I think about my privilege constantly in Jordan. One situation that was particularly striking was when we met with Doad, and he described the trials and tribulations of Jordanian journalism. Unlike in America, there is no freedom of speech in Jordan. Although our American political platforms are rife with polarization, no one is going to prison because of their opinion. 

The ability to speak our minds is an important aspect of all of our lives, especially during DukeEngage. One of the key experiences during DukeEngage is the weekly reflections when we listen to new voices and connect their voices to our perspectives and experiences. I’ve listened to every member of our cohort state their opinions that explicitly contradict the American government agenda and feel empowered and confident while doing so. In many ways, this is not a reality for most Jordanians. It is a crime here to criticize the king, government officials, and institutions. In addition, defamatory speech is absolutely prohibited. Journalists could face jail time for publishing information that is not approved by the government or the monarchy, and the policies are getting stricter. I think about this every time my supervisor answers a political question, a guest speaker presents, or when I am in a taxi and feel comfortable discussing current news. I am grateful that I have grown up in a culture that encouraged discourse and that this privilege follows me overseas. 

There is a popular anecdote about two fish used to describe culture. One fish swims past the other and asks, “How’s the water?” The other fish replies, “What the hell is water?” Almost every orientation I have attended brings up the visual to prove the point that you don’t truly know what surrounds you and how it affects how you interact with the world until you leave your ‘fishbowl.’ In this case, leaving America and Duke is leaving the fishbowl to dive into the Jordanian ocean. But despite the change of environment, you still don’t shake off how you’re used to swimming. This means all of my interactions are impacted by my context. It can be silly things, like how Americans shut car doors harder than Jordanians, or larger decisions, like entering a new space at work and not knowing the proper professionalism. This means many mistakes are made, but I try to be conscious that this is not my water, and I try to take a step back and watch how the other fish are swimming.

There are honestly so many moments in which I have realized how incredibly privileged I am to be an American Duke student. A great privilege I have is being apart of the Duke Engage program in general. Today, I spoke to my supervisor about the Duke Engage program and how our trip is fully funded. He was shocked to hear the cost of our apartment and amount we received as a stipend. Unemployment among youth is one of Jordan’s greatest issues. Therefore, most Jordanians our age do not have access to the amount of money we have and still rely on their parents for support. I recognize how lucky I am to receive enough money to live in Jordan without much stress. Still, I can’t help but feel guilty sometimes for being able to live so comfortably while the people we work with struggle to afford basic necessities. When I go on site to visit the refugee camps, sometimes I try to bring little gifts for the kids. Personally, I’d rather spend money on the communities we are working with than on myself. The most amazing part is how the smallest gesture a difference. I bought 2 packs of chalk for 2 Jordanian Dinar for the kids to play with and they were so incredibly grateful. The simplest actions that make no impact on our lives mean so much to the communities we are working with.

Outside of work, it is interesting to compare how locals are treated compared to us. One memory that comes to mind is the bus ride back from PeaceWadi. We were pulled over by police officers who asked to see our papers. However, once the officer found out we were American, he let us go without actually seeing our documents. It’s incredible how our status as Americans alter how we are treated in public. I’ve noticed that stores will also give us free pastries or extra food once they hear our broken Arabic and find out we are American. I feel like I’ve experienced Jordan hospitality to the fullest extent.

I was excited when I heard about the project that Geethika and I were going to work on this summer. I had worked at a couple of refugee organizations before doing mainly case management work, and I came into the summer wanting a different experience. Working on a case study spoke to many of the skills that I had gained in an academic research setting, and it was compelling to get to use some of these skills in the field. 

Like any non-profit, this does not mean I entirely work just on the case study. Just two days ago, we went to visit some of the kids who were in one of ILearn’s programs in the field. I sat with two of the girls in a classroom and tried to help them with math while they tried to teach me the Arabic words for “multiply,” “over,” “add,” and “minus.” I felt slightly silly trying to help them at first because I did not have the vocabulary to be an effective teacher. But, after time, I picked up on the words, and one of the girls and I fell into a routine of solving the problems together. I think that is one of the most unique parts of working at a non-profit. Your job is rarely limited to the initial project that you were assigned. This is entirely different than school. At school, you are in a hyper-limited environment. Even the assignments with some creative freedom require that you adhere to a rubric that will tell you that you were successful. Non-profit work is rarely that. Sure, I may have been initially assigned the case study project. But, sometimes you are going to spend your day attending meetings with your supervisor in the field and helping a little girl do math across a language barrier. Working at ILearn has reminded me that variety at work and doing jobs you did not expect to do is a valuable experience that I can continuously learn from. 

Outside of the job, I feel as though my life is about balancing spending time in Jordan and preparing for graduating from college next year. I want to spend every weekend exploring a new area of the country and drinking tea in a cafe but I am also stressed about what I am going to do after university. While I am learning to go with the flow more at my job, I am learning how to structure my time without short-term deadlines to keep me motivated. 

In general, I think what keeps me motivated to work is my genuine interest and passion for the projects I am working on. It is easy to feel discouraged for a variety of reasons both at and outside of work but if you just remind yourself of your genuine interest I think it is easier to overcome barriers such as a narrow time frame and big projects.

As a Computer Science major, I’m not new to the process of trying to make a program work—the trial and error, debugging, endless googling, and hours-long attempts to find out what’s keeping your code from running (which usually ends up being a single missing set of parentheses, or something similarly infuriatingly simple) is something that I am not only familiar with, but also have consciously chosen to make a permanent part of my life. But I had never before experienced it on the scale of our current project. 

Brendan, Leyla, and I have been working to develop an app that will make it easier for Community-Based Organizations to make their annual reports to the government. When we were assigned this project, the three of us were immediately incredibly excited—it involves frontend and backend development, work with databases and security features, user experience, and many other components that we are all very excited by. But the sheer scale of this project made it clear to us from the beginning that it would not be an easy task. And in addition to the project itself being daunting, we soon realized that there were other factors that would make our work difficult. 

In my CS work at Duke, I have usually been working on projects that are carefully designed by my professors and directly supervised by a team of teaching assistants—each step is carefully prescribed, and there is an existing “correct answer” for what the final product should look like. Things are already broken into smaller pieces for us, and the coursework is curated so that we are able to spend time learning concepts before we are asked to demonstrate them through projects. Our current project is not at all like that: the program has already been started, but it’s been started in a language and using a framework that none of us have seen before; our direct supervisor has been incredibly helpful logistically and has set up meetings for us, but he is not a software engineer and has not been involved with the programming of this app; the developer who began making Wathik is no longer working for ILearn, and lives in Saudi Arabia now. This means that our work is largely self-guided, and that we had to teach ourselves a new language and environment before we could actually start working. 

The process of learning how to work with the tools that the previous developer had used to start Wathik was grueling: we spent nearly two weeks studying to learn entirely new programming languages and developer tools. There were multiple times where I thought that I wasn’t getting anywhere, or that I should factory reset my computer and start over, or even that I should change my major and that software development is not the correct path for me. 

Luckily, our supervisor was able to connect us with the developer who had started this project. He was going to be visiting Jordan for Eid, and would be in Amman for a few days. Even though he was here to visit family and celebrate the holiday, he very generously offered to meet with us. 

After speaking with him, it only took a few more days of work for Brendan, Leyla, and I to start making breakthroughs—we had spent weeks on intense work that was incredibly valuable but provided only non-visible abstract structural results, and were finally able to make progress on things that would be visible to future users of this product. 

This process has been exhausting, both intellectually and emotionally. But it’s also been completely worth it—I feel like I’ve learned more in these past couple of weeks than I would typically learn in a full semester-long CS class. I’ve also learned about the generosity of the people in this industry, and their willingness to help and teach each other. And, possibly most importantly to me personally, I have gotten to experience that amazing feeling (every software developer must know it) of making code that didn’t work before start to work—and this time, I feel like I’m doing it on a project that matters.

Sitting on zoom this week has been a common theme throughout the workdays. Meeting with Abdullah “Josh” the head back-end developer at a Jordanian software consulting company to configure a local database on my computer for 40 minutes after a whole day of not being able to work with my terminal was just the first of many. While that may sound a little bit grueling, what made it so exciting was in between the debugging of my computer system, we talked about our Eid experiences in Amman and our families ways for celebrating Eid. Josh had no incentive to being available for our needs, but he has been so willing to jump at aiding us in our path to succeeding as web developers for this project. So while there was a lot of trial and error this week that posed a problem for even being able to get started on the actual work of the website, without these slight hiccups, Brendan, Leah, and I wouldn’t have been able to forge strong relationships with people like Josh in Amman.

Thinking about what my work for iLearn means, I reflected a lot on how creating a digital platform that will allow non-profits and CBOs to centrally report their annual work and finances will be useful. A lot of thoughts passed through my head on if this would just become another abandoned application of the millions on the internet or if this had the actual capacity of being useful to the community and audience we intended it for. However, being here in Amman has broadened my world and my understanding of how the education and skills that I have can be useful and have an impact. Part of the motivation is having been in Amman and meeting with the different Non-profits and CBOs. Being able to directly see who and what organizations will hopefully benefit from this sort of software has been the biggest motivating factor.

This project is one of the most rewarding things I have worked on. I am incredibly excited about the idea of creating a useful piece of technology that will hopefully help organizations in Jordan overcome the challenge of communicating important work and finances with donors and the government. 

From facing challenges with even getting the Laravel framework (the software we are using to work on the web application) to run on my computer to trying to work around the Arabic to English barrier, there have been a lot of hours spent configuring both my computer to adjust to what I want it to do and configuring and my mind and the way I work to overcome challenges. I am motivated with this project because I feel like it is using my technical skills to propel my interests in social impact.

Since moving past all of the seemingly simple problems of getting different languages like SQL and PHP to configure with my local machine, we are moving fast. From creating a form out of the first template, to enhancing the login system, and even just getting into more of a routine and rhythm to approaching problems, our team is working hard and the developments are showing it!

I am really happy and excited about where this summer is taking me (challenges and all) and can’t wait to see the future of this software and the non-profit sector in Jordan!

I like my job. I like my job a lot, in fact. Whenever else could I do research, meet those communities, and coordinate with people across six countries? I came to Jordan, expecting my job to be about social enterprise mapping and statistical evaluations of nonprofits in Amman, but what I got was even better. While my work consists of a lot of scouring the internet about domestic refugee policies in the MENA region, in moments where this data meets my education from conversations with people is what I believe to be the greatest virtue in my work. Sometimes my off-the-job learning can bring so much more depth and nuance into my work. Going into the “Refugees: Priorities vs. Reality” project, we had set up a timeline for everything–a comprehensive, smooth sailing plan. All the numbers added up and the plan was clear, but learning that political refugee projects were not permitted in Egypt brought us a step back in our preliminary research, as we had to pivot on to Libya instead. In another instance, we were calling a Tunisian social entrepreneur who expressed worries about the uncertainty of getting focus group interviews with Tunisian refugees–another hitch in the plan. He explained he had taught in Tunisian camps and never learned a single student’s name, but that was the culture there. They did not disclose personal information or thoughts on their circumstances, perhaps out of protection for themselves. This would mean major changes in our interview style.

While my PubPol 155: Intro to Public Policy class couldn’t have ever prepared me for this work, I feel I’ve already learned leaps and bounds about professional writing and the balance of office and fieldwork with ILearn. When the “Refugees: Priorities vs. Reality” project slows or is waiting for approval from our partner organizations, I can count on the Masahati or Thaki projects to have some reporting for me to do. My supervisor, Saif, has taught me so much from his enthusiasm. Listening to his excitement on the way to Soof Camp about how he loves to see the Soof people eager to work reminds me that his role of helping them find employment is larger than just a job. He is helping people self advocate.

The project I’m working on “Refugees: Priorities vs. Reality” is a work that aligns very closely with my values of efficacy and researching with both my head and heart. The project is a three-pronged case study across six countries in the MENA region with partner organizations American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF). We will be conducting focus group interviews and producing six deliverable reports and videos, comparing the economic and social aspirations of refugee youth with current refugee policy. This project will be presented in a regional closing event in Jordan that brings together decision-makers, stakeholders, and our collaborators to facilitate networking and showcase the results of the consolidated, regional report. While the timeline suggests the project will be completed by September at the latest, if I’ve learned anything from working so far, it’s that the plan doesn’t always run smoothly. We leave on August 10th, but I would love to keep offering my skills to this project until the very end.

It is very easy to think that a computer science project will be easy: I mean how hard can it be to get a website to write text on top of an already existing pdf? This cockiness was scorned after the 4+ hours I spent this week trying to write the ultimately two lines of code that accomplished this task. 

I am working on a project called Wathik with Leah and Leyla, a website that allows Community Based Organizations to log data about their activities and projects that can eventually be compiled into a report that they are required to submit to the Jordanian government. This project is aimed to ease the burden on smaller organizations in Jordan, making sure that they can submit the proper paperwork without a large investment of time or energy. Perhaps the most daunting challenge in this project is not a specific feature, but rather finding resources to help us learn how to use the frameworks and languages on which the website has thus far been created. None of us on the project have any experience in developing web applications nearly to this scale and therefore there was a lot to learn, even before we wrote our first lines of code for Wathik.

Another barrier has been the lack of continuity with the project, as the person who has developed most of the website no longer works with ILearn, and in fact is currently living in Saudi Arabia. Without a proper form of contact, we were unable to even open the existing project, and creating the website somehow seemed an insurmountable task. If a situation like this arose in one of our classes in Duke, the only negatives that would arise would be having to wake up early the next day to go to office hours and have a friendly TA explain all of our errors, an option that does not exist for us here. 

Fortunately, the former developer Abed Al-Rahman sensed our desperation and invited us to a hackathon at his company that he was attending while visiting family in Amman for Eid, an event where his company was working the entire day to create one web product. We were greeted by the amazing hospitality of the entire team, each eager to show us the aspect of web development in which they specialize, particularly the lead developer Abdullah, or Josh as he is more commonly known. The next day Abed Al-Rahman and Josh sat down with us for four hours to teach us all of the basics of how to develop the website, allowing us to then begin development on our own. Josh has remained an eager contact, constantly sending us helpful articles for our development in the middle of the night, not because we asked for them, but because he wants to help us in some way.

Development has skyrocketed since this meeting with our team adding new features each day and finally being able to generate pdfs that are not an amalgamation of question marks. I believe that the important lesson from this learning experience has been to reach out for help, because if you are working in a field that people are passionate about, they might surprisingly have no hesitation to sit down with three clueless students from halfway across the world to share their passion and set them up for success.

No matter how much research you do, it will never compare to first-hand experiences. I feel as though this is a huge lesson I have learned since being in Jordan. In America, when learning about Palestine and Palestinian refugees, I could only rely on secondhand stories and online videos. However, nothing compares to the personal stories I have heard and the connections I have made while being in Jordan. When we were first going to visit the refugee camps, I was nervous. I was terrified that the conditions would be horrifying and I would break down. Yet, when I got there, I was greeted by smiling kids eager to show me what they’re learning. They are some of the most resilient people on this planet and have been through so much hardship in their lives, yet you’d never know when you meet them. They are simply full of joy and life, inspiring me to be more like them.

I have been working on Project Masahati, or My Space. This is a program designed to provide children with a safe space to learn through play. In high school, I took a teaching course at my local community college. This class taught me about lesson planning, making infographics and flyers, and online resources for teachers. I took the class as an elective, and questioned whether it would benefit me in any way, since teaching is not a final career goal of mine. Nevertheless, I am incredibly grateful I took this course due to its immense benefit to me while I work on Masahati. Thus far, I have created various activities for the kids, created flyers, inputted data, written reports, and much more. It’s incredibly rewarding to know that the lesson plans and activities I develop will be used in a classroom environment.

My absolute favorite part of my work is definitely working directly with the kids. We visited a refugee camp with our I Learn supervisor this past week, and I had an absolute blast. We helped them out with math; honestly, I even learned a new thing or two! I noticed the way that the teachers in Jordan teach math differs from how I was taught as a kid; the Jordanian method of comparing fractions seems much easier to comprehend than what I was taught. These kids are what keeps me motivated to work. During our last visit, they had so much fun doing math they continued working even after class ended. My history teacher in high school would have us race to complete a question on the white board, so I set up the same activity during our visit. The kids LOVED it. My poor supervisor was begging me to leave (sorry Saif). The kids don’t have an outdoor area to play, but we played music and I taught the kids the “cha cha slide” while they taught me Dabke (a traditional Palestinian dance). I cannot wait to see what else these kids will teach me during my stay in Jordan, because I could confidently say they have already made a permanent impact on my life.

Before the beginning of my Duke Engage program, I made efforts to prepare myself for the discrepancies between my own American perspective and what I would experience once I arrived in Jordan. But no amount of studying is a replacement for hearing people’s personal stories. 

I came to Jordan to work as a software intern for ILearn. This is not necessarily a job that I have to do in person—my coworkers and I often work from cafes rather than going into the office. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking to myself about why exactly I flew halfway around the world to work on a project that I could’ve done from home. And now, about two weeks in, I believe that I do have to be here to properly engage with the nuanced perspectives that exist as the context for the work that I’m doing. Since arriving in Amman, I’ve heard a wealth of perspectives from everyone I’ve met. There is a stark difference between caring about the identity of Jordanians and the suffering of Palestinians as an American hearing about their lives only through news, and as a person for whom these issues are facts of their everyday lives.

A week after arriving in Jordan we visited Abu Faras. He lives on a farm where he operates an NGO called Peace Wadi. After picking us up by the side of the road, he drove us past the Baptism Site of Christ and then to his property, past his grove of date palms and to his home. Faras is from Palestine, but had to move to Jordan at a young age. Now, he is not able to return. His front porch looks out across the Jordan River at Jericho—he is able to see where he was born, even though he cannot visit. I had already known about the inability of Palestinians to freely cross the border, but the injustice of it still struck me when we were visiting Faras: as an American citizen, I may freely cross into and out of Palestine with very little difficulty. But for Faras, who lives within sight of the city where he grew up, it is currently a legal impossibility to go back. 

We heard a slightly different perspective that same week, when we spoke with Palestinian-American journalist Daoud Kuttab. Kuttab was born in Jerusalem, and since then has worked in America, Palestine, and Jordan. Kuttab’s perspective led me to think more about the reality of reconciling personal identity with geopolitical possibility. Despite his pragmatic approach to this issue, he expressed that he believes the Palestinian cause is a beautiful one; but he also does not see a way for this to translate into political change without some compromises. Speaking with Kuttab made me think about the importance of both personal emotional approaches and pragmatic political approaches to this issue, and also led me to consider the difference between short-term and long-term contributions, and direct and indirect ways of addressing the situation. As a software intern, the work that I do will mainly be used to indirectly help people who have already been displaced into Jordan by the conflict. It will not do anything to put an end to the occupation, or to help people who are currently suffering in Palestine. That does not make this work any less valuable—it is work that there is a need for, and that should be done. But this approach alone cannot solve the problems at the root of this crisis. 

I feel so incredibly privileged to be in Jordan right now, working with people who have a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. I hope to continue learning, gain a more nuanced perspective, and make myself as useful as possible.

In 1949, two thirds of the Jordanian population was of Palestinian origin. It’s one thing to read this statistic in our pre-departure readings, telling a story of the interconnectedness of Jordan and Palestine, but it is an entirely different experience to meet so many people in Jordan who call themselves Palestinian. While relying on taxis and Uber for my transportation in Amman, I have had many opportunities to practice my few Arabic phrases, including “inta min win?” or ‘where are you from?,’ with many sharing their connections back to the Palestinian land. Even those who don’t track their heritage back to Palestine are immensely tied to the current political struggle, strongly supporting their Palestinian neighbors, friends, and fellow Jordanians. 

While in Jordan, I have also become acutely aware of the emotion tied up in the Palestinians struggle, one that is often overlooked in the United States, where most of the ways that I learned about the conflict came from news networks or academics debating the merits of a two-state versus a one-state solution. While we have had the opportunity to share in this conversation with Jordanians, particularly the journalist Daoud Kuttab, it has been interesting to also hear the emotional response to the conflict. In the same conversation with Mr. Kuttab, one of the employees at ILearn (the NGO for which we are volunteering), Saif, chimed in to share that he could not understand the differences in reactions to the crisis in Palestine and the war in Ukraine. He did not understand why people see the Ukrainian war as a justified war to protect their land supported by allies, whereas the crisis in Palestine is seen as a situation that must be solved by some sort of political compromise. This statement was a little disjoint from the rest of the conversation, and Mr. Kuttab responded by talking about some of the reasons for these differences and what he saw as the most practical response to the situation in Palestine. While I did not disagree with Mr. Kuttab’s response, I valued the insight shared by Saif of how emotional and personal the issue of the treatment of Palestenians by the Israeli government is to Jordanians, even those without Palestinian heritage.

When Saif is in Amman, he stays as a guest like me in the apartment where I am staying for the summer. Due to this proximity, I have been able to have multiple conversations with him at the end of busy days. We talk about our lives, the events of the office, and the importance that he sees in the work we are doing together. I understand that my projects are important, but since I am working on computer science related projects, like building websites, I have been grappling with the reason that I needed to come to Jordan, when my work could have been done from the United States. 

The first time that I started to understand why being in Jordan was important was when after the first week, the cohort took a trip down to PeaceWadi on the Jordanian-Palestinian border. I am certainly still grappling with the reason I am in Jordan, but this moment felt as an important one to share in the human experiences of those living with the effects of a dislodged Palestine. We met a man, Abu Faraz, born in the city of Jericho in Palestine, but now living across the Jordan river in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. There was something poetic in watching him sit on his front porch, looking out on the city where he was born, but to where he could no longer return because of the conflict. However, what stuck out about Abu Faraz was not the seemingly tragic narrative of his story, but his immense joy and hospitality, welcoming us into his home for lunch and sharing his life with us. What I have come to realize about ‘being Palestinian’ is that it is an immensely strong identity for people, seeking community and joy together in the face of great adversity. This identity is now deeply intertwined with the Jordanian identity, an identity of Palestinian-Jordanians, looking across the river to their old homes and communities.