cultural expressions – GW Blogs from Abroad

An Introduction

AdminSeptember 1, 2015December 14, 2018

!مرحبا

My name is Allison and I'm blogging this semester from Amman, Jordan. Today was my first full day in Amman and the beginning of the Middlebury School's orientation. Orientation Week is particularly crucial for this study abroad program, as it's the only time during the semester that we will be allowed to speak in English. It's all Arabic after this.

Orientation was helpful, but by far the best experience of the day began afterwards, when we met our mentors (مرشدون) and began to explore Amman. We grabbed coffee at a local shop (where smoking indoors is still very cool) and talked for a while. The mentors are all University of Jordan students. It's really calming to talk to someone your own age who understands both Jordanian culture and that of American study abroad students. The mentors also give us some idea of what modern Amman is like. The female mentors all wore hijabs, but one of them cursed continually and talked openly about politics. Lara, my mentor, wears skinny jeans and loves Dan Brown books. None of this is particularly earth-shattering I guess, but every new detail about their lives feels like a small piece to the intricate puzzle of Jordanian identity.

So far, my only other source for extended interactions is my host family, who live in the house above mine and my roommate's basement apartment. We have the most contact with Eman; as the mother, she is in charge of the children (including us). She has four children, one live-in servant, and a husband who I have yet to meet. She's also in charge of feeding us breakfast and dinner, which is great because she's an excellent cook. Tonight's dinner was mansaf. The national dish of Jordan, it's lamb and rice soaked in a yogurt gravy. And it's delicious.

Overall, my first day has been filled with anxiety. Everything is different here, and that's a concept that my mind is having trouble accepting. Still, my interactions with Jordanians so far have taught me that, however different-minded we may be, at the end of the day people are just people no matter what country you're in. Maybe it'll be different once I start speaking to the mentors and my host family in Arabic, but right now the best cure for anxiety is a long conversation with another person. It makes everything strange or foreign melt away until I'm left with the warm, familiar feeling of getting to know a new friend.

That's all for now.

!مع السلامة

Another Isaan Treasure

AdminMay 14, 2015December 17, 2018

By LizGoodwin04

As I walked through the village of Chonnabot in Northeastern Thailand, I could see every step of the silk-weaving process. I saw silk worms feeding on mulberry leaves and yellow silk being extracted from the worms and spun onto giant spools. Women weaved in the shade of the open space beneath their wooden houses raised on stilts. The beautiful and rich-colored silks popped against the simple, wooden looms they were woven on.

Thailand is famous for its silk and weaving is an important part of Thai culture. On Wednesday, I visited the village of Chonnabot in Khon Kaen province, which is famous for having some of the finest mut mee silk in the country. The mut mee process is often referred to as “tie-dying.” The silk threads are tied together with a fiber before dyeing to resist the dye and create a design. When the dye is dry, the fiber is cut away and the undyed spots are painted with other colors. The more colors in a piece of mut mee silk, the more complicated the silk is to design and make.

While I was in Chonnabot, I stayed with a family who make their living from mut mee weaving. They gave me a first hand tour of the village, bringing me first to their neighbors who raised silk worms. In order to extract the silk, you have to boil the worm in the cocoon and then the thread is taken off the cocoon and threaded onto a spool. The leftover boiled worms, they eat. I, of course, had to try a boiled silkworm and they weren’t too bad! Just very chewy…

After chomping on a silkworm, we headed over to a woman who weaves using the traditional loom. She had a consistent rhythm. Step on the left peddle, thread, step on the right peddle, thread, and so on. She made the process look so easy! However, after sitting down and trying to weave a bit myself, I experienced how difficult weaving is firsthand. I was terrified of messing up the intricate pattern they had already begun!

The whole silk extraction and weaving process impressed me, but what impressed me and surprised me the most is how the loom has become in many ways the center of the village. It is how the village supports themselves and preserves their culture. Weaving, I’ve discovered, is just one of the many treasures of Isaan!

Murals from "The Troubles"

AdminApril 14, 2015December 14, 2018

By kennatim

While I can appreciate a good work of art, I am not much of an art museum person and would not exactly call myself an art aficionado. Rather, my most exciting experience involving art has been witnessing the giant politically charged murals in the cities of Northern Ireland this past week. The tension is still very much in the air, after hot conflict known as “The Troubles” occurred all throughout the area between Catholic unionists and Protestant loyalists from the 1960s to the 1990s. The violence, bombings, and riots tore the area apart, and neighborhoods are still visibly divided.

Last week I went for a 2-day, 1-night trip to Belfast with each member of my CIEE Dublin program. It was incredibly interesting to tour the City Centre, neighborhoods which had experienced so much violence, and even the dry dock where the Titanic was built. What made it even better was that I got to take it in with 32 friends. The most interesting section to me was the murals and the memorials surrounding the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods where violence took place. They were colorful and diverse in nature: involving memorials for murdered children, hatred towards the other side, people picking up arms, commemorating a bombing, international figures like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., support for Palestine, and general intimidation and territory-marking in what could essentially be considered a turf war.

We spoke in hushed tones during our tour, as the city is still vibrant and the effects still lasting. I could not get over how well done artistically many of the murals were, but also the differences in rhetoric between Catholic and Protestant neighborhood murals. While a Protestant mural might reference a heinous crime by a “republican murder gang,” a Catholic mural referencing the same event might commemorate the “heroic IRA freedom fighters.”

The only thing that could come close in tension to Belfast was Derry. I found Derry (called “Londonderry” by loyalists) to be even edgier, as it was a majority Catholic city in Protestant Northern Ireland. Therefore, the majority that felt repressed by the minority (where the famous “Bloody Sunday” took place) was very active in their speech and action against the British and loyalists. There was no shortage of fiery murals here as well. Included in this post is a picture I took with a pro-British mural, an obvious reference to British dominance and destruction of Catholics in Derry, taken in one of the small Protestant neighborhoods. There were murals of children approaching tanks, men ready for war, of more international peace leaders, etc. Some black & white and some in vivid color, some the size of entire buildings, and some accompanying a memorial garden.

I found Derry to be more interesting than Belfast, mostly because I was given a tour by my distant cousin from Galway, Joe McDonagh, who grew up hearing about new violence occurring in Northern Ireland on the news just about every other day. He gave firsthand insight of the importance of the sites, and helped me to understand how different the environment was less than twenty years ago. I also recently found out that a distant cousin of mine was an MP in English Parliament who fought for the rights of Catholics in Northern Ireland, named Bernadette Devlin.

My two escapes to the North were eye opening. We as young Americans can have such an American-focused view towards the world that we do not realize how much emotion and conflict can consume a country we consider to be well civilized and modern. The many murals in Derry and Belfast helped to give me this insight. I hope it is not the last time I visit the North, and I hope the next time I do, it will be continuing its journey to a peaceful society as it has been for the past two decades.