Broomsticks

Each morning I wake up and anxiously check my email to find what progress I've made in my seemingly endless effort to break into Kakuma. I had been instructed by the Senior Protection Officer at the Kenyan Department of Refugee Affairs to make travel arrangements to get up to the camp pending final approval, so all of my logistics had been tidily squared away this past week. Today I awoke to a cryptic email instructing me to get approval from the Ministry of Higher Education, ostensibly because I'm doing research. This email comes two days before I leave, and doesn't include a contact or a means of obtaining approval. I have been wrangling with him for weeks and have obtained full approval from UNHCR, who administer the camp. I am speechless.

Now I assume this is cultural and that nothing comes easily, right? But I also must assume that this man does not want me to go to this refugee camp. He has sent me to get the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. I sent emails to every contact I could find at the Ministry of Education. It turns out there isn't exactly a Ministry of Higher Education, per se. He's directed me to a nonexistent agency, which has absolutely no discernible governance over the refugee sector. I will continue with the full press. There's nothing else I can do - this has become my mission in life. I am feeling a huge weight though, and a creeping desire to cry.

The same batch of email brought an acceptance for my research proposal on 'Educating the Most Vulnerable: The Experience of Unaccompanied Minors in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp,' which I had submitted to the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council annual conference committee. So, I am really excited to have the opportunity to present my paper next spring at that conference- I've never done anything remotely like that. But it will not be possible without visiting Kakuma. It's all hingeing on the one thing. No pressure, no pressure at all.

Focus on Kakuma

The past month of my life has been consumed almost entirely by one thought - getting permission to go to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya when I'm traveling with my DePaul study abroad group in the country for three weeks starting in late November. Permission to travel to the camp and enter it is difficult to obtain and the bureaucratic obstacles are formidable even if I weren't on a different continent with a nine hour time difference. I have a plan to do a needs assessment and interviews there on unaccompanied minor education that will allow me to complete my Master's thesis and ultimately work for advocacy and policy change to help these most vulnerable children.

The area of Kenya that the camp is situated in is desolate by any standard. Kakuma is located near Southern Sudan and was originally created to host the tens of thousands of refugees streaming in from the Sudanese civil war. It is now home to as many as 75,000 Sudanese, Somalians, Burundians, Ethiopians, Rwandans and Congolese (depending on who's counting). Commercial flights to the region are only to Lokichogio an hour and a half away, with the exception of a single weekly UNHCR flight from Nairobi, and military escort must be arranged for any road travel to the camp because of the threat of bandits. Aid and NGO workers leave the camp by dark because of the precarious security situation within the camp itself.

Because of these relative risks, UNHCR and Kenya's Department of Refugee Affairs take very seriously their responsibility to protect those within the camp and those asking to come to visit the camp. I cannot tell you how many different people I have had to plead with to get as far as I have, which is now hovering on the edge of approval to visit. The net result of all of these efforts is a weight of responsibility on my shoulders - the research I am doing, the experience I am planning had better be worth it for the refugee children I will study, the UNHCR staffers who have aided me along the way, and for myself and the effort I'll be undertaking.

If all goes as planned, I will be splitting off from my DePaul group the first week in December, flying from Kisumu in the southwest back to Nairobi and up to Lokichogio and then driving back down by escort to the camp. During the three days I'm at the camp I will survey, perform a needs assessment and interview as many of the educators and counselors who are working with the unaccompanied minors as is feasible. What's working? What is funded and what is underfunded? What is conceived at a desk in DC that doesn't translate in Kakuma? I assume the project will become very organic and that needs and shape will present themselves on the ground. I am adaptable and can capture what comes. A UNHCR plane will take me back to Nairobi and then I will need to fly back to Kisumu and find the DePaul group for the remainder of the study abroad trip.

I am so hopeful that this happens. I am committed to this purpose personally, professionally and spiritually. I will take pictures and document the entire journey -- not just Kakuma but throughout Kenya (Kibera! Lake Victoria! Elephant orphanage!), in this space.

The email in which the professor implodes

The study abroad program that brought me to Jordan was run through my graduate school and was, well, imperfect. How do you say that an experience that had so many life-changing and really amazing moments was fundamentally broken? But it was. There were so many things wrong with the way it was run. I say that, yet I would go again in a second. It's a complicated feeling.

Our professor, an Italian man who in large part put the program together, sent out an email to the students today filled with anger and obvious pain at the negative feedback that he'd received through course assessments and complaints to his department chair. The feedback was so bad that he has apparently been relieved of his overall Study Abroad duties. He wrote that he believes that our negative response means that he must have set the bar too high for us and that, 'perhaps naively,' he thought we could handle the opportunities he gave us. He now thinks he should have 'planned the program just with some visits in the refugee camps and playing with the kids.' His defensiveness stings me and, reflexively, I feel guilty.

As I'm looking back on it now from about a month and a half of perspective, I almost embrace the extreme amount of emotional and physical drama that was going on around me during the trip. Perhaps not getting timely food, water, sleep and emotional support while experiencing what I did in Jordan made me more able to be raw enough to be open to those experiences. It's a dangerous game because I really did feel emotionally unstable there at times. How far can you be pushed before it really is too far? There is no question that it was one of the most formative times in my life and that I have been struggling to explain that to people who are important to me since my return.

To our coordinator and caretaker Mohammad, first of all, and to the professors Marco and Nesreen, I will always be grateful for having seen so many things that truly changed my life. The smiles of the children of Jerash and Baqa'a camp. The stones and columns and expanses of the ruins of Jerash. The tragic, intricate story of the Bedouin. The six shooting stars at Feynan - one more than I'd ever seen in a row and endlessly more if I'd stayed on that roof. The spooky, timeless miracle of Petra. The Kafkaesque and Brobdingnagian (!!) US Embassy and its symbolism of all we are and aren't in the Mideast. The average, middle-aged white men who decide where to spend the $500 million the US government sends each year to Jordan. I'll stop - but the point is the same - the trip had an enormous impact on us, but imagine what it would have done were it to have been run efficiently; with sensible logistics and a framing theme and instructors engaged by their students rather than by amassing Memorandums of Understanding for future missions. Sigh. Knowing that to be true does not make me any less of a sophisticated professional, nor any less intellectually capable of comprehending the opportunities of the capacity-building and refugee material presented; but it does make me sadder and more aware of what could be a negative butterfly effect on my school and the programs in Jordan.

At swim one bird

I'm deciding to keep up with this blog, for my own purposes, even now that it has no strict academic outlet. Soon I'll be prepping for the arguably even more arduous 3 week trip to Kenya in November, and I'll need this even more. I'm still not happy with how it's reading and my tone and general content. In part that's because I've had to be careful about the audience and the fact that I know it's had to be graded. And I am always a political person so I need to be conscious of not putting anything in print that shouldn't be out there. Having said that, I'm still writing. It was a frustrating thing not to be able to write about the moment that I realized that average, middle-aged white men are still running the world - but perhaps I will document that, complete with photographic evidence, in a month or two.

On a personal level, I am very much still at sea. I seem to be in limbo. Not able to communicate about the issues that are consuming me - issues like the geopolitics of the MidEast, proper application of AIDS funding, and What I'm Going To Do With My Life. This is where my brain is spinning most days. School is starting back up and that will help very much. I seem to be unable to vocalize these thoughts much outside of my academics, so school will get me out and speaking again. Arguably, social interaction and intellectual human conversation is a good thing. I wonder, is this a normal thing when one is undergoing a career change that involves a shift in modes of thinking and emotional perceptions? Do other people have to withdraw and reorient themselves? I am really having difficulties with feeling relevant to the kind of basic neighborhood/suburban conversations that I need to be involved in. Somewhere in Jordan the guidewires that tethered me to my lifestyle here in Oak Park were sheared off. Were my family not so deeply connected, I feel as if I could pick up John and the girls and go any number of places.

So once again, I'm looking for answers. Does anyone have any? I am very humble. If you have any to offer, I would accept them most gratefully. Fast answers, slow answers, long-term, short-term, tomorrow, today. These are very complicated puzzles we're all working out.

Bedouins

During our visit to Jordan, we had the opportunity to experience Bedouin culture in several different contexts. Our first contact was with a Bedouin municipality in central Jordan, where we met with leaders of two local tribal societies who had formed a cooperative to address critical issues such as water scarcity, land stewardship and social welfare that have threatened the very existence of the Bedouins. The Bedouin as a whole are comprised of hundreds of tribes who travel nomadically in the region of Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria. As with indigenous people all over the world, their existence has been threatened by politics, globalization and the realities of life in 2010, with traditional values giving way to gradual, grudging acceptance of modernization.

Later that same day, spending time in the tents of Bedouin, with the women segregated in one section and the men in another, as we did in an encampment near Feynan, I had the sense of viewing a lifestyle that had changed only slightly in the past hundreds of years. The tent’s tarpaulin roof was supported by smooth, honed wooden poles and the floor was composed of colorful rugs and blankets smoothly laid on the desert floor. Our hosts welcomed us with all the warmth that the Bedouin tradition prescribed – ‘three days of welcome before they ask your name, after that they may ask your name and choose whether to welcome you further.’ This was the mantra and I loved hearing it said over and over like a prayer. We had sweet, bitter tea and spoke in low tones and it was so easy to pretend away the centuries. It saddens me greatly, as it does so many others, to think of this disappearing— so the challenge continues, find a way for the Bedouin to endure and not become an anachronism. Find a way for sustainability and for the maverick beauty that they represent to so many to make sense in our century.


In this particular region, pooling resources has allowed the tribal societies to share funding and expertise, as well as to collaborate on the essential efforts of schools, health centers, charitable societies and a women’s center. These facilities represent ‘resettlement,’ an effort that is fraught with contradictions for an indigenous people whose very lifestyle has been defined by nomadic tradition. The Bedouin tribes have traveled the deserts and arid lands of this region for thousands of years , living out of tents using intimate knowledge of the land and environment to farm and support their livestock.

Understanding the particular needs of the Bedouins is notoriously difficult, bordering on impossible for outsiders; and the leaders of the cooperative explained that volunteers were scarce. The representative who spoke to our group was frank – those who did volunteer either left after a short period of time or developed programs that didn’t meet the particular needs of the community. As he explained, the educational system has been so poor for so long that teachers had to come from the outside – the community itself had been unable to produce its own instructors.

Because the Bedouins are indigenous not, as most would assume, rural, the cultural nuances are extremely difficult to grasp. The Bedouin representative explained with a great deal of passion that the people of this region have different needs from any other people in any other region in Jordan. He claimed that programs targeted at rural populations assume a desire to economically improve oneself in a material way. But the Bedouin “do not want iPods” – he explained – they want access to water, health care and education. His description of the scope of their needs was plain: agricultural training and greater economic access to markets. The Bedouin creed, as explained to us by every Bedouin we met at every stop along our journey, is to live lightly on the land. A week later at the Ministry of Agriculture, we were told a story that we were assured was true of Bedouins who had beautiful concrete block homes built for them by the government – only to have the government find a year later that it was the goats living in the house and the people right back outside in the tents again. Who can say what is fact and what is fiction? But all can agree that the problem is a difficult one – great need and tiny resources.

These tribes, according to their own calculations, are farming only 2,000 acres of the 10,000 available due to the extreme water shortage in Jordan. Jordan ranks near the bottom in the world in terms of water shortage – a ranking that is unlikely to change for the better anytime soon given the world’s climate change trends. By tradition, the Bedouin grow the water intensive crops of tomatoes and melons. The math doesn’t appear to work. Dramatic changes in agricultural methodology and crop selection seem necessary for permanent sustainability.

The Bedouin host at the tent where our group had tea had a clear message to send back to Amman – they were thirsty, he said. The black piping we saw in the arid desert seemed like an impossible means of conducting enough water for a family, much less livestock and crops, but somehow he and his family were living off of it.



There are creative and sustainable solutions still possible, and one of those was at the other end of that black water piping. The Bedouin family and tribe driving and hosting our group took us to our night’s lodgings at Feynan Ecolodge – an innovative nonprofit hotel that uses profits from its programs to support both the Dana Biosphere Reserve where it is located and “to sustain the cultural integrity of the local people by hiring members of the community.” Feynan had been developed by Chris Johnson, who has created similar efforts in other areas of natural beauty around Jordan, in cooperation with Muntaha Sayyad, who is a volunteer for one of our sponsors, the Jordanian Alliance Against Hunger, and who had been accompanying us on our travels. Feynan paid the Bedouin women to use their traditional skills to create stunning handicrafts, which were then sold in the lodge’s gift shop. It is an innovative and successful concept and though probably not a solution on a large scale, it is the kind of thinking necessary if sustainability is to be built over the long-term.

Internalization

When I decided to do the master's at DePaul, and when I decided I wanted to work in communications in organizations that focused on programs in the developing world, I knew I was going to face the problem of empathy and the resulting feelings of depression. The scenes in Jordan, mainly in Jerash, but also in the Bedouin community, are the first of many of the scenes I'm likely to see of places where there is simply a greater amount of need than there are solutions. I'm haunted by the faces and also by the seeming insolubility of the issues.

Since returning from Jordan, my emotions have been on the surface, on display for seemingly anyone to see. In past weeks, a fundraiser for an African nonprofit brought me to visible, embarrassing tears before the speaker was even on the stage and a police officer's story of Chicago's West Side violence also prompted me to inappropriate emotion (in the Starbucks line, no less). As my colleague Amanda characterized the feeling (thanks, babe), I am a 'hot mess.' I am trying to ask anyone who knows how it works and how to deal with it. I know it's normal and that everyone feels it. Michael Diamond, my professor who has accomplished more than I could ever imagine, explained to me that you don't want to get inured, and of course he's right- how could you do the work if you are inured to what you see and experience?

So the question is this - how can you keep feeling the love and the pathos and the sympathy and the empathy, but be super sharp and functional and effective? And then how do you go home at the end and still have enough fuel left in the tank to take care of your family and yourself? Who can give me the answer? This is what I'm trying to figure out now and I have seen for myself that there are lots of you who are really, really good at it and have worked through it beautifully. I want to join you.

Jerash and more and more

Today was a day like no other day in its wavering outlines and particular emotional flavor. It was the first official day of the DePaul program in Amman. The morning was spent in a confusing sequence of speakers at the University of Jordan, no particular information was gleaned and protocol appeared to be the order of the day. We did see a few antiquities, one of which I was enchanted by because of his resemblance to a Miyazaki character. Here he is - the adorable little basalt sphinx of Umm Qais...


After that we headed into the mouth of the lion. Jerash is home to the Palestinian refugee camp with the poorest conditions, at least in Jordan. It houses primarily Gazans who left their homes in 1948 or 1967. We met with the deputy director of the camp in his office, where we all crowded in and sat on seats in a semicircle. One of the men served us coffee - rotating around with only two cups as he alternated from person to person. It was a strange scene. There were unsmiling security guys. The director explained the dire conditions of the camp. Two doctors for only 300-400 people a day, no NGOs serving the population, open sewers, intermittent utilities, extremely overcrowded schools and on and on. It was apparent from our drive in that the camp was worse than the worst slum in the U.S.

At one point there was nearly an argument between the director and some of my fellow students when the deputy asserted that the Palestinians were the only "real" refugees. This was an important point for him and his tone and body language were emphatic. One of my cohort raised the point of the Bhutanese and another talked about indigenous populations around the world, but the Palestinian would not be driven off message. There was a hum of tension in the air. It was unclear to me how much of it was posturing and how much was lost in translation, but in any case, who argues with a Palestinian camp director in his own office? Here is the camp deputy director. He has a great face - one that I will remember for a long time.



The residents of the camp in Jerash are in an impossible situation politically. After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel seized Gaza from Egypt. The residents of this camp are, as I said above, Gazans - which makes them somehow persona non grata. They are refugees of a different status than nearly all the rest of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan. They do not hold Jordanian passports and do not have the right to work or travel outside of Jordan. The difference is visible everywhere as the Jerash camp is, no mincing words, a slum.

We toured the camp with escorts from our security detail and with camp leadership. I stayed back with the two Jordanian police officers who accompany us everywhere. One in particular, Mahmoud, is our driver and is particularly kind and always has a smile. He pulls into traffic with our bus in a way that earned my respect immediately. I was kneeling down and talking to the children who were all around us. They were beautiful children, may Allah give them perfect health, and I started giving them the bracelets and Hot Wheels cars I brought from home. It was great fun. I had to be careful only to do it when there were small groups and the cops helped me out with that. There were donkeys and goats and open sewers and elders in traditional costume sitting on blankets. It was surreal. But incredibly powerful all the same. These were people who were very determined to be doing what they were doing. They are in a terrible place, but they're waiting to get what they want. They could leave Jerash and emigrate elsewhere presumably. But they are resilient, and they wait to use the keys to their houses that they have hanging by the front doors. Whether you agree or disagree with their cause, you've got to hand it to a people who are willing to live for decades in what can be called squalor for a cause that they believe in. My respect for the people of Jerash is great. And those sweet kids, whose faces I can't think of without tears, I hope they enjoy those toys one millionth as much as I enjoyed the bright as the sunshine smiles they gave me. My heart explodes with the loveliness of their grins.

Arrival

I just had to check my calendar to see what day of the week it was. The flight was 12+ hours and the time difference is eight hours. I slept for ten hours and now I am truly disoriented. Presumably I'm going to have to get good at this whole world travel thing at some point but apparently now is not the time. The group we're traveling with met us as soon as we made it through customs and has taken care of every last detail for us. We have a security detail, our restaurants are chosen, basically we are totally infantilized. I think that is adding to my disorientation. I tried to sneak away from the group and grab an American latte (Illy!) at a cafe we passed today and was mortified to look up and see fourteen people waiting for me, including one security guy.

On the flight I sat next to an older Jordanian woman, clearly a matriarch, who was working over a rosary in her jewel-encrusted hands. After some conversation I asked her what it was like being a Christian in Jordan. She said that it had been better under King Hussein, and that his son's Jordan was a less tolerant country. Her husband had a house up in the mountains overlooking Amman with a swimming pool and gardens that he had inherited from his parents. I was immediately invited to visit. She told me about her children, who are scattered around the world, and introduced me to her son and daughter-in-law. The son had married an American who was busy reading Twilight novels the whole flight. When we were about to get off the plane, the American wife put on a Reds hat, and I told her I too was from Cincinnati. Everyone starting exclaiming and it turned out they were all living in Cincinnati and owned a high-profile fast food chili business. We were all very excited about this coincidence and now we have vowed to visit with one another. I love small worlds.

One reason I tell this story, besides the fact that it was funny, is that when I told the wealthy Jordanian woman that I was going to be visiting Palestinian refugee camps, she had what I would call an unexpected reaction. I am new to the politics of this region. I know enough to know that there are layers upon layers upon layers, but when the woman said that the Palestinians have money and that they only pretend to be poor so that I will feel sorry for them, I was surprised. "They are sneaky," she said with a sneer. It was the sort of casual racism that we see in our country more often than I would like. Still, I was blindsided.

Today, the group program starts officially. I will see if my third meal in Jordan involves a three for three on hummus and baba ghanouj. Inshallah.

Difficulties

I have delayed and delayed the beginning of this - the start of recording my thoughts about this travel experience. I am set to leave this week to go to Amman, Jordan, with a group from DePaul, where I am working to get my Master's in International Public Service. This is a fact that in and of itself is not unusual but given the arc of the story, the circumstances that I leave from and the trip I'm preparing to embark upon, it manages to transcend the everyday. We will be traveling in Amman and around Jordan studying issues relating to refugee management with a focus on the Palestinian situation. During the course of our travels, we'll also get to see Petra (!!!), the Dead Sea and spend a night in Bedouin tent. Clearly, I am beside myself with excitement.

The delay in starting the blog has stemmed from a deep-seated belief that my thoughts and observations are no more or less special than anyone else's. If anything, expressing my own American entitlement in a public forum seems to me to be an unbearable thought. I will strive to keep a lid on it - the entitlement, that is - but know that it will come through in the form of my assumptions and ignorance of many situations and lifestyles.

And the reason my journey is less predictable perhaps than my fellow students comes from my background. For the past 13 years or so I have been near fully occupied with the business of being a wife and mother to three daughters, now 12, 10, and 7. I have taken a couple of brief and very intense breaks to work as a political communications director for two congressional candidates and volunteered with great fervor for Secretary of State (!) Clinton's Presidential run. That work brought me to where I am today, striving to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to work in a similar communications/press capacity for an international aid organization.

I'll try to keep the reflections relevant. And I can promise they'll be humble.