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.
