finished

i am done. school finished yesterday (here's a picture from class),  headed to cyprus tomorrow, and will be stateside in ten days. i'm having flashbacks of returning from oakland--trying to explain an experience that really, well, cannot be explained. it must be experienced. in short, kuwait has taught me this: normal is relative. we truly are products of our environment! perhaps as a graduate student in sociology i should have already known this. and i did,  intuitively, but not personally. it's similar to my experiences living in oakland: it's one thing to study poor people (as sociologists love to do), it's a completely different experience to live and work with poor people. 

ethnocentrism is the fancy sociological term which means the tendency to view, experience and evaluate the world from one's own cultural perspective. in other words, conceptions of right, wrong, and normal are socially and culturally constructed: they are relative, and thus, are not consistent across all cultures. but...but... some of you may be saying. some things are just wrong and others are just right. perhaps. 

after deciding to come to kuwait this summer the initial question i received from most was this: are you going to have to cover (i.e. wear a hijab)? nothing wrong with the question. but why was it even a question? because it's not normal (and we can debate that meaning some other time) for women in the united states to cover. admittedly when i first arrived in kuwait i probably stared a bit too much, especially at women who were fully covered wearing a burka. but now, i pass them just about everyday and don't look twice. it's become normal. 

i leave you with this: "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."- mark twain