By Lindsey Schibelhut, Senior Reporter.
There’s a saying about not judging a book by it’s cover. Not judging a region before experiencing its culture and people, however, is something not often thought of. On March 30, Delta hosted the global awareness presentation “Crescent moon: living and traveling in a Muslim world.”
Panelists at the event included: farm owner of Good Stead Farm in Hope Mich., Sarah Longstreth; CMU Alumna, Amanda Jaczkowski; and English Professor, Ray Lacina, with Associate English Professor, Andrew Colenbrander, moderating. They all discussed their personal stories of traveling to Middle Eastern countries.
“We’re trying to… explore traveling and living abroad as ways of deepening our individual collective understanding of the world, especially some of the more unfamiliar parts,” began Colenbrander.
Panelist Lacina and his wife were asked to visit Saudi Arabia by a Muslim friend. Lacina converted from Catholicism to Islam during college and has never regretted the decision.
“Never presume you know something about the place just based on the things you hear,” explains Lacina. “If people are being described to you as somehow different from you, you’re getting wrong information… That was certainly my experience there, very generous, very decent, very kind people,” says Lacina.
Lacina spent six years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He says the beautiful thing about the country is that it’s still very traditional, but it is also embracing many modern things. Lacina, too, discussed the pilgrimage he took while he was there, which stuck with him as, “familiar and foreign intermixed.”
“Mecca is in a mountainous region and so when the dust started to come down, the rain started to come down, I looked out at the mountains, and I felt like I was driving through a little chunk of Southwestern Wisconsin where I grew up… it reminded me of home,” says Lacina.
Marie Johansen, 65, heard about the event on Delta’s Q-radio.
“It’s nice to see the cultural options exposed for the community to get involved in,” says Johansen.
Next to speak was Jaczkowski. At just 23 years old, she has already traveled to 45 states and nine countries. She graduated with her degree in international relations, religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in 2014 and studied abroad in Jordan for six months, while also visiting Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon.
“When I was in Jordan, I would say the most interesting thing that I experienced, would be with the religious side of things,” explains Jaczkowski. “Because at that point I had recently become Muslim. I was expecting the people in the Middle East to be overgeneralized, very religious and it was not like that in Jordan,” says Jaczkowski.
Jaczkowski says people were very surprised when she told them she was leaving to go pray.
“Everyone’s like, ‘you’re going to do what?’ I had known basically up until this point, the majority of the people I knew from Muslim countries, were from Saudi Arabia,” explains Jaczkowski. “And people from Saudi don’t even think about it, it’s time to go pray, they get up and go pray…In Jordan it was complete opposite, they were shocked that you’d go pray, they were surprised there were people wearing headscarves,” she says.
Delta alumni, Kerice Basmadjian, 44, connected to the event on a familial level.
“I have a big interest in Middle Eastern culture and life. My sister lived in Egypt for eight years, so I was listening to how their stories sort of lined up,” says Basmadjian.
Basmadjian expresses how the new information will impact her in the future.
“It’s always good to get a little taste of culture, from people who have been there and heard about it; and that’s not tainted by the media or the politics of the world,” says Basmadjian.
When visiting another country, Jaczkowski assured the audience that “everyone’s the same, you’re going to run into the same problems.”
But she says on the flip side that, “you’re also going to run into people who are going to take out… and let you eat their lunch. They’re going to invite you into their home, just because they see that you’re a foreigner and they want to show you the best that their country can give.”
Longstreth says that some of the literature in her gender studies class in college, regarding Arab and Muslim women, was negative and very one-sided.
“That was the driving force for me looking into studying abroad in that region,” says Longstreth.
She describes the agricultural practices she witnessed while living there.
“People utilize good foragers like sheep and goats. They can forage around the desserts… they can find very few things, but still be able to produce viable meat,” says Longstreth.
“They try to utilize what little resources they have,” says Longstreth.
Jaczkowski says she finds it absurd when she hears people say Muslims don’t like the United States.
“The United States is their prime idol of what they want to live in,” explains Jaczkowski. “Every student in my university that I talked to, either lived, wanted to live, travel, work, anything in the United States…that’s their goal… the American dream is more alive in the Middle East than it is here,” she concludes.