays for the group. We were with a team in the Everest area that year, and so we started in 2013 volunteering with this organization, thinking it was a once in a lifetime trip. We went and we quickly fell in love with the country, the people, and mostly the scholarship girls. It wound up being a life passion, really for all of us. Our entire family continues to be very involved in Empower Nepali Girls. What Fulbright did was allow me to go back and participate in higher education. I’m a psychologist by trade, and so I was able to help develop one of the first psychology degrees in the country at the Master’s level to train mental health counselors. That field is so new, it’s almost non-existent. It’s a brand new way of thinking, to think of mental health and mental health care there. And so it’s one of the greatest honors of my life, really, and changed my perspective on mental health to have helped implement this program. The experience allowed me to bring so much back to my graduate students here in my graduate program, after my Fulbright. I was even able to take my graduate students for international experiences to utilize their mental health care capacities in ways we had never thought of before as they launch into their doctoral degrees and become therapists here in the US. So there’s just been a large exchange back and forth in training mental health care here as well.
Leland: Where did that passion for service stem from? You said that you grew up in rural Mississippi?
Patrice: It came from my family values of community. I grew up in a family with a ton of love and not necessarily a lot of material things, but everything we needed. I feel super blessed to have had that, a family who didn’t have a lot but managed to give a ton. So, the modeling was just always there to leave places better than you found them. Leave people better than you found them. Contribute with whatever it is that you have, and if you don’t have money, contribute your time. Contribute of yourself, you have a responsibility to figure out what your gifts are and use them. If you’ve been given a gift, there’s a responsibility that comes with it. Those were just strong family values.
Leland: Now. Bryce, what about you? What encouraged you to apply for the Fulbright?
Bryce: So I have to say, I feel very lucky that those values were passed on to me for sure. I’ve known for a long time that I had wanted to do something meaningful to give back as I was entering the early stages of my career, and education has always been something that I’m very passionate about. Even though I’ve taken my degree paths more towards public health I really have found that, especially in Nepal, through the work that we’ve done since I was younger, that education has very tangible results on changing the trajectory of people’s lives. If you give them the opportunity, they are incredibly smart, they’ve got the drive, it’s just providing them opportunities, and education is a surefire way to do that. From high school onwards, I’ve been involved with tutoring groups after recognizing this. As I was looking for organizations to engage with, I recognized that the ETA program would be just the right fit. I had heard about Fulbright from my mom’s experiences, and from my university at Tulane, and after looking into it as well as other options that it seemed like a great fit. So I started getting the certifications to be worthwhile, to go over and be qualified to teach these kids, because they deserve quality education. I got the certifications, I went through the process, and I applied through Fulbright, specifically because I saw how much more it amplifies the impact of the work being done. The wonderful network that it has, the resources that are available to do it. Also that the program is open enough that you are expected to teach English at the school, but you can and are encouraged to get involved in the community in as many other ways as you are able. The program emphasizes the diverse skillsets to work where they shine. I really appreciated that flexibility that the Commission gave me, because I was able to work with schools, not just the one that I was placed in on a day to day level, but through several districts. And I did work in English teaching, but also in a number of health aspects. I would do in-service trainings with teachers on disease modules, running first aid certification programs, vector borne disease mitigation, and other public health things. It was it was fun, making the modules, talking with communities, having those stakeholder meetings on a day to day basis, and really filling out something that could be useful for these spaces that I was placed into.
Leland: This is very fascinating. So both of you did your Fulbright in Nepal then?
Bryce: yes sir.
Leland: So Patrice, you did yours in 2018 and then Bryce, you just did yours 2024-2025. Same country, several years apart. How would you compare and contrast your Fulbright experiences in Nepal? Was there anything surprisingly similar in both of your Fulbright experiences?
Patrice: We haven’t talked about it that way. That’s a good question. Similarities and differences…
Bryce: One thing that I noticed while I was over there is I did a lot of work with primary and secondary level schools. That’s where I was. Most of my time was spent in my regular placement in Kirtipur, but I was also frequently working and volunteering in all the other districts.
Patrice: That’s one that we did have a little distance on.
Bryce: I also did some volunteering with students from Master’s level programs or higher education level programs that asked for research methods assistance. And if I got to talk to any of the professors over there, they’d see the name Moulton, they’d be like, “wait a minute, do you know Patrice Moulton?”
Leland: That’s amazing!
Patrice: Yeah, I think one of the impacts that I felt, probably as a mom, as much as a Fulbrighter, was how cool it was to see Bryce connect there. So for me, it was about having the time there to be there long enough, for more than just knowing the people on the team and in the given village we were working in, it was the first time when I did a Fulbright that I really built a community there. Because I think building community, building relationships, is one of the primary aspects of diplomacy that Fulbright serves. To build relationships at all kinds of levels, while we’re out serving that we can then move back to for future partnerships and capacity building. For lots of other activities after we get home that are both good for us here in the US, for diplomacy, for resources, for research, there’s just a multitude of reasons. Part of my goal in my head when I went was “say yes to everything”, to meet as many people as possible, to connect people, to hold gatherings. As part of being a Fulbrighter, there, I would pull all the Fulbrighters I could find in Nepal through the commission, and ask them to go do things with me every week. So that we could form a community of specialists there in Nepal and work with each other. I had such a rich experiences of getting to know people, the relationships built that continue this many years later is probably the highlight of my time as a Fulbrighter in Nepal. But in the process of doing that, I never dreamed that then, you know, my son would be returning to that place where I had this community that I had built. So Bryce had that added value of walking into a community that was waiting for him, that was excited for him to get there. A community of everything from government workers to school teachers to families in rural areas that I had worked with that couldn’t wait for him to get there, to meet him, to spend time with him, to learn from him. So as a professional while he was there as a Fulbrighter it was great to see him interact with that community. He had his own community he built and his own world while he was there, but he also got the benefit of a network that was ready and really wanted to learn from him, share with him, and utilize the opportunity of him being there. He had so many cultural experiences that I didn’t have the opportunity for because I was just meeting these people.
Leland: What are some examples?
Bryce: There was this time at the festival known as “Gai Jatra”, where I was able to go over with a principal from a school that we have worked with previously, that was from that Newari community, and being able to just be with their family through the entire thing was incredible. They did have someone in their family pass away within the last year, so they had their own part in the procession. It’s a large kind of carrying shrine each family of a deceased community member has to remember their relative, which you dance through the streets using sticks to clear a path for in a large parade. People usually hire a band to go in front as well so there is music all around. So being able to participate in something that was so intimate as a morning ritual, but that is done in a really celebratory bonding way, meant the world. Within the community of these families, there are many of them that very much saw me as a part of the family and not just a professional connection. And like you said, being there for an extended period of time, it really does help with that. You get really ingrained. I have a number of people like the family that I lived with, they always say that I’m “Uncle Bryce” to their kid, because the kid was born while I was there. I was there through pretty much the entire pregnancy, and so was the Fulbrighter before me that stayed in that community. This other Fulbright Researcher had gotten close to this family, and she’s seen as the aunt to the newborn. They think of her as a genuine sister. You really become connected into these communities and have these lasting connections and impacts, and you really imprint with a lot of these folks as they do with you. And I have to say, when it comes to these communities and this network that my mom had built previously, I was very proud to be able to connect my cohort and other Fulbrighters into it. And it really just stacks, it spreads out, because then all of us were building our own communities, our own networks, and so everyone that they met, we’d all introduce each other to each other, and it really does become this wonderful large group. There are so many professional as well as personal opportunities that come from that. We were connected with the embassy as well. We connected with other exchange programs. Whenever we saw opportunities that say, like the Peace Corps volunteers, we got to know could utilize, or thought “these are good people for them to know”, we would happily help connect them. It really was collaborative, and I loved that on so many levels.
Patrice: You might want to share about Ama, because I just think that’s the most adorable relationship.
Bryce: So Aama, yeah, it means mother in Nepali. The house that I was staying in, because I was in a homestay for the entirety of my time there, she was the owner’s mother, and she was about to be a new grandmother. She thought I was the funniest thing in the world trying to cook Nepali food for the first time, and then in her mind, she was like “Oh no. Oh, this poor boy’s going to starve”. I believe that thought process was what got her out of her shell. When I first moved in she was very reserved, very quiet, I could hardly get three words out of her, but always pleasant. I have to say, one thing I appreciated of the orientation program for the Nepal commission was the language learning capacity. So I can say that I’m not fluent in Nepali, but I gained a strong basic understanding. So I tried to talk to her, and she would still be quiet, but very quickly, after a week of her thinking that I was going to starve myself because I couldn’t cook the dal right she got very open. She would grab me by my shirt and pull me into the kitchen, show me how it was done. And then she got so, so comfortable that every time she would see me pass by the doorway, she would just essentially say, “you, sit down!” with no room to question it.
Patrice: She became your language tutor…
Bryce: She would have me watch her TV series with her. Then she would ask, “Hey, what happened there?” She would know exactly what happened, but she wanted to make sure that I was able to follow along. I’m still in touch with that family very, very actively, and so I’ll send messages along to her…I miss her deeply right now, and it’s only been a week since I’ve gotten back.
Leland: You explaining your Fulbright experience, it brings up two things in my mind. One is, it provides a flashback of my own Fulbright experience. I did an ETA, but I did it in Panama more than a decade ago, but some of the same kind of stories were the same… I think everybody has their Ama moment, right? No matter where you are in the world, that’s really interesting. Second is this, as you said, it all builds on each other. When you are a Fulbrighter, and you go abroad and you spend, you know, the 9 months, 10 months, or, you know, a year, you don’t necessarily see the full result of what you built, right? But here’s a rare opportunity where you, Bryce, got to build on your mom’s experience in the same country. You extrapolate that we don’t even know that ‘whatever Fulbrighter’ did ‘whatever thing’ a decade ago, but those contributions helped to build on to whatever the following Fulbrighter did, and so on and so on to create this lasting collaborative network in that area… and then all of a sudden you realize that, oh my gosh, it’s the Fulbrighters who are really the ground game of US citizen diplomacy!
Okay, so back to Patrice. Was there one piece of advice that you gave to Bryce before he left Nepal? And Bryce, did you actually heed that advice?
Patrice: So I probably gave more than one, okay, but I think the one that I probably said more than anything was “say yes to everything.” You’re going to have so many opportunities. The time is going to pass fast, make it count. Don’t just do the minimum expectation that you can be successful with. Make it so much more than that. Make it personal. Build it to be something that you will be really proud of when you come home and for the rest of your life. You will have relationships and bonds to appreciate and enjoy, make those days that you have there meaningful. They’re a gift. Make them a gift to other people. Give yourself the gift of building those relationships, because that doesn’t go away.
Bryce: Great. I have to say, that was a piece of advice that I very happily paid attention to and really tried to incorporate in my everyday life. I’m so glad that I did. I can probably count on my hands the amount of days that I was not out doing something, because there’s always something to do. If you make yourself available people will start asking you to do a million things, whether it’s work based or just to hang out. And when you do, especially when you’re in these places, with such rich culture, such amazing chances for these exchanges, you get to experience what these programs are for. I never regret a single bit of that. It was a wonderful time. It led me to stories that I’ll have for the rest of my life, places I never would have gone or found otherwise, and solidifying relationships that I will be keeping for the rest of my life, both professionally and personally. There are a number of people that I do hope to go back and work with that we’re already talking about. Saying “okay, these are some projects that could be done. These are some areas of need. Do you want to come back and do it personally, or do you know someone who can?” So connecting folks together and also providing, again, circling back to that network topic, the opportunities for following Fulbrighters. I’m currently working with the Commission for the orientation of the new cohort of ETAs as their Mentor so this part is very forward on my mind.
Leland: Now a question about sort of impact and legacy. Patrice, how did your Fulbright shape your career? And Bryce, how do you think your Fulbright experience will shape your career going forward?
Patrice: That’s a really hard one for me to answer, because it’s so broad, like it’s hard to know where to start. And I think a lot of this is also what you make of your experience determines what you have to bring home and how you utilize it is such a personal thing. But for me, it changed my career drastically. Psychology remains at the base of what I do, advocacy work and critical incident management is a lot of my work, but how I do it and where I do it, have broadened. There were research opportunities that have come along that I never would have expected and continue to discover new avenues for. As a matter of fact, I’ve had, I think, four articles published and a book coming out on international service learning that’s published this year that is based on or started with the work and the relationships built in 2018. That time as a Fulbrighter changed my career in terms of the way I teach some of the content that I teach, in terms of a global perspective for future therapists that are learning and want to have research careers and such. Emphasizing cultural understanding in research, conducting international research, and teaching the ethics of conducting international research have become a major part of my life. I manage student service learning programs for US students truly believe these aspects of the academic and learning process will impact the work they do here for the rest of their professional lives as well. I continue to teach as a guest lecturer. Doing that Fulbright opened up the higher education landscape in Nepal and nationally for me, to where I’m often asked as a keynote speaker or to come and be a guest lecturer anytime I’m in Nepal. I can’t get to all the universities that invite me to come and lecture, sometimes train faculty, or sometimes to teach students. But I always make sure to go back to, you know, my home there, what I consider my home, which is part of Tribhuvan University and it’s just a wonderful place to have worked with during my time as a Specialist. Now they’re about to graduate their fifth round of graduates in mental health. The program is successful that was started and the graduates are well trained and hungry to learn and share information. They’re always willing to teach me, and I love that fact, creates another avenue of cultural exchange as I learn from their perspectives and how it shapes what I come home to do in the mental health field here, because I’m also very active here with mental health proponents as well. Really the experience with Fulbright changed everything. It changes the way I view my work, the clients I work with, the relationships I have with people. It changed so much for me in my career that it would be easier to say what it didn’t change, is the short answer.
Bryce: And I’d say for me, just because I’m so freshly back, I don’t quite know how it has changed my career trajectory yet, but I know that it will, because one thing I’ve already noticed is the alumni base is amazing. The people that I’ve interacted with so far, the connections that I’ve made with other young alumni around, paired with the connections I had made are ones I never could have imagined. Within the alumni connections I have made we’re having the kind of conversations that give me a lot of hope and inspiration. It’s a group of really enthusiastic, driven people. It’s the kind of group that I’ve always wanted to be a part of, and I know that as we’re going to go through in our careers, it’s one that we should all stay involved in, and that I plan to.
Leland: If you two could relive one day of your Fulbright experience, which one would it be, and why?
Bryce: Off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you the exact day that it was, but it was one. It wasn’t anything exactly special happening, just a regular day at school. I had just finished teaching my eighth-grade class, and one of my students came up to me asking for clarification on something we had done a week prior, one of the health modules I had done on burn first aid. He had wanted to get some details right. And I asked him, “Oh, are you just interested in this, or what’s the reasoning for following up?” And he said, “Well, when I went back home I was telling my parents and my little brother about what we learned and my younger siblings had questions about, well, why would we do that? Why wouldn’t we do this?” and just knowing that what I was doing, directly with my students, with my kids, was going out into the community, and was actually having a ripple effect going onwards. That they were going on and teaching, that they felt confident enough in the material and in themselves to do it! It really let me know that what we’re doing, what I was doing, was meaningful, that it had purpose, that just that stuck with me.
Patrice: And I guess for me, there’s a number of them that come to mind, but I guess the one that comes to my mind was there, again, not an extraordinary event. I had taught for the day in a graduate program, and I remember being very taken with how these students want to learn so badly. The sacrifices they make to get to school, to be in school, is just something that I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around, that I was in a classroom where the students were sitting on the floor. They came to school at seven o’clock in the morning on motorcycles in ice cold weather, or got on the back of someone else’s motorcycle, because they then needed to get class finished, so that they could go do whatever to have food to survive, they would come and every we all were in everything we owned to wear, because it was freezing in these classrooms. There was no heat. There was one young woman who would come and bring us hot tea in tin cups. She would make it on an open fire. She would bring us cups of tea as the class started, to try to warm people up. And those students never missed a beat, they never missed a word. They never missed an opportunity to ask a question. They never asked to leave early. They wanted to stay longer. And they would ask me at the end of the lessons when I would be able to come back to spend more time with this them. They would be happy to get back together again in the evening if I would come back. Wow. I was just blown away. And they were so smart. They were soaking it up like sponges and I remember that teaching day of just them being so hungry to learn, and that really striking me. I remember asking them what education did for them. They had a number of answers, but the answer that was the broadest was hope. That education was the hope for a different life, for someone to see them, for an opportunity. And in that moment, I realized how important those lessons were, how important those days were.
That evening I wound up going to the home of one of the student’s families who had invited me to come and have dinner with them. I found my way to their home, which was very, very simple, it didn’t have much of anything there, and I remember them feeding me first. It was my first experience with that, because they weren’t sure there was going to be enough food to go around. They made sure that they fixed a plate for me and made sure that I didn’t want seconds before they fixed their own plates. And I remember the conversation at that table was a lot of questions about the United States, about how I lived, where I lived, what I valued. The student, was interpreting with the mother and father, who had all these questions but spoke no english. They were so surprised and so pleased to know these things about America that they had never realized that the values we had were so similar to the values they held, because the only place they had ever seen America was, like once or twice on a TV show or on a movie. I was just so impressed with the depth of their questions, and what they wanted to know. I remember two topics we spent a lot of time on were ‘what did it mean to be a parent and did we try to teach our children’ and ‘what did I believe about my country’? I’m a pretty patriotic and proud to be an American person so it was such an honor to get share that with people in such an intimate way, over dinner and on a tin plate with a cup of tea. And it was lovely, absolutely lovely. I would redo that day over and over again.
Leland: Would you say that the family values that were instilled in you in rural Mississippi, had quite a bit of similarity to the family values around that table that day in Nepal?
Patrice: We had more similarities than we had differences, and the differences were often things that were semantics. Where I felt the biggest connection, over and over again, when I was there and elsewhere in Nepal was being a mother. I think everybody who has done a Fulbright has this from their own perspective, but for my time there I was away from my family. At the time Bryce was a senior in high school. I remember having another number of people say, “you’re leaving while he’s in his senior year?”, and I would be like, “Yeah, but we got this” since my family’s all on board. I went, but I definitely was missing my family, and I had such an immediate connection with every mother that I met. The way you love your children and that internal connection of being a mom regardless of your socioeconomic status, the language you speak, what you have or don’t have, there’s connections there that you just automatically find. The minute I would say I had a son, there was a bond.
Leland: Last question, um, how does it feel knowing that you’re part of a unique Fulbright family legacy, both in general the Fulbright community, but then also in your own family?
Bryce: I feel proud. I mean, I couldn’t be prouder of the fact that she has done such amazing work over there, and that I got the opportunity through Fulbright to make an impact as well. Especially at this early stage in my career. I think it’s such a blessing to work with Fulbright overall that I hope that if I have kids, that they might have the opportunity to as well. I would definitely recommend them to try for it! But I think, just like it was for me, that it should be their own choice. Seeing the good that Fulbright does for other people in the communities you worked in, but also when you get back to the states the insights that she had afterwards and the community the Fulbright Association provided really is inspiring. It was something that I really wanted in my life going forward, and I am really excited to be able to experience it for myself and to keep it going for this next generation, as a young alumni.
Leland: I recently read a quote that apparently William Fulbright himself had said, which is “in the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.” And I think both of your experiences are perfect examples of that, for sure. Thank you, guys. My heart is filled, absolutely filled. Thank you for it, for sharing the gift of your stories and experiences.