Find Your Tribe

It was the advice of an American 20-something, sitting at NoodAsia in a swanky part of Amman. We were five at dinner, but each of us knew only one other before the meal began. I love gatherings like that. The three of us newbies sat enthralled as the other two described their impressions of life here, pieced together over a few years of exploring. I welcomed their insight, with only two months to piece together my own picture.

“Find your tribe,” she told us, “get yourself adopted by a Jordanian or Palestinian family.” (It’s estimated that 70-80 percent of Amman’s population is Palestinian). She described days spent hanging out at her family’s home, learning the rhythms and unspoken rules.

I liked her advice; as it's really why I came to the region in the first place. My family’s roots trace to Syria, but long enough ago that we’ve lost all connection beyond names, food, and faint stories. People hear my name and ask where my family’s from, unsatisfied until I claim Syria. It happened here, at the border. They asked where my father was from, and I answered the US, knowing full well that wasn’t what they meant. “No, but really, where is your father from.” “Syria.” “Ahh, yes.” And then they looked after me during the interminable wait for the bus.

I claim this heritage that I really know nothing about it. So I’ve come to explore – Syria a little, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. I started my summer in the region on a Lebanon Immersion Trip with thirty other students, organized by two Lebanese Harvard Kennedy School students. We spent two weeks exploring Lebanon as we met with top politicians. It was fascinating – the access was incredible, and as students, we could push on quite difficult questions. The Immersion Trip also included two days in Damascus, which involved a three-hour Q&A session with Assad. Imagine – I am the first of my family to return in over 60 years, and I enter with a Presidential escort. Our tour guide wanted to celebrate Syria's religious heritage, and so took us to a mosque, a church, and a synagogue. The synagogue is full of the icons collected from the 30 or so synagogues that were once open around the city, and is maintained by the head of Jewish communities in Damascus and Aleppo, and his sisters. The rest of their family left by the 90s, but they stayed - I didn't quite gather why. They don't have children, and, when asked of the future of the community, and the future of such spaces as the synagogue (which certainly isn't on the traditional tourist route), they said they take it day by day. I plan to return to Syria in a few weeks, and will this time make it up to the city my family is from. Inshallah.

My base for the summer is in Amman, working with the UN Iraq’s Information and Analysis Unit. It’s a new interagency effort to use the information available on Iraq to strategically guide humanitarian and development programming and policy. I’ve been put on a few really interesting projects, including a trends analysis of key indicators in Iraq over the last 30 years, and developing district-level profiles of the political and social situation. I’m in search of a topic for my thesis, so hope one of these will evolve into that. For now, I’m reading whatever I can and talking to anyone who will take a few minutes. It’s fascinating.

A post-script: The American who gave me the advice has been here two years, which was how long I lived in Ethiopia before I started grad school. She described the range of emotions she’s felt here, as it becomes more and more her home. They were the same that I felt in Ethiopia, and it helped us both to think of them not as unique to our countries of residence, but more to our own adjustment process. I will return to Ethiopia this coming weekend – my first visit since I left, almost exactly two years ago. I’ve heard it’s changed a lot, but still I find I imagine myself in all my old haunts as if nothing’s different.