Strength in Numbers

I wrote this as one of our weekly journal entries that we send to Nico and Emily.  I was looking through them and decided I’d share some.  While untimely, it’s worth showing the evolution of the trip.  This one was written on February 24th and in response to our time working with the women’s collaborative.

Kalpana Dhange is a fiery woman who doesn’t seem to know her own strength just yet – but she’s learning. When we first encountered Kalpana in a larger group, she came across as confident and outspoken; however, upon translation, we found out that she said her voice was shaking.  She was surprised to be speaking in front of so many new and confusing people who had come to learn about the power of these women’s groups.  Later, in a smaller setting, we learned just how much the women’s confidence had improved with their involvement in the support groups. For many, the group’s activities were their first opportunity to venture outside their homes.  As they’ve grown closer over time, their confidence in telling their own stories has made leaps and bounds.  The almost month-long retreat that some attended gave them a chance to hear their own powerful voice, both individually and collectively.

The strength of that group fabric was evident as one woman, Sushama Chaudhary, shared that the challenge of her eyesight often makes her feel weak. This moment of faltering confidence was met with the gentle but firm support of her peers, who saw the challenge of her eyesight as something that only made her stronger and more capable.  With the help of her group, Sushama has battled through these difficulties to become a Village Volunteer, one of the group’s leaders.  Village Volunteers, part of the Bajaj Foundation’s community network, oversee multiple support groups, relay concerns and needs to the Bajaj Foundation and make sure everything is running smoothly.

Kalpana is also one of the group’s leaders.  In fact, the group was so important to her that instead of running in local elections, she opted instead to take on a leadership role.  31 years old and running a small general store in her village, Kalpana is taking advantage of every opportunity that comes her way.  Kalpana’s business strategy for her shop draws from the training she received during the retreat where they taught the women about merging the social and economic ends of business.  In an ingenious interpretation of that training, Kalpana offered free water to villagers so that they would come by with their children.  The children were good for business: Kalpana had put Pepsi for sale next to the water.

The strength and innovation of these support groups is an untapped resource.  Sushama’s perseverance and Kalpana’s fueled ambitions are testimony to the notion that true power comes from within.  Sometimes you just need a few friends to help you remember that empowering idea.

The Role of Dissent

I wrote this as one of our weekly journal entries that we send to Nico and Emily.  I was looking through them and decided I’d share some.  While untimely, it’s worth showing the evolution of the trip.  This one was written on February 24th.

One of the hardest things to do is to give constructive feedback, to “disagree without being disagreeable”.  I’ve always struggled to do this well - the giving and the receiving - because I tend to be stubborn and straightforward. I think our biogas group did a pretty good job overall with providing a good environment this week as we worked on the various projects, but one thing I especially struggled with was giving feedback on people’s writing. I’ve never really perfected that.

When done poorly, the end goal - making a project, an idea, someone’s writing better - is wildly missed.  When done properly, both sides leave the exchange having learned something and the end goal is achieved.

I think that the best leaders seek constructive feedback instead of waiting for it.  They actively bring in dissent.  I read somewhere that a general required all his subordinates to submit a memo listing three reasons why a plan was good and three reasons why it was bad.  Lincoln was famous for constructing a team that debated within itself.  I’m a big proponent of the idea that the best ideas should always win, but that requires having everyone check their egos at the door.

One thing I believe teams are often missing - to an extent, ours as well - is active, responsible dissent.  I’m not super concerned with bruised egos: someone can say something harsh and the wound will mend in time.  I do, however, think that when we fail to provide that active dissent, the best ideas might not bubble to the surface because of group think.  If we don’t bring our best to what we do, why bother?

I guess that’s why sometimes I take on the role of the contrarian and in the process, hopefully I become better at giving and receiving feedback.  I hated when my dad would do that to me when I was younger and caught the political bug in 2008.  He would play the stereotype of the stupid Republican and force me to debate him.  When I was able to brush that aside, he played the smart conservative.  Every time I would lose my head, he would tell me that if I wanted to get involved in this game, I would need to beat even the best dissent or adopt the ideas that I thought were good into my own playbook.

As someone who’s interested in leadership, it’s something that I think about a lot.  How do we foster active, responsible dissent? How do we redirect misguided feedback into something more positive? Am I shielding my own bad ideas from feedback that would make them better?

The Art of Listening

I wrote this as one of our weekly journal entries that we send to Nico and Emily.  I was looking through them and decided I’d share some.  While untimely, it’s worth showing the evolution of the trip.  This one was written on February 18th.

There’s been a lot think about in the last week, but I’ve been dwelling a lot on listening.

There was a moment in our interviews with the women that I realized that I was actually listening to them speak without knowing more than two words in their language.  It was almost like I tried to feel the words they were saying.  I was watching the tracking of their eyes.  I was noticing the movement of their bodies.  I was riding the waves of their voices, as they got louder or softer, as they sped up or slow down. 

On the way back to the ashram, I listened to some music and soaked in the landscape.  I had another realization: the millions of little things that were going on in front of me didn’t overwhelm me.  The buildings seemed to rise and fall like little hills and the people flowed around me like I was a stone in a river.

Molly and I talked about the experience of the drive back and talking with the women and we both realized that we were engaging in the collective mind that Ankur, Nico’s friend from Stanford, talked about when he visited us at the ashram.  Ankur walked in the footsteps of Gandhi, who began the famous salt march in 1930 in protest of the British and traveled light and without food, depending on the kindness of strangers who he met along the way.  Ankur, who actually wrote a book about this experience, shared with our group some really interesting reflections. He found that one thing that helped him in his travels was seeing villages as collective entities and being aware of that when he entered each new location’s space.  Ankur went on to say that the conception of a collective mind and space can extend to your individual interactions as well.

 With the women, I think I was just trying to enter their emotional headspace.  To some degree, I think I succeeded.  On the drive back, rather than fighting all the distractions that Wardha had to offer, I just peacefully swam through them and became part of the collective experience.

I’m not quite sure what the implications are, but I think it could change the way I listen to people.  I tend to speak up a lot, but something about the experience has made me want to listen more.  There’s some wise saying about the balance between listening and speaking, but maybe I just didn’t listen the first time I heard it.  I mean really listen.

Frameless Travel

I wrote this as one of our weekly journal entries that we send to Nico and Emily.  I was looking through them and decided I’d share.  While untimely, it’s worth showing the evolution of the trip.  This one was written on February 5th.

My roommate’s friend asked me the other day, “So, what do you think of Doha and Education City?”

I think my best answer is that it’s a great place to visit, but not to stay.  It might be different if I was going to be here over a longer stretch of time, but I’m looking forward to the next leg of the trip.

I was first wowed by the impressive buildings and great facilities of Education City, but after a few weeks I felt a little suffocated by the bubble.  Sure, I did a pretty good job of getting off campus and seeing different parts of Doha, but it’s tough when your campus is literally walled off.

One of the things that I really like about Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus is that it feels integrated into the city.  Stand in front of Purnell and your view digs into the city and tells you that you’re part of something bigger: a sprawling urban landscape with people with all sorts of backgrounds and future pathways walking together.  Even though Wean Hall is an abomination and Baker Hall not quite Gates, I miss being part of the heartbeat of a city. 

While Wardha will certainly have a different heartbeat than a city, at least we will be close enough to hear it.  Life is meant to punch you in the face, make you gasp for air from laughter, flip you upside down and move you to move mountains.  Not just in Doha, it can be tough to get that full offering of life behind walls and in the high towers of learning.  All of this reminds me of a great passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that encourages me to engage in “frameless travel”: 

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. 

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

ZatAoMM is a great book about travel - and thought - and I’ve come back to it a lot in the last few weeks.  I don’t think it’s the best idea to actually ride a motorcycle in India, but certainly I’ll hop on the metaphorical one.

Serving as a Medium

“We must credit the good we do to the hidden foundation of good, and be grateful to serve as its medium”

- Always We Begin Again

Our group has been busy the last few weeks.  We came to the Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha and hit the ground running.

We have been working with the Bajaj Foundation, an organization that does a variety of community development projects in the district of Wardha.  Among many others, the foundation works on biogas plants, water resource development, irrigation, horticulture, organic farming, alternative income sources like grocery stores, and support groups for women.  They are community-driven, needs-based and have a fantastic network of staff and volunteers wherever they are working.

We started our first week here doing various site visits to get a sense of what kind of work the foundation does.  Then, we split up to focus on different areas in order to help the foundation document their projects for their upcoming annual review.  That documentation is also part of a larger effort to create a portal - a website with information on projects, a forum for discussion and data available for analysis - to connect the Bajaj Foundation and those affected by its community involvement with Carnegie Mellon faculty and students.  The aim of the website would be to create a space where the two groups could interact and learn from each other.

I ended up in the group focusing on biogas and alternative income projects. Before we went on targeted site visits to get more information and good case studies for their annual review, which we are helping to write, we sat down with the staff experts in both areas. I knew that the staff involved with these projects knew their stuff, but I was still blown away by the depth of knowledge they displayed.

I came here wondering what exactly I could do for this community in Wardha and the people at the foundation.  Where was my utility in all of this?  I’m not an engineer, so I cannot offer advice on how to construct wells and biogas plants more effectively.  I’m not proficient in coding and software, so I cannot build the website that will bridge the foundation and Carnegie Mellon.

I can, however, carefully and deliberately help plant seeds for the future.  If all goes as planned, the relationship with the Bajaj Foundation will be an ongoing one for Carnegie Mellon and students will follow in my footsteps in coming years.  By listening intently, always being curious and asking questions I can help understand how others might find a place of impact in the continuing relationship between an Indian foundation and an American university.

That is my utility.  It is a recognition of my limits, which has required me to check my ego at the door, but it is also an understanding of the strength in my developing ability to communicate stories and ideas.  This process of finding my utility here ran parallel to the my thinking on the non-possession of good.  As soon as I internalized that the good we do is a communal effort, I was able to see my small part in the larger picture.  If I can end each day knowing I served the medium of good, I can be proud of the work I am doing.

Non-possession of Good

Gandhi’s ashram includes “non-possession” as one of its rules. This rule is typically understood as forsaking our attachment of material things in order to focus our effort on service to others.  Gandhi’s life lends to a more challenging interpretation: not only should we not own material objects, we should not own good.  Gandhi’s guiding principle of practical idealism, a philosophy balanced by realism and optimism, finds new meaning in this conception of non-possession of good.  Together, non-possession and practical idealism give a roadmap to meaningful good and a guide to our work with the Bajaj Foundation.

The Gandhi the world knows began by happenstance.  Gandhi himself admitted as much in his autobiography, reflecting that “[a]n opportunity offered itself when… I was [not] ready for it” (80).  In South Africa, a laborer named Balasundaram who had suffered under an abusive employer approached Gandhi seeking his help. Gandhi chose to help the man, but there is an important distinction: he did not initially seek the opportunity.  He could not claim entire ownership of the act of doing good.  Gandhi could only claim partial ownership: each moment of good is the meeting of opportunity and decision.

Gandhi could also only claim partial ownership of the new identity that came from his interaction with Balasundaram.  After helping the man, a charitable identity was thrust upon him as the “case reached the ears of every indentured laborer and [he] came to be regarded as their friend” (81). Gandhi did not seek out these opportunities to help laborers, he simply had the choice of whether he wanted to reinforce or dismiss this new identity.  Gandhi decided to bolster this identity, but like the initial act that led to the identity’s formation, claiming complete ownership of the good he had done is not possible.

The partial, incomplete ownership of good is humbling. When an individual is possessive of good, it becomes an activity of ego and susceptible to the pitfalls of idealism.  Idealism, normally an extremely personal activity, is the cognitive movement from what’s possible to what should be possible and that movement can obscure limits.  Blindness to limits can lead to the sacrifice of impact for idealistic gains, however small.  Non-possession, on the other hand, inherently defines limits.   In the case of Balasundaram and the laborers, Gandhi recognized that he only played a part in bringing about the good.  Embracing non-possession shifts the focus of the good to the community and it’s one of the reasons why the work the Bajaj Foundation does is so meaningful.  Their work is driven by the fact that they don’t own the good they’re doing: they’re only part of the difficult process of making something meaningful happen in their community.  The Bajaj Foundation seems to understand that idealism can occasionally make them lose sight of what they set out to do in the first place.

That is not to say that non-possession and idealism are incompatible, only that it should be an idealism of the community, not the ego.  When asked if he would hypothetically accept a world government coming out of a meeting of nations in San Francisco, Gandhi replied, “I may not get a world government that I want just now but if it is a government that would just touch my ideal [of non-violence], I would accept it as a compromise” (Collected Works, Volume 86).  Gandhi used community ideals of non-violence as a guide, but was willing to compromise in order to have reality touch his ideal.  If Gandhi had been possessive of good in this case, his ego would have blocked a compromise.  Instead, Gandhi’s mindset of practical idealism gave a chance for the ideal to even exist.

The case of Balasundaram provides a useful focal point for understanding how Gandhi executed this mindset. Gandhi found that “[t]here were only two ways of releasing Balasundaram: either by getting the Protector of Indentured Labourers to cancel his indenture or transfer him to someone else, or by getting Balasundaram’s employer to release him.” (Gandhi 81).  Ideally, Gandhi would just abolish the archaic practice of indentured servitude; practically, he needed to simply release him from his contract. Gandhi regarded himself as a “practical reformer” who “[confined his] attention to things that are, humanly speaking, possible” (Collected Works, Volume 33).  In this case, by engaging in the art of the possible, Gandhi was still able to touch his ideal – the freedom of laborers – by winning an individual’s freedom.  Practical idealism, a philosophy grounded in non-possession, produced meaningful good in this situation.

These important lessons in non-possession and practical idealism can also produce meaningful good in our work with the Bajaj Foundation.  Most importantly, we must remember to stay humble, as we do not have complete ownership of the good we are trying to do.  In fact, our work is a network of collaboration between multiple university campuses, the Bajaj Foundation and communities with real needs.  The truth of this communal effort gives power to the bottom-up approach of the Bajaj Foundation, a principle grounded in non-possession, and we would do well to remember it as we make plans.

Just like Gandhi, our group has the chance to reinforce our identity as helpers with each decision we make.  Each of those decisions should be guided by practical idealism where we recognize our own limits and abilities.  We must ask important questions like, “What needs are we meeting?” and “Are we leveraging our identity to its fullest?”  When we leave Wardha in a month, we should also leave the good.  It is not ours to keep.

The Stuff of Dreams

I am a traveler.  I state this because of the vast difference between traveling and migration.  Traveling is an opportunity afforded to few to wander and explore; migration is a movement of necessity and often urgent purpose.  Almost a cliché, I am one of the privileged travelers, a young, educated, white male on a semester-long journey.  Despite this, the fact that I am not a migrant does not detract from the truth that to travel is to learn.  Traveling is learning about the unseen past and present as well as the unrealized future.   In its purest form, to travel is to engage in reflection and projection.

Traveling wipes out the ingrained sensory adaptation to our environment, the process of tuning out repeated and normal events in order to keep the brain from overheating.  While that filtering is often useful, much is lost in the process.  Travel directs our eyes to see the same things from a different perspective.  Paulo Friere, in We Make the Road by Walking, calls this destruction of the filter “ruptura”, noting that “there is no creativity without [it], without a break from the old” (38).  Ruptura, facilitated by travel, can be a mirror for the unnoticed past and present.

My first time traveling was to Malawi in the summer of 2009 and it was there that I experienced ruptura.  I worked at a rural hospital in Namitete, a small village an hour from the capital city of Lilongwe, on a variety of projects ranging from teaching the cleaning staff in the post-op ward basic physical therapy to helping design a low-cost incubator out of basic materials.  Every day, I interacted with people who had a small but vital role in their community.  It took a journey across an ocean to realize simple truth: everything counts.  The previous fall I had enthusiastically volunteered in the 2008 presidential election for then Senator Obama, but I questioned whether what I did really mattered.  Upon reflection in Malawi, I concluded that those small actions add up to something much larger.  I had discovered the power of collective action.

Ruptura isn’t just about rethinking the past; the break also provides a contrast that illuminates the present.  In the fall of 2012, I threw my energy yet again at the American political process, taking on a student leadership role in Obama’s reelection campaign .  Months after another landmark experience, I arrived in Doha to hear no one talking about political activism.  I have yet to meet a student in Education City who is as excited as I am about the possibility of public service in government.  In Malawi, traveling taught me the importance of small, collective community action.  In Doha, traveling revealed something I have undervalued my whole life: the invigorating opportunity to be part of government and politics.

Political activism is a form of expression.  Again in Doha, travel unearthed something I’ve missed in my acceptance of what’s normal: the power of expression and freedom of speech.  I came to this revelation while listening to hip-hop during a long lunch on a day off from classes, when I realized that one element I hadn’t seen in Doha was anger and discontent freely expressed.  I’m not an angry person, but listening to music fueled by discontent - artists like Macklemore, Lupe Fiasco, and Talib Kweli - made me pause and regard anger’s power.  Friere goes further, tying knowledge to emotion, stating that “knowing for me is not a neutral act, not only from the political point of view, but from the point of my body… it is full of feelings, of emotions, of tastes.” (23).  It’s only when we have the full range of emotion available to us as a tool of expression that we can truly say something profound, that we can we really know something.

The forced mirror that traveling creates is not not necessarily always a good thing.  We travel with our own prejudices and judgement is prejudice’s close companion. Myles Horton, thinking through his attempts at community education, reflected that “I couldn’t see how this was part of anything that I knew anything about and couldn’t quite bring myself to think there were ways of doing things outside the system” (50).  Perhaps the lack of political activism and freedom of expression is not an issue in Qatar and the people are happy with current state of affairs and I’m stuck in the American mindset.  Thinking through these contrasts - democracy versus absolute monarchy, free versus limited speech - is a valuable exercise thrust upon the traveler.  Through these exercises, travelers can begin to have an idea of the future they want to project for themselves and others.

Sorting out the prescription for self is the easier endeavor and relies heavily on curiosity.  Friere, elevating curiosity as “absolutely indispensable for us to continue to be or become”, gives it an important place in self-growth.  Without curiosity, the contrasts encountered through travel would never be explored.  I cannot imagine a world for where I cannot fully express myself.  The differences between Qatar and the United States has solidified my appreciation of the freedom of speech and my commitment to that right being part of my own life.  Disparity offers a simple choice for the individual: which do I prefer?

Extending prescription beyond self becomes much more difficult.  As I travel and collect experiences to compare and contrast, I have to not just consider what I would prefer, but what would be best for others.  This thought process is not about a contrast between existing communities but for the one we want to see.  Freire calls this projection of the future a “dream with a different society” (58).  Like John Rawl’s famous thought experiment, the original position, this community of dreams must be built keeping everyone’s interests in mind.  In the case of freedom of speech, I cannot dream of a society without it.  My short time in Doha has already shown an opportunity for discontent to find voice in the plight of the country’s migrant workers.

Traveling gives us a chance to think with a blank slate as movement shifts perspective and shakes the mind free from its complacency.  With that temporary tabula rasa, the traveler begins to see things he may have overlooked.  More important than that reflection, though, is the opportunity that traveling presents to dreamers.  I travel to collect the stuff of my dreams, for myself and for others.  I bump into contrast, brainstorm blueprints for the future I want to see and continue the construction of a better world in my mind.  When I return from my travels, I can only hope that the dreaming continues while the hands get to work.

An Unequal Exchange

Education City has an undercity of workers that keep its cogs clean, its chains moving and its grandeur intact and growing.  Construction workers raise new buildings almost overnight in their long half-day shifts.  Security guards silently watch in every building, a seemingly unneeded measure given EC’s perimeter checkpoints.  Cleaning crews wipe down the behemoths that Doha calls buildings, keeping the campus in a pristine state.  While these construction workers, security guards and cleaning crews all have a different function in EC, they all have something in common: they are immigrants.

Of Qatar’s roughly 1.8 million inhabitants, only about a quarter million are citizens, a result of demanding requirements.  The rest, with a few exceptions for expats, are immigrants from the surrounding regions: the Arab states, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal.  Our group has been learning about these migrant workers and the challenges they face.  They are often recruited with false promises - secure, well-paying jobs - only to be met by the harsh reality of Doha.  While not all migrants suffer the same fate, many experience dismal living conditions, delayed or missing pay, restricted movement and absent job mobility.  The other day, our group took an “alternative tour” of Doha, visiting the segregated migrant sector of the city and walking through a factory.  I preferred seeing the city from this perspective because it gave the tremendous growth and wealth of Doha a gritty and truthful context.  Ever since our discussions of migrants workers has begun, it’s been difficult to grapple with learning their struggles on a campus built by their hands but not to their benefit.  While it’s not my place as someone in a state of admitted ignorance of a total picture, my short time in Doha tells me that something must be done.

Despite this, I have to be careful not to disparage these workers’ humanity.  It is so easy to do this, to paint people as victims and not see their resilience and their power. Americans are seeped in our own imaginings of American exceptionalism, but where does our greatness come from?  While credit must be given to our innovative thinkers and leaders, I think sometimes we forget the common hands that gave those innovators a foundation to even jump into the unknown and the difficult in the first place.  Slaves, farmers, factory workers… immigrants.  Americans are so aggressive in our judgement of illegal immigrants, but we owe our greatness to them as well.  In the face of inequality and difficulty, the untold stories are powerful and many.  

Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with workers in Doha and add some depth to my understanding beyond their struggle.  Our group has been tutoring some of the cleaners who work on Georgetown’s campus here.  They’re all at very different stages, but we’re trying to teach a little bit of English and computer skills as well as have some conversations about their own lives.

Each tutoring sessions has been a unique experience, but my favorite so far was this past Tuesday.  As a tool to teach the differences between past, present and future tenses, we asked the workers to construct timelines of their lives.  We explored their past - where and when they were born, marriages, children, travel to Doha - but also what they wanted for the future.  I was working with two men, one 38 and the other 25.  Both came from Rapti, a region of Nepal, were married with one son and want to open a business sometime in the future.  The older man wants to open up a restaurant (but not cook - he wants to be the boss!) and the younger one aspires to sell bananas.  Resisting the urge to make an Arrested Development reference, I asked why bananas and we eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a more diverse selection because he loves all kinds of fruit.  At the beginning, the younger man was incredibly quiet but by the end was laughing and more confident in the telling his story.  I joked with both of them that I would come visit Rapti and drop by the restaurant, hoping that the older one was buying fruit from the younger.

For my community advisor interview (got the job!), I did a little research on different conceptions and understandings of community.  One of my favorite was the idea of a community of memory, where a group of people have not only have a shared history, but a shared sense of what they want in the future.  The tutoring session felt like the creation of a community of memory: both men came from a similar background but had plans for improvement in their future.  Although still an outsider, for a moment I felt part of this community of memory as we all had a shared hope for a better tomorrow.

In the end, though, it still felt like an unequal exchange.  Sure, I’m departing a little knowledge of English or how to use a computer but they are giving so much more.  They are raising and then maintaining the buildings in which we learn and making what we do possible.  Perhaps even more powerful, they are giving hope and knowing hope is a tremendous force.  It is only when we know hope that we can attempt to translate it into something more tangible, and I am immensely grateful for all who give me the gift of hope.  My humble goal is to take that hope and try and make the exchange - individually, locally, globally - a little more equal.

The Power of Curiosity

Curiosity is the most important trait for making the most of any experience. Curiosity sparks the initial interest and the subsequent action and the adventure that may follow is where life resides.

I’ve been doing my best to stay curious in my first week in Doha and I’ve found the best way to practice that curiosity is to actively ask questions of the people I meet and explore their stories as much as possible. During an RA staff meeting last year I jokingly said that people are my currency (I will occasionally make silly philosophical statements during staff meetings), but that joke has a lot of truth to it. You can either have a life that trades in things or experiences and connections between people are like the dark matter of those experiences: they are the scaffolding for everything that we see before us.

Because Qatar is a country that attracts people from all over the region (Nepal, India, Pakistan, Syria, Bangladesh, etc.), you find a plethora of good stories. The people are very friendly (and sometimes confused at my interest) and the taxi drivers, security guards and students that I have met have been confronted with a restless curiosity.

One quick example. I met the friends of my roommate the other day and one was from India and the other was from Pakistan. I asked the student from Pakistan a lot of questions about how he thought the Pakistani people viewed America and my country’s involvement in the Middle East. I asked both of them how they thought the conflict between their two countries might find some daylight in the future. I really enjoyed hearing their perspectives on these important issues as we went out to hang out, drink tea, play poker and get food.

The other day, I watched a man give a presentation called “The Internet is My Religion” where he said something incredibly powerful: “Humanity connected is God”. Whatever God may be, I think we all know the power of connected people. I hope my curiosity continues to spark an exploration into that power.

The Pursuit of Experiences

The whole student crew (Lexi, Wesley, Marielle, Marcy, Molly, Tahirah, Marie, Asha and yours truly) are now in Doha, Qatar.

The trip was relatively easy (D.C. > Toronto > Frankfurt > Doha).  I flew into Toronto and was greeted by a few in the group as well as a delay for my flight to Frankfurt, which would ultimately lead to Doha.  The delay left me a 30 minute window to get through security and board the plane after landing, but thanks to packing light I was able to get a quick sprint workout through the airport and made it with time to spare.

Everyone but Tahirah was on the flight from Frankfurt so Wesley and I waited with Nico (Professor Slate has asked us to call him by his first name as his wife will be here soon and that makes Professor Slate a little confusing), Wesley and a student from CMU’s Qatar campus named Abai for her to land.  After Tahirah came in, Abai dropped Nico off at his hotel and we got to see a bit of Doha while he answered my incessant questions.  Doha is a really beautiful city with a host of different architectural styles for the number of new buildings that have shown up in the city in the last few decades.  We admitted to some hunger on the way back to where we are staying so we got our first taste of Doha with some shawarma (delicious grilled meat) and karak (chai tea popular in Qatar).  It was my first time trying both so it was a real treat.

I’m staying in the dorms here at Education City, a campus with multiple universities from around the world.  I haven’t met the other suite mates in my apartment, but my roommate is studying communication at Northwestern.  The campus is outstanding with tons of new buildings, facilities and well kept grounds.  Today we took a tour of the whole campus and Doha.  After some stops at the stables where the Arabian and European horses used for jumping, dressage and racing are kept and a mall modeled after Venice, we ended up in Katara, a cultural village with lots of museums, exhibits, and restaurants. We finished our day at a restaurant with a family style dinner with plans forming for trips out to the desert, watching a beach soccer tournament and attending a service at a center designed for non-Muslims.

I made myself a promise for this semester (and beyond) to take advantage of every opportunity and walk through the world collecting experiences.  The last few days have been jam-packed and I can already tell that the group with me is geared towards adventure and passion and each one has their own story to tell.  I can’t wait to hear them and have them join me in my pursuit of experiences.