Sometimes it’s hard to choose a title. For this post, I wavered amongst:
1) “Be careful what you wish for: With every wish, there comes a curse.”
2) “Last night, I did the unforgivable.”
3) “Honestly, it’s not my fault! Blame the Internet.”
It might be instructive to simply stop writing now, and then let you guess what happened. Would we learn more about what you think of me, or would your guesses be more accurately viewed as projections of your own predilections, and guilt-inducing belief systems?
Anyway, before I tell you what I did that prompts such possible titles, let me remind you of a few key points about this trip: First, I aim to be an “authentic traveler” – someone who gets a taste of how locals live their daily lives, rather than the stereotypical tourist who whisks in and out in an isolated bubble, snapping many a photo and probably seeing the “important sites,” but having almost zero meaningful understanding of local life. It’s the difference between someone who comes to Elkhart County and lives with an Amish or similarly conservative Anabaptist family for a while or people who sleep and eat at EssenHaus, visit the Shipshewana Flea Market and then returns to wherever they came from, spouting their knowledge of Elkhart’s conservative Anabaptists.
This philosophy of travel rather than tourism has evolved out of several experiences of the last few years. A good part of the credit goes to JAM and Mel, who, when hosting us in Germany over New Year’s a few years ago, put in a lot of extra work to figure out the public ground transportation to get us around Germany and into France without simply renting a car, which would have been the easy thing to do but would have denied us the visceral experiences of intermingling with the local populations. Then, to some degree in S. Korea, and especially in Japan, I found myself chafing at the limiting isolation of (mostly) being bussed around on charter busses with other teachers from site to site. Thankfully there were times in both nations when I took advantage of free time to wander and roam the streets, to ride the mass transit, and – in the case of Japan – to stay with a Japanese family in their home. The other major influence on my thinking has been the three student trips to DC that I organized and chaperoned the past three summers. On the first trip, I basically followed the tour company’s modus operandi, since I’d never led a student tour before and because I had already been a pain in their butts when I insisted that we not go to DC in May and June, but instead go over the 4th of July – a time that virtually no other school group visits. That first year I was a bit dismayed at how much time we spent on the bus, lecturing to students about all the many historic scenes and sites. It was boring – felt like being back in school, and not with a very dynamic teacher. Sure, I know why most tours would want to run that way; every moment the kids are off the bus there feels like more potential for trouble: kids going missing by accident or on purpose, thievery by our kids, or muggings – or worse – of them out on the streets. The “safest” (by that I mean most controlled) way to take a group of 14 year olds to DC is to keep them at the hotel and on the bus as much as possible, zooming from one site to the next in such a bubble that one bright young student once asked me, “Does anybody actually LIVE in DC?”
That did it; I couldn’t take a group back like that and still live with myself. So rather rapidly we’ve make the trip a much more on-the-ground, this-is-what-DC-is-like experience. First we added a trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl. Then the next year we went all out: giving the kids far fewer informational lectures and instead giving them time to explore neighborhoods like DuPont Circle and Adams Morgan, and incorporating time at the Eastern Market (where else would Alex have been able to purchase a raw pig’s foot to sneak into my backpack?) (-:
So when I applied for a grant to fund this trip I did so with the plan of not just studying the historic and modern interplay of the three monotheistic religions, but doing my best to especially focus on experiencing modern Islam in its daily reality. That’s why I jumped pretty quickly on Mike K's idea of using CouchSurfing.org to stay with “real” people in their homes along the route -- knowing all the while that I don’t enjoy sharing my bedroom space, and that I need a certain amount of alone time to recharge my batteries. I inquired with five separate people about surfing their couch in Tel Aviv, and only ended up getting the hotel when none where able to accommodate me. I used CouchSurfing to find Bustan Qaraaqa; I expected to be staying with Palestinians, not an enclave of Europeans and Americans in the West Bank. Still, they were warm hosts and enable me to travel around the West Bank for a couple days as local Palestinians do – by foot and small outdated buses and servees (shared taxi-bus-type thingys). Admittedly, I did some online whining about some of my less favorite parts of the stay, and two days later ended up at a hotel in Jerusalem, but I made sure that hotel was A) the cheapest I could find without going to a hostel and having to share a bedroom, B) locally owned by a Muslim family in East Jerusalem (that’s the part mostly inhabited by Palestinian Muslims, as it was part of Jordan prior to the 1967 war, and C) within walking distance of the old city. For my taste, it was perfect distance – a good 25 minutes of serious walking up and down challenging hills all the while surrounded by locals, some of whom greeted me cordially and some of whom no doubt said to each other something like, “Look, there’s the stupid American on our streets again.” It was great. I ate from street vendors, walked and sweated in the crazy heat, and – with time and language acquisition – could really have become part of the community.
Whoa! I’ve written over a thousand words and still haven’t told you what dastardly deed warrants such defensive explanation. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit me to continue, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I did last night, but feel free to offer guesses. (-: Let me say this much, my crime was something that would be neither illegal, nor immoral, in Elkhart (yeah, Robbins, that’s a pre-emptive strike at whatever you were going to say).
