Salam aleikum, everyone!
First of all, sorry that I haven’t updated in a while! You
can blame that on my extremely limited internet access since I have been with
my host family.
Second of all, I found a soccer ball!
Thirdly, let’s begin. So where did I leave off… Oh yeah! I
was just about to meet my host family for the first time that evening. I did
meet my host family, and we had a lovely iftar on a traditional Omani sea
vessel. It was actually one of the most uncomfortable, humid, disgusting
(people were getting sea sick and vomiting everywhere) dinners of my life, but
still, it had the potential to be wonderful. I have an eighteen-year-old host
sister named Meera, a two-and-a-half year old host brother named Saif, and a
host mom and a host dad, and a marvelous host housemaid named Lykshmi. For the
most part, my stay with them has been fine. I’ve visited a lot of houses, salam
aleikum-ed a heck of a lot of people, kissed hundreds of women’s cheeks, kissed
the foreheads of two old ladies, and eaten way too much delicious food. I am
feeling more and more Omani with every calorie of fried, wonderful goodness I
put into my mouth.
Now that I am more involved and intimate with Omani culture,
a few things have stood out to me. Firstly, if you think Americans are addicted
to technology, just take a little hop, skip, and a jump over to this country! I
swear I have never seen people more addicted to their cell phones. To give you
an idea of how bad this has gotten: My host grandmother, whom I’d say is around
the age of eighty-five, has two cell phones, TWO! The grandparents I know back
home can barely manage with one. My host sister has four cell phones… enough
said. Almost every teenager in Muscat spends the majority of his or her time
looking at their little LCD touchscreens. Omanis love their Arab soap operas,
too. At first I thought the TV shows were attempting to satirize other episodic
dramas, but then I realized these people were actually being serious.
Furthermore, I’ve noticed that the
driving in Muscat in absolute insanity. It’s common for one follow two to three
meters behind a car going 120 kph! I have since given up gasping and gawking at
the decisions being made by my driver and other drivers around me, and instead
just shut my eyes and hope for the best!
Here is a list of fun (and not so
fun) facts I have come to know about Muscat and Oman:
1. Omanis
have this strange obsession with Kleenex. They use Kleenex for everything, and
Kleenex can be seen everywhere—on every coffee, bedside, and dinner table. I
think I might actually miss this much Kleenex when I get home.
2. During
Ramadan, Omanis basically fry everything under the sun. I have literally never
eaten so much fried food in my life—donuts, samosas, weird little cheese things
that have become my favorite snack. Every day another girl in my program
complains about her jeans not fitting anymore… I say YOLO.
3. As
I mentioned before, I kissed the head of two old ladies so far. It’s actually a
sign of respect to perform a little hand, cheek, forehead kissing ritual with
people over the age of seventy. I’ll show you guys the whole shabang when I get
back. I think it would be very strange to go around kissing the foreheads of
the elderly in the U.S., but I might give it a shot with my own grandmas and
see where it takes me.
4. Alhumdulilah,
there is a lot of ethnic diversity in Muscat. Unfortunately, some men
(typically Indian laborers) find no other solution but to jump in front of cars
racing along the highway and commit suicide so their families can get money
from the lawsuit. Meera told me that her friend has killed two of these highway
kamikazes and was forced to pay fifteen thousand OMR (almost forty thousand US
dollars) to each family for each accident.
5. To
further dampen the mood, there seems to be plenty of human rights violations
going on in this country. For privacy reasons, I will not get in to much detail
at the present time of these injustices. However, I cannot ignore those Omani
citizens whom are being taken advantage of by the system. Oman is generally a
very friendly country with polite people and a warm atmosphere, but often one
has to look just below the surface to realize that not everything is as the
authorities make it seem. This is true of every country, undoubtedly, but it is
a good reminder for me to not take everything at face value.
I’m sure there are many other
weird, interesting details of which I forgot to inform you all, but I probably
forgot them because these strange details have become my norm. I would say that
stereotyping is often not the best route to an accurate judgment of a person.
However, in my experiences thus far, Arabs have fulfilled plenty of my
pre-supposed stereotypes! They eat on the floor the majority of the time. They
prefer to eat with their hands. Men wear elaborate headdresses and white
dresses, and women are generally expected to cover-up. Although maybe not to
the same extreme as other countries, there are definitely pre-determined gender
roles in Oman—in traditional families, the women cook and the men eat.
Fulfilling these stereotypes is not necessarily a bad thing, though; these are
just parts of the culture, and whose place is it for us (Westerners) to say that
things need to change in these unfamiliar places? Although I’ll be the first to
advocate for the social equality of everyone, it’s an entirely different story
to stomp into a foreign culture and demand a change in the status quo. It’s a
tricky situation, you know?
Final thought: I have slept in one,
two, three, four, five, six different beds since I left home!
Masalamah!
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| Biracial harmony can be seen in this photograph of mine and Celine's contrasting skin color. |
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| Me at the Bait Al Kubair Museum |
P.S. Just because I am using these
Islamic words like “inshallah” and “alhumdulilah”, it does not mean I have
converted to Islam. It is a part of the culture to use such words, and I hear
them everywhere used by everyone, Muslim or non-Muslim. Just wanted to clear
that up!
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