Me⋅ta Is⋅ra⋅el

It’s a small world

I was reading Nell’s post on her first twelve hours in Afghanistan and I was amused by a particular observation she made:

“There is another party behind layers of security guards – in ritzy restaurants, basement bars, air-conditioned offices, Western-style supermarkets, and armored cars – to which flock the strangest mix of foreigners. There are adventurers, do-gooders, businesspeople, journalists, photojournalists, videographers, private contractors and private consultants, and security men who look like they just walked out of a gas station on the Jersey turnpike. To all of this, add one shameless tourist: me.”

Although the mix of foreigners in Israel isn’t quite of the eclectic caliber as those in Afghanistan, Nell’s observation reminded me of a conversation Birgit and I once had on Masada Street. (More later, on the significance of Masada). I was marveling how, though she and our friends at local NGO’s are only a small group of people, we very well might represent the foreigner stronghold in Haifa.

After a while, if you go to enough conferences and rallies, you begin to see the same faces recur. That’s how I became friends with Sarika and Iyad, who are now constants, and recently Suneela, who coincidentally knows the owner of Cafe Andala in Central Square. We both might work there this summer. This owner, Sami, is a Palestinian from East Jerusalem and, if I try hard enough, is probably distantly or closely related to every Arab member in my office. The point being: here we are gathered like scattered pieces, with scattered plans from around the world. Me, from Boston. Birgit, from the flat lands of Holland. Stephanie, from Belgium. Adam, a recent graduate of the London School of Economics. And if we joined hands and sang about world peace, we’d resemble those cheesy montages of children from around the world. But really there are so few people in the world — countable on our few fingers and toes — who are intensely interested in this region, these issues, and coming here.

To give my last piece of anecdotal evidence: On my way to document a Nakba protest (held concurrently with Israel’s independence day, to protest the destruction of Arab villages and population transfer in 1948), I met a Cornell law graduate and intern at Adalah, a prominent legal organization with UN consultative status. It came out in conversation that, last summer, he met a girl on his convoluted flight path through Russia who also lived and worked in the West Bank. This girl is the ex-roommate of my friend Tracy at Harvard. She and I party hopped once sophomore year. She’s in my year, spent the previous summer in Nablus, and now is studying abroad at Hebrew University. While some people might squint at these coincidences and conclude, “this is all meant to be, there’s a reason why you’re here.” To me, this is normal, random but wonderful collision.

On saying goodbye

I’ve gotten used to saying goodbye to friends in my “temporary lives,” whether at camp, in France or China. But while I did cry the night we delivered Dorina onto her train to Ben Gurion airport, it hasn’t been so hard to say goodbye. I don’t say this to cushion the strangeness of leaving: I honestly, adamantly know my friends here and I will see each other again. How many more times, for how long, with what frequency, I have no idea. But even this upcoming week, I will be spending with Dorina, a German-Palestinian, in Berlin.

Finally, the moral

Two lessons from globe trotting: the more I travel, the more I love home and the more I realize how I will anchor myself to my family in the future. The more I travel and the bigger I find the world is, ironically, the more it shrinks. The dark side of the second lesson is the global aristocracy. The class of citizens from first-world countries who can afford to travel and work abroad, who, as I tease Adam, jump from conflict to conflict. (In the last half decade, he’s been to South Africa, Northern Ireland, and immediately afterwards, Israel).

So, perhaps I should append a third lesson: as much as it’s been fascinating to learn about the legal and economic strategies to salvage some good from this conflict, first and foremost, to work abroad means that I become the humble, unlearned listener. One night, Iyad and I, buzzed on wine and whiskey, were talking about how different the world — as conceived by global institutes on rich university campuses — and the world — once one moves abroad — are.

Being in Israel, I feel the same reality check I experience every time I go to China. While China might be imaginatively associated with the Great Wall and red lanterns, I see it more authentically in: an angry woman, sweating through her dress and her hair mussed, arguing with a local vendor about the fairness of a vegetable scale. Or a man in a short-sleeved button shirt, cursing as he’s being squeezed off a bus. The rank smell of sweat, exhaust, and frying street food mingling. Not feeling that my feet can be clean for the whole summer.

theunscientificmethod:

I’ve been thinking a lot about contextuality, with regards to life. Events that are so insignificant in their motion-by-motion breakdown become so strangely relevant when read together with last week, with the thoughts behind your blurry eyes, that other person who is sitting so close but for the intrusion of a wall and a door. Sometimes I find myself craving the purity of a still image, everything stripped away but a few hundred pixels to the right and again to the left, up and down. A truth that exists in space but not in time, in image but not in person. But then I think. The context is what makes it all worthwhile – if only the context were different. 

listening to the call to prayer from the fourth floor of Mayroon and Maysoon’s family home. The sky is a dusty pink, and the neighborhood reminds me of the colonies of flat-roofed houses in India.

Today, I penned the last of many e-mail responses to the question “what are you doing in Israel?” Though I have the uninformative sidebar to the right and though I’m actually in my last month here — not my first, or even second — I think it’s time to belatedly explain my story.

When I first decided to take the spring semester off, I thought I’d work on a ranch, as I’ve lusted since Muching first told me about her coworker’s experience a year ago. To my dismay, I found that the winter staff was hired as early as late summer of the previous year. I also learned that the winter staff was much smaller because the high tourist season is in the summer. In January, and inspired by Nell’s fantastic blog on her year in India, I decided that a scenery change would be good for me. I set up two internships in India: first, one in a village outside of Chennai, for the Banyan, a mental health research institute. The second was at the Ashraya Initiative for Children in Pune. I bought my ticket, and planned to leave on February 12.

Only a week before my departure, I had a mild depressive attack in Eliot dining hall and ended up crying in front of Ben and Aparna. Though I can facetiously summarize those last few months now, I was wading in a personal hell. It’s hard for me to write about it now, not because it’s so painful but because it’s dim and far away, it’s hard to recall the precise feelings and words.

The point being, I realized: this was a break. This is not a period of time I should feel even more nervous about. I had never been so timid in my life. But I was trying to soothe and recuperate as best as possible. I called American Airlines, gave my ticket and credit card information and changed my itinerary to March 12.

The extra month in Boston felt wonderful but mostly slow and uncertain as molasses. I was living on the futon in my common room. I went back to my family’s home for only two of the weekends. I had a full-time job at Harvard Summer School, but most of my time was spent thinking about next steps: for the summer, for the upcoming school year, and even the year after. My mind was always leapfrogging towards more opportunities.

I applied for a Harvard Committee for Human Rights Studies internship grant to fund a project at the Mossawa Center in Israel. I also applied for Let’s Go Israel, the U.K. and Eastern Europe. I interviewed to be a proctor in Cambridge, in case I wanted to be back in the U.S. for the summer. Basically: I filled out lots of applications, had many phone interviews, and tweaked my resume.

The night before I left for India, Monica and Aparna came to my house to give my bulging suitcase a final blessing. They fell asleep around 1 AM, and an hour later, determined to have all my documents in order, I tried online check-in. I halfheartedly joked with myself, “it’d be just great if something went wrong.” Of course, something did. Every time I tried to log in with my record locater, the ever-helpful American Airlines website would inform me, in frightening bold letters, “Reservation status: canceled.” Now, I have a fairly good grasp on the English language. And I have a great ability to execute logistics. My mind could not process what “canceled” meant in this context, not with my suitcase perfectly packed, my colorful visa inviting me to the Republic of India, my carry-on with carefully selected books. I even had a newly purchased Lonely Planet South India.

After yelling at an AA representative on the phone, I discovered that when I tried to change my plane ticket in February — most likely due to the representative not entering my card information correctly — my billing information had never been processed. Meaning, the ticket I had put on hold for March was never confirmed. Meaning, that it had evaporated into thin air. Of course, the original ticket I purchased in February still existed, as stored credit. But if I wanted to travel with it to India, the earliest I could leave, when there weren’t extravagant fares, would be in two or three weeks.

Somehow, in the mind-melting crisis that followed, I found on Best Travel Store a hilariously cheap one-way ticket to Israel: 450 USD. With that price, usually, I’d get as far as San Francisco on an averagely priced day. Comparing that price with the AA fares to Israel, I decided to keep my stored credit, squeeze my eyes, and jump right into my Israel adventure — on a plane that would leave on Monday. I had less than four days before my departure.

Friends call me “random” but this story was the fat cherry on top of a slobbery sundae. Most were confused, my parents certainly were. Frequently asked questions were: what about your internships in India? Canceled. What about your plane ticket to India? Stored credit. Why didn’t you use the credit to go to Israel? Because the ticket prices were too high for the near future and there was no more point, sitting and waiting in Boston. Where the heck did the Israel plan come from? I’d applied for my job as early as February and I had received confirmation before the middle of the month. I applied for the grant and with my weird, confident hunch, had a feeling I’d get it. I was temporarily fronting the money from my savings.

So, to Israel I flew, with a four-hour layover in London where I drank breakfast tea and slept in the noisy terminal. The only information I had was a single email from my employer, whose voice I’d encountered once on a phone. She gave me sketchy instructions for how to find the building, the third floor of which I’d be living in, the first and second floor of which were my workplace. It was called the Mossawa Center. I had no idea who my housemates would be.

Two months later, all the stories and blog content that I’ve shared ensued. That’s the story of origin behind my adventure to Israel. If it’s taught me one thing about decision-making, it’s that life events are truly random. And I mean, random random not random-meaningful.There is no “better” or “right” decision — at least, not in my schizophrenic universe — but simply our own conviction.

This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation, but it’s one that took me a long time to grasp. It wasn’t even that I believed I was being blindly, faithfully prodded along towards a personal destiny. I just wanted to believe that there was a meaningful purpose catching me, even if I blundered in my personal choices. It’s like when you’re in grade school in the U.S. and they teach you these aspirational lessons: “you are special,” “follow your passion,” “figure out your calling.” It took this most bizarre first half of 2009 to realize, that I am not entitled to any special outcome. While I might have had my ego reinforced by going to a famous university, ultimately — in a great but also debilitating way — I have full power in shaping the course of my life. While we’re constrained by the inevitable prejudices and expectations of our context — culture, family, friends, peer pressure — finally, it just takes one’s own strength of mind to surge beyond that.

I’m not surging now, but living.

Coming up: my weekday routine in Israel, weekend excursions, my new status as a contributing writing to GoodEater.