Sometimes when I reflect on my study abroad experience here in Jordan, I just laugh at all the bizarre situations I get myself into. For example, somehow I ended up practically alone on the dance floor trying to do my best imitation of Arabic dancing at a Palestinian wedding here in Amman.

My neighbor took me to the wedding and she warned me that it would be very conservative. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant but, upon arrival at the wedding hall, I realized that all the women were being ushered to a room upstairs while the men were sent to a separate banquet hall. In the women’s room, the bride, bedecked in a billowing white dress, sat upon her throne in the front of the room beside the groom, who sported a beard about a foot long. She looked a bit bored, to be honest, as she surveyed the dozen or so dancing women below her.

More than 100 women were seated at large tables around the dance floor, chatting, sipping juice and pointing to the younger women on the dance floor. Most wore hijabs and dishdashes (the long cloaks), but the women in the bridal party were all in satiny dresses that would have looked right at home at a 90s prom. Some of the women wore dresses revealing more skin than I’ve seen on an Arab woman since I arrived in Jordan. About a dozen women danced with their arms outstretched, gracefully twisting their wrists and swiveling their hips. Soon the bride came down and joined her sisters and friends while the groom looked on. The three camerawomen followed the bride everywhere, and their live video feed was shown on a floor-to-ceiling screen next to the bridal platform.

The sister of the bride is a friend of my neighbor, so when she saw us seated at a table, she came over to chat and then pulled me up to the dance floor, despite my protests. I must admit that I was quite terrified because I knew I couldn’t bust the same moves I do at the Keg. I have some knowledge of ballroom dancing, salsa and swing, but there wasn’t a guy (besides the groom) in sight. So, I tried my best to imitate the women’s graceful dancing. But as soon as I got to the dance floor, it cleared out, and I ended up doing an almost solo performance while the hundreds of women looked on, many of them pointing and probably wondering why there was an awkward American on the dance floor. The bride’s sister did her best to assure me that I wasn’t completely embarrassing myself, but I was flushed red for the rest of the night.

Thankfully, my dancing was interrupted by the cutting of the cake. A giant, three-tiered cake was carried up to the bride and groom and together they cut it — with a sword. Next was time for the presentation of the gold, which is when the groom bestows gold jewelry upon his bride. The groom, with the help of his mother and sisters, placed each item of gold on the bride and then the bride’s sisters each presented her with a small gift of jewelry. Then the whole family posed for pictures with the groom and glittering bride. My neighbor explained to me that this tradition started because the gold was the bride’s financial security in case she ever got divorced or her husband died. When I was in the northern Badia with the Bedouin tribes, the new brides I met were eager to bring out the boxes with the gold necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings that their husbands gave them.

At the end of the night, after the women had danced for hours, the knock came on the door that the men were coming back in. The women put back on their hijabs and covered up their revealing dresses. Then the doors were opened and then men filed in, shaking hands with the groom. My neighbor and I excused ourselves and left. I had a lot of fun, but I really hope that the camerawomen edit out my little performance from the final wedding video.

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My family has been talking for weeks about the annual trip to the small, “forested” village of Ajloun to get their year’s supply of fresh-pressed olive oil. After all, ‘tis the season for olive harvesting. At my school building, we picked all our olives weeks ago to donate to a poor family in Mufraq. My family, however, has been delaying the trip until the price of olive oil drops. Thanks to help from the King, the price was practically halved and we finally made the trip. We all piled in the car and drove out of the city and through the large Palestinian refugee camp just north of Amman. The beige, crumbling buildings gave way to tree-dotted hillsides. We saw people picking olives from their trees and others selling their harvest on the side of the road. We wound our way down the valley into Ajloun as the afternoon sunlight hit the castle just right.

Eventually we pulled up to what I originally thought was a car garage. But as soon as we climbed out of the car, we could smell the olives. The cement floors felt slick under my feet, and everything seemed to be covered with a film of oil. Huge bags of olives were stacked against the wall and men buzzed around the machines, flipping switches and sifting through the olives. My host mother explained the process to me, and I did my best to hear her above the whirring of the machines. The olives are first dumped into a big pit and then sucked up onto a conveyor belt. They are washed and sent down a sifter to get rid of the leaves and branches. Then the olives are smashed and then churned inside a giant vat. The oil is separated from the rest of the pulp and funneled into containers. The olive pulp, however, is dried and used as fuel for stoves.

As the oil came out of the machine, my host mother stuck her finger in the stream of yellow oil to taste it. After her nod of approval, I did the same. My host brother said his father used to drink a glass of olive oil every morning because it is considered good for the body. As delicious as it was, I don’t think I’d be able to do the same. Another man waiting for his oil collected a cupful from the press and drank it, but shook his head and scowled. Apparently the oil wasn’t up to his standards. After paying several hundred Jordanian dinars for our tubs of oil, we loaded up the trunk and wound our way down the mountain again just in time for sunset.

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After listening to the call to prayer five times a day for the past three months, I decided to get back in touch with my own religion. Two weeks ago I went with an American friend and my host family’s Sri Lankan maid to St. George’s Cathedral, which is a relatively new church here in Amman. Since the Mass was only in Arabic, I didn’t recognize any of the songs and I couldn’t follow along with any of the prayers. It felt more like Arabic class than a church service to me, so last Sunday I leapt at the chance to go to an English-speaking Mass in Abdali.

I went with my host family’s 19-year-old maid and three of my American friends. The priest’s thick Boston accent and all the familiar songs and prayers made me feel like I was back in America. The churchgoers, however, were nearly all Southeast Asian girls and women. With varying degrees of fluency, the women played guitar, sang and led prayers in English. My host family’s maid smiled with delight as she looked around the church and pointed out other girls whom she recognized as Sri Lankan. As we lined up for communion, she exchanged a shy wave and hello with a Sri Lankan nun.
After the Mass, the nun approached us and explained that she worked in a non-profit agency that helped maids who have been abused or need any sort of help. Coincidentally, one of my friends who came to Mass was planning on visiting that agency the next day. For her research project, my friend has been studying the maids in Amman. It’s been heartbreaking to hear some of her stories. Last week she visited an embassy that had nearly two hundred girls and young women living in the basement and parking garage. Some of the maids had come to the embassy because of abuse or because their employers had refused to pay their salaries or renew their visas. They are living in the embassy in limbo, unable to work in Jordan or return back to their country. They wait for the intercom to call their name, the signal that they can finally go home. Some have been living in the bowels of the embassy for almost two years.

Many of my American friends here also have maids in their homestays and we’ve talked about the experience at length. My friends and I often feel uncomfortable because none of us grew up with maids in the U.S. and we don’t really know how to deal with the family dynamics here in Amman. The maids are usually around our own age or younger, but have such a different role than us in the house. We get beds and eat at the table with our families, and the maids often sleep on the floor and eat separately. The maids do our laundry and clean the house while we travel and relax at cafes. My friends and I often talk about the guilt we feel that we can go out and explore while our maids stay in the house all day, every day. Yet, many of my friends and I have friendly, often conspiratorial, relationships with the maids. My host family’s maid is a sort of ally and friend. During Ramadan while the rest of the family was fasting, we ate our daytime meals together and talked together in a mix of English and Arabic. I showed her pictures of my family and we browsed through pictures of Sri Lanka on the Internet. Since we’re both outsiders in the family, we often roll our eyes or share a giggle when the family is being especially loud or obnoxious.

I’m going home in just a few weeks, but my host family’s maid is staying until August 2010. I can’t imagine being so disconnected from my home like she is. I have the luxuries of Skype, Facebook and a cell phone to keep in touch, but my host family’s maid just waits for her weekly phone call from home. Employers generally discourage the maids from making friends and prefer to keep them isolated, but I certainly hope that my host family’s maid is able to make friends at church. After all, if I didn’t have my American friends to talk to, I don’t know how I could have survived the past few months here in Jordan with my sanity intact.

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Still smelling the salt of the Dead Sea on my skin, I’ve returned from a trip through the south of Jordan. This is the Jordan of legends: the awe-inspiring Petra, sunrises over Wadi Rum, sunsets over Aqaba’s sparkling aqua water, quiet valleys in Dana, and the salty depths of the Dead Sea. I fell in love with Jordan during this trip and I don’t know how I’ll ever leave in just two more months.
Here are the top 5 best adventures from this week:

1. Exploring Petra:

I can’t believe I’ve lived in Jordan for two months and only just now visited its most famous attraction, the rose-red city of Petra, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. My friends and I hit the Siq just an hour after sunrise and blearily made our way through the long, narrow passage that serves as the entrance to the city. The rock’s marbled colors shone in the early morning sun and I don’t think my photos do it proper justice. After a while we came to the most-photographed place in Jordan, the Treasury, which is an ancient temple carved straight into a rock face that was featured in an old Indiana Jones movie. Inside we saw the carved bowl where they collect the blood from sacrifices. As we made our way through the valley, we were flanked by hundreds of massive tombs carved into the rock face. We passed the massive amphitheatre and walked along the colonnaded Roman street. Finally we crossed a creek and started the steep climb up to Petra’s second most-famous monument, the Monastery (which is another misnomer because it was also a pagan temple). Along the way, we passed Bedouins who had set up camp in caves and were hawking their wares to exhausted tourists fighting off the morning heat. Out of breath and out of water, we finally reached the Monastery, only to be tempted to continue on to the edge of the mountaintop just beyond it. There we clambered over the rocks to see the sweeping, desolate valley below, with some of the most jagged and dramatic rock faces I’ve ever seen. There I sensed the captivating mystery of Petra and I left the mountaintop very humbled.

2. Sunset and sunrise in Wadi Rum:

Just before sunset in the vast desert of Wadi Rum, all my classmates and I climbed in the back of Jeeps and held on for dear life as our Bedouin drivers tried to out-run each other across the sand dunes. The drivers took great delight in pitching the Jeeps over steep sand dunes and listening to us scream as if we were on roller coasters. We stopped to watch the sun drop between the rock formations and cast the entire desert in a golden, reddish glow. The next morning, my friends and I got up at 5 a.m. to summit the mountain behind our Bedouin camp. I’m glad it was pitch black because I don’t think I would have had the courage to rock climb if I had been able to see what I was doing. I blindly followed my goat-footed friends as they shimmied up the rock face. From the top, we shivered in our fleece jackets and watched as the distant horizon began to glow yellow. The black and blue desert turned rosy orange, and we saw a herd of camels silhouetted against the rising sun as they were being driven across the valley floor. When the sun finally crested and our stomachs began to growl, we decided to head back down the rock face. Going down, however, was much more terrifying than the scramble up. If it hadn’t been for the bravery and patience of my friends, I think I’d still be at the top of that rock praying for the tour bus to magically appear and take me down.

3. Snorkeling in Aqaba:

After worrying about modesty for months, you can imagine how excited the other students and I were about slipping into our swimsuits to enjoy the aqua waters of Aqaba. As Jordan’s only sea port, it’s a bustling commercial zone, but also a major tourist destination. After leaving the deserts of Wadi Rum we piled into glass-bottom boats and scooted around the beautiful waters of the Red Sea. We saw amazing coral reefs and even a sunken Lebanese ship. My attempt at snorkeling, however, was a bit of a failure. I gashed my foot on the boat as I jumped off, and then proceeded to swallow copious amounts of salty water. Nevertheless, it felt amazing to wash the desert sand off in such wonderfully warm water. I felt like I was in Hawaii! I did feel awkward, however, when we returned to the beach because all the local women were floating around fully clothed and wearing hijabs. I tried to wrap my towel around me as best I could, but I could still feel the stares.
4. A night at the eco-lodge in Dana:

After leaving Aqaba, we bused over to the Dana Nature Preserve south of the Dead Sea. Upon reaching a tiny village, we left the tour bus behind and piled ourselves and our luggage into truck beds. We bounced for 10 kilometers until we reached the Feynan Eco Lodge, which looked out of place among the simple Bedouin tents that dotted the hillsides. With it’s creamy adobe walls and graceful archways, the lodge would have been right at home in the glossy pages of Sunset Magazine. The lodge is a relatively new experiment in sustainable tourism. I enjoyed the delicious buffet of gourmet vegetarian food. There is no electricity in the lodge (except in the bathrooms), so at night we lit our rooms and the back deck with candles. We sat and played cards, enjoying the darkness. Around 9 p.m. our program director led a group of us on a night hike up the Wadi. After hearing howling in the canyon, he advised us to carry a large rock with us in case we are attacked by coyotes. I thought he was kidding at first, but when he started searching on the ground for a sharp one, I quickly did the same. Despite the scare, we made it back alive to the lodge several hours later. I felt bad though because on our way back we lost the trail and ended up trudging through a Bedouin camp. We saw men curled up in sleeping bags guarding their flock of sheep. That night I fell asleep to the lovely smell of candle smoke.

5. Floating in the Dead Sea:

As a California girl, I’ve been to dozens and dozens of beaches. But the Dead Sea is nothing like I’ve experienced ever before. When I took my first step into the water, I instantly became aware of its high salinity because the gash on my foot (courtesy of the boat in Aqaba) started stinging immensely. My friend splashed water into her eyes was blinded (and cursing) for the next five minutes. But, the amazing thing was that as I walked further out, my feet just floated upwards. It was impossible to stand in the Dead Sea. We just floated on our backs like we were swinging in hammocks. It took absolutely no effort at all to just bob around, but it was extremely difficult to make any headway swimming mainly because I couldn’t keep my body submerged deep enough to fully swim. After enjoying the novelty of such a salty sea, we all headed to the beach to slather ourselves with mud. The Dead Sea mud is famous for its therapeutic properties, but mainly I just felt dirty and itchy as the black mud dried on me. I will admit that we all looked rather ridiculous as we stood around awkwardly on the beach for 20 minutes waiting for the mud to harden. I’m not sure if the mud worked any miracles on me, but I think my skin may have been a tad softer when I returned home that night to Amman. The only change my host family noticed was that I was a bit tanner and smelled like salt.

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Since I arrived in Jordan, almost everyone I met, taxi drivers and lecturers alike, asked me who I would vote for in the U.S. presidential elections. I always said “Obama, of course!” and they would reward me with a big smile. But many of the people I met didn’t even know John McCain’s name. And very few had ever heard of Sarah Palin. Most don’t know much about Obama or his platform. Many people I spoke with referred to him as “al-uswad,” or “the black one.” One newspaper headline the day before the election read in Arabic, “Obama ‘The Black,’ will he be Mr. ‘White House’?” People I’ve spoken with seem fascinated, like the rest of America I suppose, with his skin color and whether he would fail because of it. When I asked about why they like Obama, some said simply that he’s not George W. Bush. Others said he was more like them, or that he would be the president for the world, not just for America. It seems that for them, Obama’s victory simply signals that America may be on their side. His victory affirms that George W. Bush was wrong and that the American people do care about the rest of the world.

I asked my host brothers and program directors about election parties in Amman, but apparently the city would be relatively quiet as usual. So, on the night of the election, I joined a group of 10 students in a hotel room to watch CNN and Al-Jazeera. Due to the time change, we didn’t start getting results until after 3 a.m., right when the exhaustion was starting to kick in. Surprisingly, Al-Jazeera was calling states for Obama or McCain about 5 to 10 minutes before CNN did, perhaps because the American stations were exercising more caution after last election’s debacle. One by one, we watched the states turn blue. Around 4 a.m., I passed out cold, and was awoken later by my friend shouting, “We have a new president! We have a new president!” We all piled on the couches to watch McCain’s concession speech, followed by Obama’s victory speech.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as homesick as when I watched the crowd cheering in Grant Park. I wanted so badly to be there with my sister and all of my friends, some of whom had press passes. I called my sister to vicariously experience the excitement of the crowd. She hung up after a minute or two, though, to get Obama’s rising sun symbol painted on her cheek. On television, Chicago seemed more alive than I’ve ever seen it, and I longed to join in the fun. Instead, I was half-asleep on a couch, half-a-world away. The streets of Amman were depressingly silent, and we were all too tired to break open the champagne. We feel asleep again around 8 a.m., and I slept until my parents called to tell me that my father had won the city council election in my hometown. A double victory for my family! Homesickness hit me hard that morning, and I drifted back to sleep feeling sad that I couldn’t celebrate with my family in California nor with the rest of Chicago.

On Wednesday, Obama’s name buzzed on the radio and on all the television stations. When I was walking down the street with a few American friends, a few people driving by rolled down their window to shout, “Mubruk!” (congratulations). My host family shared in my excitement and we all had a huge feast of fish in the afternoon. Together we watched Obama’s victory speech replayed and had an interesting talk about race-relations in the U.S. I spent the evening checking some of my favorite Jordanian blogs and browsing Global Voices for other Middle Eastern blogs to see what they had to say about the elections. Here is a sample, The Black Iris of Jordan, 7iber.com (see an article form Obama’s visit to Amman), 360 East, a round-up of Egyptian blogs, and a Syrian blog.

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It looked boring: square, monochrome desks and whiteboard-covered walls, decorated only by two flat-screen plasma televisions. Eight new students sat at attention circled around Professor Janet Key.

“Go for it,” she said.

They had an assignment: interview each other and write. Freshmen Nazneen Zahan and Sara Al-Thani giggled while they talked and scribbled in their notebooks.

This could be any classroom—maybe one in Fisk Hall. But it’s not. It was the opening week of classes at the new Northwestern University campus in Qatar. For the first time, pure Northwestern undergraduate degrees are being offered half-a-world away.

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It started online. One day in early 2006 President Henry Bienen opened an e-mail that asked him: Would Northwestern be interested in setting up a campus in Qatar?

“I was getting a lot of e-mails—there was a boom in the Gulf,” Bienen says. The boom was based on two things the Gulf region has in abundance: space and money. Historically, students have traveled to the U.S. to reap the benefits of American higher education, but with Gulf countries now loaded in oil money, they can afford to bring U.S. higher education to them.

Bienen considered projects in Tunisia, Morocco, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but he says he ultimately chose Qatar because of Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Doha. Education City is home to branch campuses of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M University, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University, all members of The Qatar Foundation. The Foundation (a private nonprofit founded in 1995 by His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar) built Education City as part of its mission to open research and education opportunities to Qataris. Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, who visited Northwestern in May, chairs the foundation.

Most of the people who have enrolled in the Qatar school have made the country their home, though it draws a swath of students from all over the world. Doha is an international city, after all, which helps explain why the government is spending huge amounts on importing schools with built-in credibility. “You know you can build a university from scratch, the way this one was built,” says Richard Roth, the senior associate dean for journalism at the Qatar school, from Evanston. “Or, what Sheikha Mozah apparently decided was not to build them because it takes too long, but to just buy them. And I think this is genius. Instead of having some great schools, she went out and said, ‘Let’s go find the best schools.’”

Within a few months of approaching Bienen, representatives of Education City began visiting Northwestern to discuss the two schools they were most interested in: the School of Communication and the Medill School of Journalism. The Foundation wanted to combine the two curricula into one school: NU-Q.

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Photo by Hannah Fraser-Chanpong / North by Northwestern

Before accepting the Foundation’s proposal, Dean John Lavine says Northwestern carefully considered press freedom in Qatar. Though freedom of the press is part of the Qatari constitution, the media still suffers from self-censorship. It’s habit, not government, according to Professor Roth, that keeps existing journalists in Qatar from seeking out controversy. And just because the Qatar Foundation is writing a blank check doesn’t automatically mean it’s also willing to accept the ideas that Medill represents. After all, becoming a stalwart against press restrictions and censorship isn’t exactly in the government’s favor.

Lavine’s outlook is more optimistic: He thinks Northwestern can contribute for the better to the region’s media landscape as it changes—maybe even help build a free press from the ground up. When he met with members, he says he “candidly” asked them if they really wanted his school’s journalism curriculum. “I remember along the way them saying first of all that we should remember that they started Al Jazeera,” Lavine says. “They knew what journalism was. And it was rough-and-tumble journalism.” (The Emir of Qatar founded Al Jazeera in Doha in 1996 as an Arabic-language news channel. It has since expanded to include an English-language channel and a children’s channel.)
One major reason the Foundation invited Medill to Education City was because it hoped the school’s graduates would improve Qatar’s already-existing English and Arabic newspapers. “There’s a clear need already in the working press over there. There’s some appetite or hunger,” Roth says. “I read some of those papers and some of the stories, and they’re not very good.”

NU-Q freshman Nayaab Shaikh, 20, has experience with journalism in the area. She spent a summer working as a “trainee” journalist at the Gulf Times, one of country’s English-language dailies. Though she enjoyed her experience, she had difficulty with interviews. “The level of covering news needs to grow,” she says.

Qatari NU-Q freshman Mariam Al-Darwish says NU-Q’s debut in Education City drastically changed her plans for her future. Before Northwestern came to Qatar, she had never thought of majoring in film or communication. “I wasn’t sure as to what major to pursue, but when this came out, I said to myself I am definitely going to be a part of Northwestern,” she says.

Nazneen Zahan, 19, also says she was “lucky” that Northwestern came along. Originally Bangladeshi but born in Doha, Zahan always planned to stay in Qatar for university. Her choices were medicine and business, which she studied for a year at CHN University in Doha. But her opportunities for television journalism looked better once Northwestern showed up. She thought specifically about career opportunities at Al Jazeera in the city. “Whenever I think about media, the first thing I think about is Al Jazeera,” she says.

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The real negotiations kicked off after Bienen approached James Hurley, the Office of Budget Planning’s associate vice president, in fall 2006. That’s when Hurley started developing project proposals to present to the Qatar Foundation. Though exact numbers remain confidential because of the Qatar Foundation’s policies, Hurley says the creation of the Doha campus involves a budget not unlike those for individual schools on the main campus. Some of the major considerations are things like cost of faculty, support staff and student services.

One new budget consideration, besides the considerable travel expenses between Doha and Chicago, is NU-Q’s need for an independent central administration with its own finance and human resources staff. “Because they’re so far away, they have to build their own expertise,” Hurley says. “We’re trying to have them as self-reliant as possible.”

But the biggest difference, of course, is where the money comes from. The Qatar Foundation is footing the bill for the entire operation. It may be a blank check, according to Hurley, but not one the administration treats lightly. “We are frugal here at Northwestern and we will be frugal with the Foundation’s money,” he says. “That’s part of our Northwestern culture.”

Regardless of spending practices, however, it is difficult to overstate how lucrative for Northwestern the deal really is. While the Qatar Foundation pays for all faculty, staff, building, utilities and technology, the American university still collects every Middle Eastern student’s tuition.

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There’s one area where the Qatar Foundation still has no model for the new school: construction. The Foundation will build the classrooms, studios, labs and offices from scratch, but Hurley is confident that whatever it looks like, the architecture will have to be one-of-a-kind. “There’s a new term for them called ‘starchitects,’” he says, referring to the master plan that was designed by well-known Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.

Until NU-Q has a physical campus, it will share space with the TAMU-Q building (first opened in 2003) for the first year of operation, and then move into the CMU-Q building for the second and third years. This kind of tenant status is characteristic of Education City’s newcomers and, according to Hurley, it gives administrators more time to plan. “We get to continue to fine-tune our space needs which are really critical for these two programs. We need television studios. We need radio stations. We want to be really careful,” he says.

At the moment, temporary studios are being built in TAMU-Q for introductory lighting and cinematography coursework, and each program will also have its own media lab, says Mimi White, the senior associate dean for communications.

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Photo by Hannah Fraser Chanpong / North by Northwestern

The inaugural class of 2012 is composed of 38 students—21 in the communication program and 17 in journalism. 14 of the students are Qatari, while the other 24 represent other countries. Just eight members of the class are male. NU-Q received 126 applications, and White spent two-and-a-half weeks interviewing five to seven applicants a day. “We were looking for what we look for here—for students who had the capacity to do the academic program that Northwestern has to offer,” she says.

Before he came to Doha for the first time, Assistant Professor Ibrahim Abusharif was worried about students’ ability to write idiomatically. But after grading the first papers of the year, he became a little more optimistic. “Each one of the papers I read, I can see the students can write,” says Abusharif, who teaches Introduction to 21st Century Media to journalism students. “They’re trying. Some of them are overtrying, but they’re trying. You can work with effort.” Abusharif will work with students mostly on grammar and writing drills throughout the first semester. In 16 weeks, he says, they’ll try out writing and reporting.

While about half of the applicants were Qatari nationals, most people who applied to NU-Q have taken up permanent residence there, regardless of nationality or passports. Because culture and student demographics are completely unlike those in Evanston, small changes to the curriculum have to be made.

The communication program is a combination of both the communications studies and radio, television and film curriculums that already exist in Evanston. Roth says the core journalism classes will remain the same, but modifications will be made to fit students’ cultural and media backgrounds. While there are some students who have worked in television stations, there are others who have almost no experience with any kind of media. “Part of the issue right now is looking at our curriculum and looking at some of it through the eyes of someone who is of or who knows that culture quite well,” Roth said. “Saying, you ought not talk about this in the classroom because they won’t understand it or you would be better off spending your time talking about that.”

Roth says plagiarism is one topic that will be covered with more depth. He found that some admissions essays from NU-Q applicants had been plagiarized. When confronted, some students were unaware that such practice was even a problem.

He recognizes that some norms of Islamic or Middle Eastern culture will inevitably affect the way students react to assignments. Female students may want to sit in the back of the classroom or may not want to interview men alone. Students may face restrictions in who or what they can photograph. Whether or not these issues will actually end up being problems is not yet clear. “People say that could be a problem, but then again, I talk to some of these young girls and they said, ‘It’s not a problem. If that’s my job, I do it,’” Roth said.

Small changes will also be made to fit NU-Q’s semester system, as opposed to the quarters here. Semester-long courses will allow NU-Q’s schedule to fit better with the rest of Education City, and NU-Q students will take classes in other nearby schools to fulfill distribution requirements.

NU-Q will also have its own Arabic-language journalism labs. Students will be able to rework weekly assignments in Arabic for feedback. “Many don’t speak it at all but for those who do, Her Highness asked if we could offer at least labs in Arabic so that they would come out bilingual journalists,” Lavine says, “which I thought was, of course, a terrific idea.”

According to Roth, some of the faculty members headed to Doha already have experience with Arabic language and customs. Janet Key, a former Medill lecturer, will be one of the main journalism teachers abroad. She has worked in the Gulf and joins Northwestern from the American University in Cairo. “She knows the culture, she knows the language, she knows journalism,” he says.

Six other faculty members come from both inside and outside of Northwestern. They’re joined by one professor from Georgetown in Qatar and another from CMU-Q. Roth says that though several members of Medill’s current faculty have expressed interest in moving to Doha, he chose the journalism faculty for their ability to work with freshmen and sophomores.

Dean and CEO of NU-Q John Margolis says the current faculty is just the beginning for NU-Q. Right now, they’re only teaching freshmen, but things will get a lot more complicated as time goes on. “I confess that I do wake up occasionally in the middle of the night worrying about this or that and recognizing that there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle,” he said in June, prior to his move to Doha.
For now, the only noticeable effect NU-Q will have on the Evanston campus is the missing faculty members. “We’ll be able to facilitate movement into this part of the Middle East,” Bienen says. “But who knows how this will evolve over time?”

Margolis hopes that in the next few years, there will be a more direct exchange of knowledge between Doha and Evanston. With the faculty rotating between the two campuses, students can expect to hear more about Arab media culture in their classes. And more faculty will be hired to replace those lost in Evanston.

For his part, Lavine expects there to be a constant flow of students, as well as faculty, between the two campuses. “It’s terrific. Simply terrific,” he says. “If we start to put Qatari students in newsrooms in Amman or the West Bank or Tel Aviv, why can’t we put Evanston students in newsrooms in Amman or the West Bank or Tel Aviv?”

Evanston students can’t yet study abroad at NU-Q, but Lavine calls it a “real goal” and a real possibility. When and if the program is setup, those who choose to study at NU-Q will get to be abroad without really leaving campus, he says. Northwestern requires students to spend a certain number of academic quarters on the Northwestern campus in order to graduate, but because NU-Q is campus soil, despite its foreign location, Evanston students could study in Doha without using their allowance for time away.

The Qatar Foundation assured the Northwestern administration that, regardless of sexual orientation, religious preference or nationality, Northwestern students would be welcomed to Doha. “We should do what we do here and represent the values we have here,” Lavine says. “So, if we had Israeli students who wanted to come to school in Education City and wanted to go to NU-Q, terrific. If we had American or Canadian or Filipino or Korean-Jews, and there are all of those who wanted to go to school in Education City and do journalism, fine.”

Plus, of course, there is always the lingering prestige factor of building a global brand. Over the summer, Northwestern moved up a few spots to the twelfth rank on the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings. That kind of good press doesn’t go unnoticed abroad. “Northwestern has grown from a more regional to an international university,” White says.

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When the deal was finalized, Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, vice president of education for the Qatar Foundation, wrote a welcome letter to Northwestern. In it, he said he hoped NU-Q would “promote a maturing of our society into one where everyone can have a voice and everyone is accountable. A vibrant, healthy media scene will bring about greater transparency and accountability, and these are hallmarks of successful, participative societies.” He recognized Northwestern’s unmatched excellence in the two programs in the region and saw “their establishment here as evidence of Qatar’s real commitment to progressive social change.”

Justifying Northwestern’s grab for global status isn’t hard for Margolis: “Doesn’t one want to have more impact rather than less?” he says. But even if the Foundation’s intentions are genuine, the concern stands that when Arab governments promote a slightly more open media it can become a substitute for real political participation. The Arab media hasn’t completely rid itself of the traditional role as a basic propaganda machine used to rally support for regime policies and target other critical governments, and outlets generally still follow a “news-receiving” rather than a “news-gathering” method. Even private media are not independent because they do not operate in truly free markets.

Press freedom in the Middle East isn’t universally supported, either: While a Pew Global Projects attitude survey found that those in Muslim countries overall placed a high priority on press freedom, in some countries only one-third thought the press should be free from censorship. The question then becomes, even if there are professional, trained journalists in the Middle East, will they be able to act as agents for political or social change?

Bienen says no one is expecting Northwestern’s participation in Education City to bring peace or democracy to the region, but they are still aiming high. “Our job is to matriculate students, but we’re going to stand for something,” he says. “We’re going to stand for, I think, ethical ways of going about your business; we’re going to stand for doing your job well, for being able to write and communicate well, and various values. Hopefully we’ll stand for values of open society, freedom, democracy and no censorship. Whether those values can resonate broadly in Qatar and even more broadly in the Middle East, I don’t know, but one can hope.”

I just spent a week in Cairo exploring ancient ruins, winding through alleys in a city of garbage, marveling at whirling dervishes, talking politics at the Arab League, chatting with Egyptian students, and listening to reggae under a bridge over the Nile. Overall, it’s been a whirlwind of activity and now that I’ve recovered from the Cairo curse (a.k.a. food poisoning), I’ll try to give you a taste of my experiences here. And don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the usual tourist tales of camels and pyramids.

Discussing politics in the Arab League

On Sunday my study abroad group met with a representative of the Arab League for a discussion. As a member of Northwestern’s Model Arab League, I was so excited to tour the building where the League meets and sit in their seats in the grand meeting hall. It was interesting to just ask the speaker for his thoughts about everything from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (or lack thereof) to the Iraq War to pan-Arabism. Although I’m sure he wasn’t being completely frank with us, I felt he gave some very candid answers. He said it was no secret that the Arab League has major problems with the current American administration. The U.S.’s involvement is critical for any Israeli-Palestinian agreement to be reached, but he lamented the U.S.’s unwavering and unquestioning support for Israel. He argued that supporting Israel 100 percent of the time was not actually in the U.S.’s best interests. He explained that Israel only understands the language of violence because the international community has allowed it to do whatever it wants. If the U.S. wants to combat terrorism and extremism in the region, it needs to give people hope in their futures. He did not necessarily have a bright outlook on the future of U.S.-Arab relations. He talked about his doubts that the Middle East will be an immediate priority for the new American president, regardless of which candidate wins. As all our speakers do, he asked us who we were voting for. Considering that those of us choosing to study in the Middle East are by no means a representative sample of U.S. public opinion, I’m not quite sure why we are constantly asked this.

A visit to Garbage City

My host family has driven me through the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman and I thought that was true poverty in the Middle East. But nothing I have seen so far (and granted, I haven’t seen much), has been as shocking as Garbage City. I had read about Cairo’s City of the Dead, which is a slum built among the tombstones of an old graveyard, but Garbage City was another layer of poverty entirely. Behind Cairo’s grand old citadel and pressed up against the mountain is an entire city built on a garbage dump. I learned about Garbage City, or Moqqatam, from my sister’s friend, who had lived in Cairo and worked at an NGO there. She explained that this slum is where Cairo’s garbage workers live. They gather all the trash in the city and then bring it to their homes in Moqqatam and sift through it. A few friends and I cajoled a taxi driver into taking us to a rather unimpressive monastery on the top of the hill overlooking Garbage City. From the main highway, we could smell Garbage City before we saw it. Mountains of garbage towered over our car as we approached the city. Our taxi driver wrapped a scarf around his mouth and nose and drove through the narrow alleyways slowly. We saw piles of garbage almost six feet high inside crumbling brick buildings. Children sat on top of these piles, picking through the trash and eating whatever they found. Emaciated donkeys lingered outside decrepit, reeking buildings and men stacked tires into piles. Around noon we saw children in school uniforms running down the street, but I have no idea what school they went to or where. We weren’t in Garbage City for more than a few hours, but when I got back to the hotel that night, I realized the city’s smell had clung to my clothes. It’s amazing to me that the beautiful, manicured Al-Azhar Gardens were within sight of this slum. I realize that all big cities have their slums, but in all my travels I have never seen such extreme poverty and the wealth in such close proximity. With this sort of abject poverty hiding behind its fragile façade, it’s no wonder Egyptians’ glorify their ancient past so much. There is nothing to be proud of in the present if you have an entire community calling a garbage dump home.

Chatting about Egyptian media

One unbearably hot afternoon, our program directors sent us on “drop-offs,” which are sort of like scavenger hunts. Two other students and I were given a piece of paper with the name of a major newspaper and a few questions to ask. We were given a couple hours to find the newspaper, meet with someone there, and then report back to the group. After a hellish taxi ride (the driver had no idea where he was going and then the doors broke, requiring us to crawl out the window), we finally arrived, a bit frazzled and quite sweaty. We found an English-speaking editor who sat with us for a few hours to discuss his paper, politics, and his views on the media landscape there. He explained that unlike the U.S., the press is not seen as the watchdog of the government. When Nasser nationalized everything, including the papers, he undermined the pillars of civil society. Here in Cairo, readership is so low that it doesn’t even matter much if the papers publish articles exposing government corruption. He explained that Cairo has a “democracy of barking,” meaning that the government will allow people to bark because no one will listen. “It doesn’t even matter. Write whatever you want: Who will read you?” I wanted him to talk more about Egypt’s infamous blogging community, but he didn’t seem particularly aware of it or any of the controversy surrounding its censorship.

Talking with Egyptian college students

One morning my study abroad program took us to meet with some political science students at Cairo University. We gathered in a classroom and discussed their views on Egypt’s political system and economy. They seemed to be more in support of the government than I expected and had some interesting neoliberal opinions about the economy. The students and their professor also seemed very concerned with how we viewed Cairo and seemed shocked that we weren’t visiting more ancient Egyptian sites. Again, I got the sense that Egyptians want foreigners to only focus on their ancient history. I was most surprised, however, by the way we were bombarded with fliers as we filed out of the classroom. A few Egyptian students eagerly asked us to be in their student group promoting cross-cultural communication and world peace. Perhaps I’m just used to talking to jaded Northwestern students, but I was shocked by these Egyptian students’ optimism about world peace and their role in creating it. As they pitched their ideas to us, I kept thinking they were completely naive, but I must admit their enthusiasm was contagious. I put my e-mail address down on their list; I wonder if I’ll ever hear from them.

Music

On Saturday night my friends and I went to the Culture Wheel in Egypt, which has an amazing outdoor stage under a bridge crossing the Nile. We joined the mob surrounding the stage and danced to the Egyptian rappers. Everyone but us seemed to know the words to all their songs. I just enjoyed being in the midst of so many young Egyptians, some of the girls wearing hijabs, and some without. After a long day at the pyramids with all the throngs of tourists, it was refreshing to spend an evening experiencing modern Egyptian culture. Nothing about Pharaohs or the afterlife here. Just the rhythm and the dancing and the lights of the city glimmering on the Nile. We liked the venue so much we returned later in the week for a reggae concert and stayed after the show was over, just chatting with a few Egyptian guys and playing guitar on the banks of the Nile.

Another night we went to the old mausoleum near Al-Azhar in Old Cairo to see the whirling dervishes performance. I have never seen anything like it. These Sufi dancers spun in circles for over an hour to the beat of the drums and the squealing flute. A singer wailed from the balcony of the mausoleum overlooking the stage. The dancers’ giant skirts swirled about them, revealing their colorful undersides. The men unwound their turbans as they spun, with huge smiles plastered across their faces. They looked completely oblivious to the audience snapping photos and clapping as they spun increasingly faster. It seemed like such a beautiful way to express their love for God.

Glad to be back in Amman

Visiting Cairo made me appreciate Amman a lot more. Granted, Cairo seems more happening than Amman. In Amman everything seems new and beige, but Cairo just seemed to burst with history and life. I loved its mismatched architecture, crazy traffic, bright lights, and fun bars. The Nile was gorgeous, smelly, and calming all at once. But it was difficult to enjoy Cairo’s beauty because of the constant harassment. Amman’s tribal society has protected me from any trouble here, but in Cairo I was grabbed, chased and endlessly taunted. The police were the worst tormentors. Also, the mountains of trash everywhere made me concerned for this crowded city’s environmental sustainability. The food made nearly everyone on my program sick, even our Jordanian program directors. I thought my stomach had been toughened in Amman, but I still succumbed to an awful bout of food poisoning. I guess the Egyptians have just gotten used to it, but I am still concerned that their water and food seems to be such poor quality. Also, the air pollution was even worse than in L.A. When I got off the plane in Jordan, I gulped in the fresh air. I wish Amman had Cairo’s lively nightlife and rich history, but I am definitely glad to be back home with my host family.

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Never in my life have I felt as out of place as I did for the past three days in the Badia, which is the desert region in northeast Jordan. For three days I wore a hijab and a dishdash, lived in a one bedroom house with eight people and baked so many cookies I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome. It was definitely an experience.

It started on the bus ride from Mafraq to my village, Um Al-Qatain, which is just two kilometers or so from the Syrian border. I could just feel the four men in the seat behind me staring intently at me. I self-consciously put a scarf over my hair and tried to concentrate on the view, which was mostly just flat, rocky ground dotted by sheep, shacks and power lines. The desert looked like it could just go on forever in all directions. Dust blew in clouds over the red earth and burned my eyes. But soon enough I saw the sign for my village. The bus driver made a few phone calls and then dropped me off at the house. The white-washed little house stood behind a wall, surrounded by a little garden with flowers and vegetables. Munira, a mother of six, welcomed me inside. The first thing she said was (in Arabic), “You are my daughter now, call me Mama.” She swiftly drew a few pins out of her dress and pinned my scarf tighter around my face, making sure all my hair was tucked inside.

She introduced her children, although it took me a few days to get the names right. The eldest was Wijdan, a 15-year-old girl, followed by Hannan, Hanneen, Hassan, Riwan and Wizan, who was just a year and a half old. At first the little kids wouldn’t go near me, instead hiding behind the door frames and giggling every time I smiled at them. We all sat down on the floor and started rolling rice into cabbage leaves for dinner, while watching a soap opera from Saudi Arabia. Their living room did not have any furniture, save for the television stand. It did, however, have plenty of mats and pillows on the floor. None of them spoke a word of English to me, although I know from looking at the eldest daughter’s textbook that she knows more English than I know Arabic.

Munira explained the virtues of fasting during Ramadan and told me I should do it too. I hadn’t planned on fasting during my stay there, but it seemed uncomfortable not to, especially since even the nine-year-old girl was fasting. So, for three days I fasted with the family. It was incredibly difficult to spend all day in the kitchen cooking and smelling the food when we couldn’t eat anything. The thirst, though, was much more difficult than foregoing food. I’ve never looked forward to sunset so much before in my life.

Soon the father drove up in a truck, the back overflowing with tomato plants. After re-pinning my scarf, Munira sent me outside with the other kids to help pull the tomato plants from the truck. One kid opened the gate for all the goats and sheep to come out and nibble away at the tomatoes. I was a bit disappointed that my family didn’t have any camels. I brought out my camera to take photos of the animals and the kids soon swarmed around me. I gave them my camera to play with, but they mainly photographed their own shoes.

Then it was back to the kitchen for more cooking, which is what Munira and I did for the majority of my time in the Badia. It seemed Munira’s daily life was consumed by three tasks: breast-feeding the baby, cooking and braiding her five daughters’ hair. While I was there, she only left the house when her husband drove her somewhere. I tried to imagine what it would be like if my own life was contained by just four walls.

When my family took me to relatives’ houses for visits, several women showed me their wedding photo albums. I was shocked to see that these women in front of me, covered head-to-toe in blacks and beiges, had albums filled with glamor shots. Wearing billowing, bejeweled gowns, the women were photographed with thick make-up and elaborate hair-dos. Their bare shoulders were studded with rhinestones and glitter. They posed seductively, their faces surrounded by hearts and Edwardian script reading “A beautiful bride.” They seemed so proud of their photos, probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance to dress up so provocatively.

On my second day in the Badia, I was going crazy from staying in the tiny house for so long. I wanted to explore the town and just get away from the kitchen and the screaming kids. When I asked to take a walk around the neighborhood, Munira looked shocked and said, “No, not unless your father takes you.” I almost cried with frustration. Finally she agreed to let her son take me down about 50 feet to the corner of the dirt road and then back to the house. Needless to say, it wasn’t exactly the most liberating walk.

I was surrounded by people in this tiny four-room house, yet I still felt so isolated from the rest of the world. For those three days I didn’t go online, watch the news on TV or read a newspaper. Everything was just about food, family and feeding the goats. It was quiet and simple, but still a bit stifling for me, especially since most of the time I couldn’t follow the family’s rapid-fire conversation. It was peaceful at night though, when everyone took their mats and blankets off a huge stack and spread them out on the floor of the TV room. All nine of us curled up on the mats and fell asleep. Every night we woke up around 4:30 a.m. to eat a small breakfast before dawn. I honestly couldn’t eat at that time of the morning, but I still got up with the sleepy-eyed children who mechanically dipped their bread in oil and slowly swallowed it.

On my last day in the Badia, my eldest host sister took me to her school. It felt great to actually take a walk beyond the confines of the house. First we lined up outside the school and did half-hearted calisthenics as the principal shouted into the megaphone. Then we chanted “Jordan first!”, sang the national anthem and raised the flag. Since it was the day before the Eid holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan, most of the girls were at home cooking or were taken to the larger city of Mafraq to shop. Consequently, the teachers didn’t even attempt to have class. I was paraded from room to room, where I was surrounded by girls bombarding me with questions. One group of twelve girls barricaded the door with desks to keep their teachers and the other students out and preceded to ask me about Hollywood movie stars. At their request, I sang “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic“, and tried not to cringe. They also showed me their best dances moves and begged me to shake like Shakira. And I did. Probably not my finest moment, but it sent them into a fit of giggles and they tried to imitate. Then they told me all about their plans to study at universities and become doctors or teachers. Despite their graffiti-covered school and isolation in the Badia, they had big dreams. I hope these earnest, ambitious girls are able to achieve everything they want.

Monday night we anxiously waited for the Eid announcement on television. When the news broke that the Eid would start on Tuesday, the kids ran through the house shouting “Eid bukra!” Since no public transportation runs during the holiday, the other students and I were picked up by a bus and taken back to Amman so we could be with our real homestay families during the holiday. I was honestly sad to leave my Badia family. As I was packing, Munira tried giving me her own dishdashes and hijabs to wear. She even pulled hair clips out of her daughters’ hair to give me as gifts. I was overwhelmed by her generosity and left with a box of cookies, a few hair clips, a hijab and a bolt of cloth to make my own dishdash. I hope to return some day, inshallah!

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Today I bought my first thob – which is the long, black, embroidered robe that is the traditional dress of Jordan. I’ll need to wear one because I’m heading off for the desert in the northeastern part of Jordan to live with a Bedouin family there for four days. I practiced my bargaining skills in the market downtown and returned happily home with my purchase. My host sisters thought it was hilarious to dress me up in the thob and hijab and parade me around the house. They asked me to pose in various places and positions, which was quite embarrassing considering we had guests over. The hijab felt really tight around my face, and I didn’t like that it covered my ears. I only had it on for about 20 minutes though – we’ll see how I do for four days.

I actually have no idea what I’m getting myself into. The program director handed all 22 of us a slip of paper with the name of our family and the small village where we’ll be living. We’re supposed to figure out how to get there ourselves – which is apparently an exercise in “experiential learning.” I suppose a combination of buses will get me there, but I haven’t yet managed to find my exact village on a map, and you can bet that Google Maps is absolutely no help. At least I know my village is close to Mafraq (some of my friends are so far east they’re practically to the Iraqi border). This will definitely be an opportunity to practice my Arabic. I know that my family has a few sheep and goats, a garden and electricity. I have no idea about the plumbing situation though. I also learned that my family is “very conservative” in a Bedouin society that’s already considered extremely conservative, so I’m must admit I’m a bit nervous about what this will be like. My program director also warned me not to take a walk to the north while I’m there because my village is just a few kilometers from the Syrian border. And yes, all of this information is probably adding gray to my mother’s hair.

Laura models her new thob in her host family’s kitchen.

My host family here in Amman has spent the past week trying to scare me about going to the Badia. My host brother especially loved to describe the giant, flesh-eating spider camels and the hyenas. They warned me that the last American student they hosted got lice in the Badia. Another rumor is that a Bedouin family locked an American student in a room for two days because they were worried about her “safety” or something. I’m sure these are all exaggerations, but I must admit that I’m nervous. I’m also worried about getting sick. Upon the recommendation of my family here in Amman, I have six liters of water weighing down my duffel and a mini-pharmacy of drugs to combat indigestion. But, I figure I can survive anything for just four days. Also, it will be nice to get out of Amman and see a different way of life.

When we return, Ramadan will be over, which means we have a 3-day celebration of food and family. And then everyone’s schedule will become significantly less nocturnal - hopefully!

Wish me luck! I promise to come back with some really great pictures.

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My newfound Jordanian friend invited me to her aunt’s house for iftar. Located on the outskirts of Amman, the house was lovely and had a beautiful garden and patio. Tonight’s specialty: munsuf, which is a bed of rice covered with lamb, and janeeb, which is a sauce made from dried yogurt. When I arrived, her aunts had their sleeves rolled up and were cleaning a sheep in the kitchen sink. Cleaning the head properly is the most important task. They washed out the mouth, nose, and ear holes, and then dropped it into a pot of boiling water. Later they put everything in a giant metal vat over a fire outside and boiled it for a few hours.

In the meantime, the aunts asked me to make an apple pie. One of the aunts had lived in the Midwest for a few years and she was hoping to see how I made this quintessential American dish. Without my grandma’s recipe or the familiar U.S. ingredients, I had to improvise a bit. Plus, she handed me a giant 16-inch dish. This was definitely the largest, strangest pie I’ve ever made. The maid went out and picked a giant bucket full of apples, so for most of the afternoon I sat at the kitchen table peeling and slicing while the other women buzzed around me, preparing the feast. They watched as I rolled out the giant ball of dough and helped me shape the crust. By the time twilight fell, I was streaked with flour, but I had a decent-looking pie ready for the oven.

For dinner, all the relatives came over to eat the munsuf. The women and I sat around one table, while the men all gathered around a giant plate of munsuf in another section of the courtyard. This was the first time I had eaten a meal separated by gender, but with so many guests perhaps it was just a matter of practicality. One of the men brought over a piece of the sheep’s brain for me to try. I couldn’t turn it down because it is considered a huge honor to be offered this delicacy. I popped it in my mouth and tried to chew it. It was horribly soft and salty, and it stuck to the roof of my mouth. I started to gag, but forced myself to swallow and smile. Many of the women started laughing and I feared I my face had betrayed me, but then they told me I was brave. Many of them don’t like the sheep’s brain either. My friend, however, licked up her piece of brain happily.

After dinner, the men gathered in one circle to smoke argeela, while the other women gathered in another circle to chitchat and eat qataief. I tried baking my pie in the oven, but I had trouble getting the right temperature. Also, I failed to turn on the top burner in the oven, so only the bottom of my pie was actually being cooked. Eventually, however, I pulled it out of the oven, baked to my satisfaction. In the meantime, the aunts had called more relatives to come over to the house to taste the apple pie. I was very nervous as I carried it out into the courtyard and served it to all the relatives. Of course, they all complimented me and said it was delicious, but when I tasted it I realized the crust wasn’t quite right. Oh well. The uncle who owned the house said to me, “Tonight you are just like my own daughter.” I felt so happy to be welcomed by the family.

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