Postcard From Kuwait
Follow one journalism student's two-week journey in the Middle East.
-
Home
After saying goodbye to our friends, rushing through airports in Jordan, Kuwait and Chicago and flying over half the world, we’re finally back in Arkansas.
The past couple of days have been a blur. The shock of an 8-hour time difference is hard to deal with, especially when we have to hit the ground running on catching up with classwork. I’ve started to unpack and give the gifts I bought to their recipients, and I’ve been able to check off a big load of laundry from my to-do list.
Though I’m thankful to be home and with familiar faces and surroundings and routine, I miss my new friends who are now 7,000 miles away. I feel like I owe so much to so many—Arkansas State University and its supportive faculty, our guides who did everything they could to make our trip the best it could be, our warm and generous friends who welcomed us into their homes, and even strangers who were so excited to share their way of life and learn more about ours.
It was the trip of a lifetime and words fail me to express the experience. I’ve learned so much and have an intimate connection with another part of the world now. I hope I can adequately share the depth of that connection with others so we can continue to grow as people and as a global society, despite being separated by time and distance. We may look different on the outside, but behind the initial layers lies the commonality that makes us all human, living on the same planet and wanting the same for ourselves, our families and our future.
“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”
- Socrates
-
An actual postcard from Kuwait.
-
Yesterday we visited the ancient Roman ruins of the cities Jarash and Gadara in Jordan. (top) Roman ruins in Jarash. (left) Ruins in Gadara. (right) The view from Gadara in Umm Qais, Jordan, overlooking the Syrian and Israeli borders.
-
The second leg
As fun as Kuwait was, our friends in Jordan have been awaiting our arrival there since we landed in the Middle East two weeks ago. After leaving Kuwait yesterday, we’ve gotten to explore the country we originally landed in but didn’t have time to leave its airport.
Located on the opposite side of Kuwait’s border with Saudi Arabia and a little over 700 miles away from Kuwait City, Jordan is a very different place compared to our original stop. Where Kuwait is mostly sand and desert, much of Jordan is covered with greenery—short and stout olive trees with silvery leaves, grape vines with bunches of fruit hanging heavy, and lots of spots of grass and shrubs. The air is different, too, with more moisture and less dust than we experienced in our stay in Kuwait.
Today we met up with two Jordanian alumni of Arkansas State University, our friends Tahat and Bakr. With them we traveled to the ancient Roman cities of Gadara and Jarash. In Gadara we spent the afternoon walking the stone streets and ate dinner on the top of the hill overlooking the Jordanian borders with Israel and Syria. It’s an amazing view and an unforgettable place, made even better by a cool breeze drifting over the mountains as the sun went down.
Today we’re packing our things and getting ready to leave Jordan for the United States. I already miss Kuwait and the incredibly kind, generous people we met there. I can only imagine how much I will miss both stops once we’re home.
-
More interesting bits—(top) The front page of an English daily newspaper, the Kuwait Times. Ads on the front page are rarely seen in the U.S., and never are they so large. (bottom) A bottle of “Obama” fragrance at the local Friday Market.
-
Yesterday we spent the morning on Failaka Island off the Kuwaiti mainland. The island was heavily hit when Iraq invaded the country in 1990 and much of the destruction the Iraqi army caused can still be seen—collapsed buildings, bullet holes and abandoned tanks and vehicles. In the midst of these ruins, the island offers a historical museum, restaurant and a beautiful view of the Arabian Gulf and its blue-green waters.
-
More food—Machboos (top left) is the national dish of Kuwait and consists of meat cooked over a bed of rice and eaten with a tomato-based sauce (bottom left).
-
Fixing the one-way conversation
Perhaps the most striking thing I’ve realized while being here is the amount of penetration the West has into this society, and the equally large lack of reciprocation.
From movies, music, restaurants, cars and even language, the West continually streams into Kuwait and the Middle East as a whole. You can walk into any mall in this city (and there’s a lot of them) and find the same stores you’d be able to find in a mall in the U.S. Even more surprising, few if any change their product lines to suit different cultural tastes. While there are some exceptions—like the chicken on pita bread McArabian at McDonald’s—the same shirt you see in the Gap in Jonesboro, Ark. is the same shirt you’ll see in Kuwait City. And while there’s obviously a lot of Arabic in Kuwait, the amount of times I’ve been in a situation where I couldn’t communicate in English can be counted on one hand.
For tourists and ex-pats, the West’s dominance means a more uniform world and an easier transition from one culture to another. But for societies with age-old traditions that developed separately from those of the West, it means a gradual erosion of exactly what makes the world such a rich and varied place.
As a journalism student, I’m particularly interested in the one-way conversation in Western media. The amount of ourselves that we export is staggering. But how much are we getting back, and how much of this world are we really seeing?
Very little, I’d say. In international coverage in the U.S. we see a lot of Europe and maybe Asia, but the amount of coverage of the Middle East is miniscule and really only when something bad is happening. The events of 9/11 filled a void in the public’s mind about the Middle East with information that was anything but a complete picture. Muslim extremists aren’t the norm, not all Arab societies are the same, and not all Arab people feel the same way about the West.
The so-called Arab Spring—the democratic upheavals of several Arab governments in the past year or so—has drawn a lot of attention to even more Middle Eastern conflict than was already on people’s minds in the West. This region is changing rapidly and in many ways wrestling with who it wants to be—traditional and Arab, modern and Western, or some combination of these. But it’s not the whole story.
I’ve seen for a fact there is peace here. The people walking at night to the grocery store down the street don’t walk in fear. Coming from the U.S. where children might as well be on a leash (and, amusingly, sometimes are), the freedom Kuwaiti parents give their children to roam away from them in public is striking. People really feel that safe.
What can the West and its people do to prevent divisions being created based on ignorance and fear? How can those of us in the media work to more faithfully represent reality? Opening our eyes to our fellow human beings and learning as much as we can about each other is a necessary step if we are going to begin real, two-way dialog where everyone is respected amidst their differences. It’s the only way we can possibly hope for peace.
-
Traveling ain’t always easy—or simple.
-
Our group at the Kuwait News Agency, an arm of the Kuwaiti government comparable to the Associated Press. Can you guess which one I am?
