Tearing Down My Walls

This weekend was great.  I spent too much money and was finally able to see through my own emotions.  When I first came to Jordan, I was very lonely.  Although during the first 2 weeks I was surrounded by a Jordanian family, I didn’t know them and we had a hard time communicating.  I cried a lot during the first two weeks.  But then I was determined to make friends and to adjust to my surroundings.  As those who have fallowed my blog know, things moved so quickly and I was constantly adjusting to situations and doing what I had to do to get by. 

This weekend as I went shopping, I found some presents to send back home and I realized that in order for my presents to get home in time for Christmas, I need to send them this week.  So I bought these presents and started to plan on how I could send them.  Once I got home, I organized everything and then it finally struck me that I wouldn’t be going home for Christmas.  It started to bring everything into reality.  I sat there and realized that for the first Christmas in my life, I wouldn’t be with my family.  I wouldn’t get to go home.  Rojeh, my boyfriend, walked in and saw the tears in my eyes and tried to comfort me.  We had already planned to have Christmas between the two of us and he even brought me a Christmas tree but I know it won’t be the same as seeing all the people that I’ve known and loved my whole life.

Afterwards we went to our neighbor’s/friend’s house and I just wanted to watch TV as Rojeh and our friend talked, but then our friend started to talk about me.  He said that I was very strong.  I came all the way from a different country, over 12 hours away by plane, with no friends and no family.  Whenever you leave a country to go to another, like I did and like he did when he moved to the US twenty years ago, you have to start all over.  You leave everything and have to start working up from the bottom.  He said that he expects to see me on the TV someday working for the embassy or something.  He told Rojeh that he was all that I had.  That Rojeh is everything for me here.  I didn’t want to hear it because it is true.  Every time I go home to my apartment, I feel trapped by my daily handicaps from being a foreign girl in the Middle East that doesn’t speak Arabic.  I know that to leave home alone will be another struggle to explain what I want and what I need.  Sometimes it feels easier to just stay home.

I think after having to struggle for so long, you just get numb to everything and you do what is necessary in order to get by and to try to get ahead.  I feel like I’ve been here for two months and I have been a spectator in both of them.  I watch the people and I do what I need to survive.  I make friends just to quench the ache of loneliness.  Much of my life here has been internal filled with prayer and inward thoughts.  So often Rojeh ask me why I’m quiet and what I’m thinking about and I just rely “To much.”  I think about politics, public opinion, tradition, human conditions, money, and also my future, but I did very little living.  I’ve made very little real connections with people and I only have one person who I feel like I can be completely honest with here.  Most of the foreigners here are focused knowing that their time here will soon be over, but I think it’s different for me because I know that I will be here in the future. 

Before I came here, I was afraid that the Middle East wouldn’t be everything that I wanted to it to be.  Once I got here I wasn’t dissatisfied.  To me it was just different people in a different part of the world.  In the end, we are all people.  The more I learn and observe, I have felt my passion for this part of the world and dreams to help improve life here grow.  My goals for my own life have only become stronger and I know that my life will never be satisfied if I don’t make a difference here.  There is so much need around me—I have to make a difference.  With that in mind, I know that I can’t just be a numb foreigner here just as a tourist being a spectator, but eventually I will have to start accepting part of my identity as being connected to the people here.  I need to learn how to be comfortable here and how to just live life here.  I know that part of that will come once I become stronger in the language, but overall, I need to start actually making a life here because I know I will be returning. 

At least for the first month that I was here, I had dreams night after night where I was back at home and I would wake up and have to remember where I was.  It was always in shock when I remembered that I was in Jordan.  I think that is part of what made it so hard to be here in the beginning.  Now I have dreams about parts of my life that I miss, like silly enough, my cat.  I know eventually I will be able to create something solid once I finish my undergraduates’ degree and start working, but it makes things hard.  When I was home I didn’t want anything to be solid because I know I would be leaving, now that I’m here I just think about how I can’t get to solid here because I’ll be leaving.

 We went to the Rabad Castle in Ajloin (northern Jordan) this past weekend and we got there just in time for them to close.  Thanks to true Arab arguing, we were able to get in for free and we were convinced that I’m a Jordanian.  As I was looking over the mountainsides off the top of the castle, I felt like I was not only looking at the countryside, but at a nation, a people, and a cause.  Afterwards we then went into town to wait for someone else to need a ride to Amman and we just drove around the town and I got to see the people.  Of course, people in a city and in a village are completely different, but they strengthened my passion.  I guess we all need those moments that drive us forward.  That one was just one more of mine.