"I Will See You Again" - "No Goodbyes"

Tomorrow, I will leave Jordan and the Middle East, but insha’Allah (God-willing) - not forever.  I have developed so many friendships and bonds with people from my program as well as with my host family.  Life will not be the same without returning home every day to see my two host sisters’ lovely faces or entering my host family's home to find a large hot bowl of ‘maglooba’ (a Jordanian rice dish with chicken) waiting for me.

Although I leave Jordan with many souvenirs, I feel that I am lacking one intangible aspect of my trip that I wish I had better cultivated while here: more relationships with Jordanians.  In the Middle East, it is very hard at times to talk to natives, especially if you are female.  It is a cultural taboo to talk to men other than your relatives, and Jordanian women are usually not as open to talking to foreigners, except the few liberal Jordanian women.  When I do return to Jordan, I hope that I can work or intern for an organization that researches the role of women in Jordanian society so I may have the chance to interview Jordanian women.

When I leave Jordan, I will miss the “hidden gems” or “hidden beauties” that I discovered and observed unintentionally:

-       Observing one of the daily prayers between a Muslim woman and Allah as she prays the words from the Qur’an followed by her salutations to greet the angels. 

-       The innumerable rows of roses that seem to surprise me on a daily basis in Amman, a literal desert.  But life always finds a way of living even in the most adverse situations. 

-       My wandering into the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts and feeling the heartbeats of Middle Eastern culture expressed in sculptures, paintings, drawings and more. 

-       The frustrating but ‘in-the-moment’ experience of being situated in a taxi in traffic after the championship league match between two of Jordan’s top football teams, watching shebab (young men) carry their love and pride of the game and their country in the flags they wove and their shouts of enthusiasm from the cars that sped by.  I only wish I had my camera that night to capture the sheer joy on their faces. 

These are the just the few treasures that I will miss in Jordan, but I will miss the people the most: their kindness, their devotion to their faith, their natural and cultural hospitality and, of course, the food and how they make shay (tea).

Even before I return home and later in the fall to GW, I am mentally preparing myself for the questions from family and friends on the perceptions of the imminent dangers of the Middle East and the religious and cultural oppression of women.  With my experiences in the Middle East, I can paint a completely different picture for American citizens as someone who knew very little about the Middle East before traveling there and now has lived there for four months.  Person by person, I can tell my own people and my communities about a beautiful religion so old and their people and customs even older in the land we call the Middle East.