It was the spring semester of my junior year of college at UC San Diego. I was sitting through yet another chemistry lecture located deep inside a dark dusty hall. It had been designed, specifically it seemed, to contrast the outside beauty of the beachside campus. Then, the most unexpected thing happened. An anthropology professor walked in and announced to the class that he was looking for chemistry students to join his team on an 10 week anthropology dig in Jordan that fall.
They needed someone with them because it wasn’t practical to bring all the samples that they would be collecting back to the lab at the university. They needed someone to run XRF (x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy) on site so that the data could by analyzed later. This turned out to be a fairly simple technique to operate. XRF uses a laser to determine the elemental composition of materials in a way that does not damage or alter the sample.
I jumped at the chance for two reasons. The first was the I had decided to attend UCSD partly because of the research opportunities available to undergraduate students. And this was just the kind of opportunity I was looking for. I would never work in a lab a day of my life after school, but at the time I had every intention of becoming a scientist.
However, the primary reason I wanted to go was that this trip offered a pseudo study abroad experience. This was something that I desperately wanted and could in no way afford. The experience would end up being more about hard labor than hard partying, but I was willing to take what I could get. So by late September I was on my way. For reasons I can’t exactly recall, my best friend and I decided to road trip up to San Francisco from San Diego before I left. It’s possible that the flight was cheaper from SFO. Everyone going on the dig needed to take supplies with them from the university. This meant I was packing about 5 laptops and seemingly 20 pounds of zip ties and small plastic bags for collecting samples.
We stayed overnight in San Francisco at a friend’s house. For reasons I can’t explain, other than chalking it up to being 22 at the time, I left everything in the trunk of my friend’s car. The next morning, the zip ties and plastic bags had been scattered on the ground and the laptops were gone. A wave of numbing fear hit my body. I felt ice cold with a heavy pit in my stomach. I was beyond panicked. All the excitement and nervousness I was feeling because of the trip turned into a level of pure terror that is difficult to articulate and hard for me to really access or even fully understand myself now.
My mind was racing. Would I get kicked off the trip? Or worse, would I have to pay for the laptops? What would happen on the dig without them? I worked part time but I was mostly living off of scholarships that paid my tuition and covered a small amount of living expenses. I couldn’t afford to pay for whatever a single laptop cost, much less all of them. It truly is a special kind of hell to be in such a vulnerable financial position.
Since graduating high school, I had worked living paycheck to paycheck and taking community college classes before transferring to UCSD the previous semester. It was hard of course, but it felt normal because everyone else I knew was in the exact same position. We mostly all worked at cafes or restaurants or retail stores. I was passionate about going to school while others were passionate about making music or some other art form.
When I transferred to a four year university to finish my degree things were very different. Sure, some college kids are broke in the sense that they don’t have a lot of cash on hand. But almost everyone I had met was from a family that was at least solidly middle class. I remember very distinctly that one of my roommates had never cleaned a bathroom before. If they had a financial emergency, they could call someone for help. For me, that was just not an option.
But here I was, taking a big financial risk by even going on this trip, and now things had gone sideways. I had no idea what I would do. So I was shaking as I called the grad student who I had picked up the supplies from. I told her what had happened and that I didn’t know what to do. She told me that she didn’t know what to do either. So I waited. And in the end, nothing happened. I got on the plane and never had to pay for them and the dig continued along just fine without them.
I arrived in Amman some 24 odd hours later. A driver was waiting to take me to the hostel with the other students. He was friendly and spoke a little English. We stopped at a little roadside stand along the way. He got out to drink a coke and offered for me to join him. I was so nervous and tired and unsure of myself that I stayed in the car.
He dropped me off and I tried to sleep in the hot dark room of the hostel. I was startled awake by the sudden wail of the 5 am call to prayer. I had no idea what was happening and thought it was an emergency evacuation at first. It was even more startling to learn that this happened multiple times a day, every day.
I arrived just a day or two before we left the city to go to the dig site. I wish I had given myself more time to explore, but I did make it to a few spots. There were precious few stop lights to navigate the city. I had read in a Lonely Planet guide book for Jordan that if crossing a street seems too daunting, I should position myself by a grandma and cross when she crosses. This advice really works! It is a trick I still use to this day if I find myself trying to navigate a particularly lawless intersection.
We packed ourselves into old 4×4 stick shift Toyotas. Each grad students was responsible for driving one. We drove for a few hours headed south out of city and into the desert. When we pulled off of the single lane highway we reached a small hamlet which consisted of a dirt road, a few houses, and one store. The professor had rented a large building that we used as the lab. The open air courtyard we used as a lecture hall in the evenings. We were doing all of this for school credit, after all.
We stayed in big square army style tents. The showers and bathrooms were makeshift outdoor stalls with no roof. The water was freezing cold. This was fine at first but went from uncomfortable to unbearable as the weeks went on and the weather turned cold at night.
I’ve never been in a place with such little light pollution, before or since. Looking up each night it was so clear that I could easily see the Milky Way. It was so peaceful and quiet in the dark aside from the hot winds that would whip and howl through the camp.
We would wake up well before sunrise, around 4 am. We had exactly two choices for breakfast, peanut butter and oatmeal or peanut butter and pita. This went on everyday, for 10 weeks. It’s truly a miracle that I still eat those foods today. We would load ourselves into the trucks, jockeying for an a place in the cab or else risk having to ride in the open bed of the truck. We would brace ourselves for the bumpy journey to the actual dig site itself as the grad students followed wadis to navigate.
The region we were staying in is called Khirbat en-Nahas. It was the largest copper mining and smelting site in the Levantine region and beyond during the early Iron Age. Everyone had to work on the excavation. It was difficult, exhausting, and incredibly hot. I was always uncomfortable. We dug up buckets of earth that we would then sift through for pottery shards and other small artifacts. I even found a Roman coin once.
We worked through the morning and in the afternoon everyone had their job in the lab. I would do the XRF analysis, basically shooting a laser at samples of pottery or sediment. We would then bag and label everything, putting the artifacts into large crates to be stored in the basement of some museum.
Like every chapter of my life apparently, the cast of characters was a rag-tag group of misfits. There were about 20 of us total, graduate students and undergraduates. We slept five or six per tent. We worked five days a week and would travel somewhere different every weekend. I got to see the major sites such as the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, and Petra. After visiting a tourist destination we would smoke hookah and then retire to whatever hotel we were staying in armed with the cheapest beer and liquor we could find.
Aside from the grad students and a few of the undergrads majoring in archeology, no one really knew each other well when we first arrived. But because we were living and working together constantly and under such difficult conditions, everyone became close. We quickly sorted ourselves into a few different groups. This inner circle would become my best friends during the trip. I stayed close with most of them once we returned to normal college life and some even after graduation.
The professor contracted the local Bedouin to set up the camp and perform the toughest manual labor at the excavation site. They were all young guys with lots of energy who were constantly goofing off. The first thing that struck me was how affectionate they were with each other. They would hold hands and stand with their arms around each other. It reminded me of the way you see adolescent girls be affectionate in their friendships with one another in the US, but would be completely taboo for boys.
We also saw explosive bravado when there were disagreements. There was never any danger of someone getting seriously injured, but I remember very clearly a particular argument that broke out. The offended party was yelling and chasing another local guy at full speed with a rock, threatening to hit him. This directness of the communication and extremes in the range they used to express their feelings was something I has never seen before.
Some of the grad students spoke enough Arabic to communicate and we would try to have some sort of conversation through them. One of the locals, Omar, was especially friendly and outgoing. He would ask us about our tattoos or what life was like for us back home. Before the end of the trip myself and the part of the crew I was closest to had managed to build enough of a relationship with him that he invited us to his house.
It was a small group, there were four of us that went total. The house was in the hamlet where the lab was located. We went in and sat on the floor. Covered in a black burka showing only her eyes, Omar’s wife entered and presented us with a beautiful towering golden plate of Mansaf. This Jordanian specialty is a rice pilaf dish topped with lamb, yogurt sauce and slivered almonds. Then she disappeared, backing out the same doorway where she had entered, all without saying a word. That was the only time I has the opportunity to interact with a local woman the entire trip.
We had all this beautiful food and our smiling host in front of us. The only problem was that our vocabulary was limited to a few words such as marhaba, assalamu-‘alaikum, shway shway, la, and of course, habibi. As Omar patiently waited for us to begin eating first, we tried to figure out how to say, where are the forks? in Arabic. After some gesturing back and forth and a bit of nervous laughter we served ourselves with bread.
Before we went, I extended the invitation to one fellow student who was part of the group and he refused. I couldn’t understand why someone would say no to such a generous offer. When I pressed him he became annoyed and dismissive. I was dismayed by this reaction. Then I remembered myself at the very start of the trip. I was too timid and unsure of myself to even step out of the car and share a coke with the driver on the way from the airport.
I could have looked back on that version of myself with shame. And even though it was a small moment, regret for all the lost possibility a closed off attitude towards life can represent. Or I could be proud of how far I had come. Even within just a few months, how I grew to be more adventurous, more open to new experiences. And as a result, how this change in attitude had enriched my life in a very tangible way.
Thinking back to who I was when I was 22, I was scared of so many things. Some of the things I was scared of were very real, such as financial insecurity. I was scared of losing my scholarship and not graduating college. But other things were very much a prison of my own making. Now, I am still afraid of things that are not real. But I am working towards breaking free of those things, and the connection and possibility doing so offers, despite the risk.
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