I’m currently in Boston, living in an area that more closely resembles suburbia than anywhere I’ve resided in a long time.  There are no cul-de-sacs, which where the feature of suburban planning that most tortured me when I spent a summer walking door-to-door registering voters when I was eighteen–what’s apparently efficient for cars is quite the opposite for walkers–but here I’m still forced to traverse on foot distances that were scaled for motorized vehicles, walking twenty minutes to buy vegetables that I could have found by walking two minutes in any direction from my dwellings in Damascus and New York.  It’s a residential neighborhood, so also in contrast to Damascus and New York (two very different cities in other respects) the small houses are set a little ways apart from each other, and also from the street; there are trees in between the sidewalks and the asphalt, and everything is very neat and clean, probably because no one walks, very few people take the bus, and there is only a small pocket of time between leaving one’s house and climbing into one’s car in which everybody else could damage the area in any way.  The houses are pretty, though, in the rather New England way of pale-colored clapboards, and from mine I can walk to several small malls filled with the chain restaurants I associate mostly with airport layovers, one moderately fancy chain hotel, several liquor stores, many hair salons, a few humdrum “ethnic” restaurants, at least as many Dunkin’ Donuts as there are Starbucks in my own hometown, and the Mystic River of Hollywood infamy, though I haven’t discovered any bodies dumped into it.  I take two buses to get anywhere in Boston, and two buses home, and I come back to an apartment of white walls and polished hardwood floors in which the only furniture is the table, chair, and futon in my bedroom.  I have a roommate, but I haven’t met him, only seen traces of his presence in the apartment while I’ve been out: three days ago there was only my food in the fridge, and two days ago he left a bowl of peaches, and today they’re gone.

If near-suburbia is slightly depressing, however, at least it’s easy to escape it through my job at an “inner-city” school, in an area of Boston that was described as a “ghetto” by friends who grew up in the city (although all the word showed me was that they’d never visited this neighborhood, since that turned out to be a gross exaggeration).  I teach Arabic to high school students at a summer program led by a crusading public high school teacher with three Masters degrees who’s out to change who, exactly, can study this language.  It is, in fact, pretty difficult to get very far with Arabic if you’re not from a certain socio-economic class, as a list of my CASA classmates’ alma maters’ suggets: Harvard, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania… In short, it’s difficult to get into Arabic, much less continue with it, outside of only a handful of higher-education institutions–and the few high schools that are beginning to teach Arabic are overwhelmingly private and expensive prep schools.  The program I teach with, however, is free to all students, who recieve a $500 scholarship if they pass the course; in addition, students whose families make less than a certain amount each year are also paid $8.00 for each hour they spend in class, in order to enable them to study rather than work in the summer.  So a majority of the students are from racial or ethnic “minorities”; about half are from public high schools; and just under half don’t speak English as their first language.  The mixed relationships these students have with educational institutions can make teaching a challenge, mainly because it isn’t always clear whether we should prioritize teaching Arabic for those who will continue to study it in college, or making Arabic “fun”–which is one way, but perhaps the slowest way, to  teach it–in order to try to spark an interest in Middle Eastern issues for those who aren’t already, or simply giving kids who have very few opportunities to travel a wider perspective on the world.  Ideally, of course, we’d do all three, but the press of time usually means we have to pick and choose–something I’ll write a little more about later.

How the president uses language matters; it shapes the way the media and the way both his supporters and detractors use it as well.  That’s one reason I was glad to have a president who’s dropped the us-against-them spiel and who employs a higher level of discourse, even if he doesn’t always follow through with concrete actions.

Today, my mother brought my attention to a good example of the way that Obama’s speech is being used to frame the political debate in America, with both positive and negative consequences.  She called to recommend that I turn on our local public radio station to listen to a debate between Portlanders at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Israel and Palestine, and when I did, I found that the precise issue under debate was whether or not Obama was fair in asking Israelis to halt the expansion of the settlements, using this part of Obama’s speech as a jumping-off point:

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s
right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United
States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  This
construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to
achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

This is a great example of the disconnect between the debate within America and in the Arab world, which Obama’s speech mostly failed to bridge.  Although I hate to speak for other people, I think it’s already self-evident to most Arabs that the Israeli settlements need to stop; furthermore, it is also already clear that the existing settlements need to be removed.  For the radio debate moderator, however, the question of the removal of existing settlements was a secondary one that he only brought up later on.  If Obama had called for the removal of these settlements, however, he could have encouraged the political debate to bypass the far less pertinent question of a halt and cut straight to this more key issue (which is not, by the way, even a subject of debate in the Arab world that I’ve ever seen).

There’s quite a contradtion in the quotation above, in which Obama calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, but not necessarily the removal of settlements, in the same breath.  I’m not sure how there could possibly be a Palestinian state with the Israeli settlements fragmenting the West Bank as they do.  The best (or at least most visually interesting) representation of this is the widely-circulated image called “L’archipel de Palestine orientale,” which I saw on the wonderful blog Strange Maps, that skillfully conveys the way that Israeli settlements and the Oslo zoning process (which dictated which pieces of the West Bank would be under Israeli and PA control) have reduced the West Bank to a series of “islands,” the sum of which don’t equal a single, governable state.  One could logically be against the creation of a Palestinian state and also against the removal of settlements, but not for the former and against the latter, and this is the more important question that should have been brought up for debate.

To be fair, of course, Obama didn’t say he was against the removal of settlements; he just didn’t call for it.  It remains to be seen whether he’ll find the political courage to do so.

I missed most of the delivery of Obama’s speech since it fell on the day before I left Syria, and I was rather preoccupied with other matters; however, one of the things I’d never thought about being shocked by in America is the glowing way people still talk about Obama, whom most Americans in the Middle East (not to mention Arabs themselves) cooled on a while ago.  I read the text of the speech later on, and there’s no doubt it was great rhetoric, with a real attempt to strike a conciliatory and cooperative tone; however, it was not greeted in the Middle East with quite the adulation that it seems to have received from American liberals.  For American readers of the blog, Global Voices is a good place to read summaries of Middle Eastern bloggers’ reactions to the speech:

A GV article charactized Egyptian bloggers’ responses:

While many praised his eloquence, charisma, intelligence and awareness
of Arab and Islamic history, more believed it was just the same talk
they had heard from other presidents but in a better wrapping. Also,
they almost all agreed they are waiting for “action” to prove the
supposed “good intentions.”

Another Global voices article also summarized other Middle Eastern bloggers’ reactions, which struck a similar tone.

Obama had a hard path to walk; if I’m impressed by any of his comments, it’s in light of the internal American political scene and the rhetoric I’ve become accustomed to from our politicians. Part of the problem, however, is that what may seem a radical admission for an American president–that Islam contributed to Western civilization, that Hamas enjoys some support among Palestinians, that Palestinians suffer from an occupation–are already glaringly and painfully obvious to someone outside of the American political context. Hearing them acknowledged may be mildly gratifying, but not as gratifying as it would be to seem them used as a basis for action.

I left Bab Sharqi at 2:30 pm yesterday; now it’s 10:45 pm, Syria time, on the following day and I’m still not home.  Gotta love the West Coast.  But at least I can cross borders easily, unlike my friends back in Syria, who pay for hundreds of dollars in application fees for visas that are never issued, or take months to emerge out of the bowels of the bureaucracy.  I’ve heard of Americans being question upon returning to Syria from the U.S., so I mentally prepared myself for the possibility of being delayed and missing my next flight.  However, the border official who stamped my passport coming in was an amicable middle-aged man with a fluffy gray beard who wasn’t too concerned with the details of my travels.

“Do you know some Spanish?” he asked me conversationally.

“Umm…a little,” I said, more than a little perplexed by the question.

He peered at the customs form I’d filled out, at the space where one lists the countries one has visited while outside of the U.S.

“Oh…Syria,” he said.  “I thought you had written Spain.”  He didn’t ask me if I knew any Arabic.

Getting through the Egyptian airport the previous evening was a little more challenging, since the official in charge of transit first tried to insist that there was no flight to New York that night and that he would find me a hotel to stay in instead; after some arguing, he checked and found out that there was indeed a flight, but set up a special chair for me to wait in by myself for assistance because apparently transferring to a Delta flight required extra procedures.  At first I found the Egyptians cold in comparison to Syrian friendliness, but they warmed up after one was impressed by my Arabic and insisted for several minutes that I must be from an Arab country.  I showed him my passport but perhaps he couldn’t read English very well; at any rate, he didn’t change his mind.  He was so enthusiastic about the idea that I finally told him my family was Syrian but had lived in the U.S. for a long time, and hoped there were no Syrians walking by at the moment, since they would see through my story in a minute.  He found the answer extremely satisfying and devoted personal attention to finishing up my paperwork, which took several hours nonetheless.

Everything in the U.S. airports–all I’ve seen of the country, up till now–seems ridiculously shiny and new.  The fast food tastes ridiculously like plastic.  And  I no longer feel like The Other; that has to be the strangest thing.

I’m leaving Syria tomorrow, a fact which is a cause for intense excitement (that I’ll be able to see my family and friends) and sadness (for many other reasons).  I’ll be back in Portland, Oregon on Saturday in the early evening.  After spending time in my home city and visiting a cousin in Alaska (also really exciting), I’m going to teach Arabic to public high school students in Boston for a month and a half (anyone looking for a subletter?).  And after that egregious use of far too many parentheses comes…who knows?

…but this is just annoying.

While Delta has started charging passengers $40 to check two bags, they make the following exception:

U.S. Military personnel on active duty with travel orders may check in 10 bags on Delta aircraft or 4 bags on Delta Connection® carriers at no additional charge. Each bag has a maximum weight of 100 lbs (45 kg) and size of 80 linear inches (203 cm).

Wow, so military personel could potentially load down the plane with up to 1000 pounds of luggage, for free?  What on earth are they bringing?  And given that I’d kind of rather not know, why should I subsidize it?  Bah.

In Arabic, it says “sharqiyat batman;” I assume that the latter word is someone’s name, while “sharqiyat” means the sort of antique-looking “eastern” trinkets that a lot of tourist-oriented shops sell.  In this shop owner’s translation, however, he became…Oriental Batman!

CASA ended last week.  We had a party and somebody brought a cake with our photo on it:

We lit the candles and everyone decided it would be ironic and funny if we celebrated our lack of American nationalism and Amerian funding by singing patriotic songs, most of which I barely knew the words to.  It was neat repeat of one of the more awkward moments of my birthday party, in which the Americans found the irony of singing the national anthem quite hilarious, while the Europeans and Syrians didn’t find it remotely amusing but tried to be excessively polite about it anyhow.

One of our teachers asked us to go around the room and report moments that we’d never forget from the past year.  I said I’d always remember M going up to the bored employee puffing coolly on a cigarette at the Department of Passports and Immigration, then shouting in his face, “Smoking is prohibited!”  R said she’d never forget how good I was at acting like a prostitute, as my entire class discovered when we staged an inpromptu rendition of Sa’dallah Wannous’s “A Day From Our Time” and my portrayal of the pimp/whore was said to be especially convincing.

Joking aside, it’s hard to express how grateful I am to have had this chance to study in Damascus, in this program in particular.  While each semester presented its own challenges, I couldn’t have asked for more dedicated teachers, or more wonderful and thought-provoking classmates, from whom I learned just as much as I did from any professor or text.  Additionally, I couldn’t have asked for more enjoyable or complicated city to spend a year in.   The continuation of CASA as a program in Damascus has recently been called into question for reasons of internal politics and minute power struggles, but I’m happy to report that it’ll be held for at least another year so that a new group of Casawiin can enjoy the same chances that my friends and I have; hopefully, it’ll continue for many more to come.