a woman's worth

There is something inherently romantic about traveling alone. Discovering the world while promulgating an uninterrupted internal monologue can lead to revelation and self discovery. And though every bone in my body wants to insist that traveling alone while also being a young woman has no effect on this type of reflection, it does.

Fear is an attitude. And I truly believe that fear is a choice. But, on a recent trip to Damascus I was confronted by intermittant reminders of the perils of my sex; and I found myself frequently asking moment by moment, should I be afraid?

The trip began smoothly. I arrived at the bus station and purchased a ticket to Damascus explaining to the driver that I would have to leave the bus at the border. Syria, as I already knew, is very skeptical of American travelers and arriving on any land border without a visa means a 4 to 6 hour wait.

I chatted pleasantly with a French backpacker on the bus and, after taking a one-hour detour to an isolated garage to fix a problem with the bus, arrived happily at the Lebanese checkpoint at which passports must be verified in order to exit Lebanon and enter the 5 km stretch of nebulous territory before reaching the Syrian border. My Lebanese visa had expired and so I told the bus driver that I would have to withstand ten extra minutes of bureaucracy before we could leave. He politely agreed, apparently hiding great impatience, for he promptly left me there, taking my french friend with him and leaving me to fend for myself.

I quickly darted between three different offices in order to renew my Lebanese visa and ease my trip back upon return. In each office I was met by smiling faces and wandering eyes. Each immigration officer or shop-owner scanned me up and down, endlessly entertained by my broken arabic and toothy smile.

I hadn't felt this way in some time. In Lebanon, men stared at me, but it was different. I didn't feel like an oddity there, for the Lebanese girl walking just behind me was probably wearing fewer clothes, and they would stare at her too. But, Syria is less cosmopolitan and much more conservative. And a familiar combination of self-confidence and strange slightly sexual power came over me as it had two years prior when I was living in Jordan, a similarly conservative society.

So with my visa issues resolved, I exited the stuffy and smelly, fly-infested immigration office into the hot hot sun. Realizing that my bus had left I panicked for a moment. My first instinct was to coyly ask the men standing outside the immigration office for help. I was ready to use my feminine influence on them to my advantage. So could I really blame them for looking? Does working within an existing system, even a repugnant one, validate it?

But a taxi soon stopped in front of me, saving me from having to make a decision.

Until this moment I had been completely lacking any insecurity about my dress or my sex. My sun dress was modest, and my backpack clearly advertized my status as Ajnabiyya or, foreigner: a label that usually warrants forgiveness of any seemingly odd behavior.

When I got in the car I found it stuffed full of what appeared to be Syrian migrant workers. The three men squeezed into the back seat had quite obviously worked all week without the best of accomodations, for they smelled as men do after days of work and minimal bathing and their clothes were covered in dirt and the white dust that wafts up from the limestone and cement that are ubiquitous on this side of the world.

They were very polite, but of course, very interested in finding out as much as they could about me before the driver returned. The four of us actually carried on a lovely conversation mostly in Arabic and I smiled and laughed as per my default in these situations but I also found myself tugging my dress up from the top and down from the bottom, desperate to cover up.

But when the driver returned and we set on our way, the conversation stopped as driving at 90 plus miles per hour with all of the windows open doesn't exactly warrant flowing interaction. And as we zoomed down those 5 km I reconsidered my behavior. Though my instinct is to nod and smile and laugh in all the right places, perhaps it is wiser to go cold.

When I reached the Syrian immigration office, I turned in my passport and began to wait the 4 to 6 hours I had dreaded all day. But, to my surprise after 3 1/2 hours and a whole day without food (as it was Ramadan and there was none to be bought) I was surprised when I was called back to the window and told that my visa would be ready soon.

I waited at the window as the 5 or so men behind it stared and whispered, presumably about me for another hour. One of the immigration officers, Abu Ahmed, had been chatting with me about where I had learned my Arabic and what I was doing in Lebanon - the standard questions for which my answers were so rehearsed that they came out almost subconsciously. After I had stood at the window for an hour and a half, I mustered the gumption to ask if everything was all right with my visa. Abu Ahmed said yes and that it would be five more minutes.

As I had been watching the workings of the office for over an hour, I started to learn the game and when the phone rang and Abu Ahmed finally stamped my passport, which he had been clutching in his hands this whole time, the tightness in my shoulders started to ease. I looked at him and said "khallas?" with the sweetest smile I could muster. Is it finished? He told me I had to wait five more minutes.

But when he then came from behind the partition to casually chat some more, I became suspicious. Though there was nothing I could do, out of fear of angering the man that could make this whole trip for naught, I said nothing. But after another 45 minutes of waiting and looking as tired and pathetic as I could, he finally handed me my passport with a fresh Syrian visa and a slip of paper containing his name and phone number. The victory of obtaining my visa was almost overshadowed by my anger in discovering that the last hour of waiting had been spent not waiting for my visa to be approved, but for Abu Ahmed to summon the courage to give me his phone number.

For some of this time, I had been commiserating with an American-Palestinian man who was waiting as well. And we decided to find a taxi to Damascus together. But, it seems that trusting the familiar does not always pay. We walked to the road block where Syrain soldiers inspected what was being brought into their country and after giving me a once-over they began inspecting the boxes of gifts my new friend had brought for his family, as he was planning on traveling on the West Bank by land.

In my exhausted haze, I overheard them asking him about me, and he repeatedly referred to me as "jowzati"- my wife. The rage came back, especially since before we got to the road block, he had insisted that he do all of the talking. When we got through the inspection point and finally got in a taxi I confronted him about this, but he claimed that he had not said it. But, I know what I heard, and I sat in the taxi fuming until I finally got to my hotel and dissolved in to my bed.

The rest of the trip lacked the drama that journey itself had entailed. I met up with a college professor and his wife and had a lovely time that I will not soon forget. But the frustrations of my sex stung all weekend and still do now.

I never was afraid, not when the bus left without me, not when the Palestinian man told the Syrian border guards that I was his wife, not once. I was bothered, annoyed, but when you've traveled enough, you learn that unless you've done something truly evil or worse yet, stupid, it's going to be ok. This notion may be naive, but it seems to keep me from living in fear. So I'll take it.

But I can't help but think, that everything about my journey to Damascus - virtually everything - would have been different if I weren't a woman.