When I was twenty-five I left Iowa for an adventure. Time is a rubber band; bending and snapping back into place. The past six years have been stretched to contain the experiences of a lifetime lived longer than my current age. From traipsing around Jaipur with fifty Egyptian tenth graders in tow, to learning to free dive to witnessing the rise and fall of a government, my adult life has been one discovery after another. It has been like walking through Middle-Eastern markets; wandering the ancient alleys, completely losing your way and then stumbling upon the very thing you didn’t know you needed in your life until that precise moment.
My writing notebooks are my photo albums, cataloging stories that matter to me. It has the snapshot of the sweet potato salesman giving food to the blind beggar with whom he shares a corner. It is the image of my friend Marwa, Costa coffee in hand, apologizing for her silence these past two months, explaining that she traveled to Italy in …show more content…
Life abroad is at once demanding and stressful as it is beautiful. The cliché, life is messy, has never proven more poignant then these last few years in which global headlines double as my daily reality. These are conflicts born out of a sense of justice and sense of loyalty to themselves, their family and their culture, or in short, their identity. And, I am deeply interested in issues of identity, having had my own identity defined, redefined and examined through the lenses of friends from Westerns and non-Western backgrounds alike. Through, navigating relationships on both sides of the secular and religious, foreigner and local divides I am continually amazed at the paradox of globalization and division. The more communication has improved, the more easily we have found like-minded individuals with whom we can create our own echo chambers, isolating our ideas from each
My writing notebooks are my photo albums, cataloging stories that matter to me. It has the snapshot of the sweet potato salesman giving food to the blind beggar with whom he shares a corner. It is the image of my friend Marwa, Costa coffee in hand, apologizing for her silence these past two months, explaining that she traveled to Italy in …show more content…
Life abroad is at once demanding and stressful as it is beautiful. The cliché, life is messy, has never proven more poignant then these last few years in which global headlines double as my daily reality. These are conflicts born out of a sense of justice and sense of loyalty to themselves, their family and their culture, or in short, their identity. And, I am deeply interested in issues of identity, having had my own identity defined, redefined and examined through the lenses of friends from Westerns and non-Western backgrounds alike. Through, navigating relationships on both sides of the secular and religious, foreigner and local divides I am continually amazed at the paradox of globalization and division. The more communication has improved, the more easily we have found like-minded individuals with whom we can create our own echo chambers, isolating our ideas from each