Getting over a stolen laptop

so, the below entry I wrote about a month ago about a week after I lost my laptop. i didn't want to publish it because I wanted to give it some time to make sure I still thought it was honest after the anger passed (which it has)...

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Hello all,

I'm sorry for not writing sooner. There are many practical reasons why I haven't written for a few weeks now, but they are all only proximate causes. The real reason why I haven't written is because I have been angry. I don't like when I'm angry and I'm constantly worried that I'll give a biased point of view of a culture that 1) has no shortage of biased points of view, and 2) feels victimized and paranoid about these biased points of view, thus perpetuating the circle of misunderstanding.

I don't by any means consider myself an angry person, and I've been more angry the last week than I can remember being in a long time. I'll get to the specific reasons in a moment, but the reason is basically unrealistic expectations and the wrong approach to the Middle East.

I came to the Middle East thinking of it as an situation where I would learn the language, learn the culture, interact with the people, grow as a person, and come out of it with a greater ability to communicate with a different culture--essentially as an academic exercise. Recently, at a moment of particular frustration, I was talking to a British friend who has lived in the Arab world for about a year and a half. He told me "The Middle East is hard. Not long after I was first arrived in Morocco, I just broke down and cried." If you prepare emotionally, for that sort of experience you can expect it, deal with it and move on. When you come a idealistic greenhorn, it feels like the whole culture is undermining your attempts to learn from it and help it grow.

You can't approach the Middle East like that. If you want, you can do the tourist thing, and go about in the world insulated by money, but that is not what I wanted and still not what I want. Nothing in the West really prepared me for it, and because people here are 1)used to dealing with it and 2) very proud of their culture and don't want to say anything that reflects poorly on it they haven't really prepared me for it. The tendency to repress seems a strong one, and quite honestly the thing I am most grateful for since I've been here has been a piece of advice to never leave my passport and money anywhere--not a locked apartment, not a hotel room, not anywhere. If it hadn't been for that I probably would be without a passport and down a few hundred dollars more than I am. If someone had said to me before the trip, "If you think someone is cheating you, don't trust them for a minute" and "Don't ever leave anything unlocked anywhere, no matter how trusted you think it is" I'd probably still have a laptop, an ipod and a whole lot more compassion. But there has been only one person that has cautioned me about it, and even him only after a hundred conversations emphasizing the generosity of people.

As a liberal, there is the strong tendency to fight categories and to try to expect the best of everyone. Those aren't good assumptions in the Middle East. Not that you should expect that everyone is bad or anything of the sort, but know that you will get ripped off because you are vulnerable. After it happened to me a few times, I tried to do everything I could to prevent it. After failing time and time again due to the magnitude of things I didn't know, I try my best and accept that it is going to happen. The male social situations which are the majority of my interactions form a sort of model around which to build a more realistic approach to the Middle East. In them, you get the very male energy and attitude that is built around cleverly insulting each other and the assertion of dominance over each other. It is a culture that I definitely recognize from the US, but one that is marginalized to frat houses and high schools. It is a culture where pride and dominance are the natural approach. It is a culture that I've occasionally had to deal with, but never one I've been comfortable with or liked. When you stack all the cultural and linguistic barriers against one, it has been that much harder.

The anger comes as a reaction to feeling taken advantage of. It was there when my ipod was stolen. It was quite a bit worse, when I loaned money to a person who disappeared before he could return it to me. It was subtly reignited each time a person would give me grossly incorrect change. It started to burn when I was charged about $35 for a load of laundry, and when my laptop was stolen, along with my wallet, all the books I had bought to learn about the region, and about 15 pages I had been working on writing to trying to express my sense for the culture, different experiences I had that illuminated the differences, and how to grow closer. Finally, reporting the incident to the police who are now using as an opportunity to extort greater bribes from the hotel is not exactly doing anything to restore my confidence.

I think my approach is often similar to the western tendency of grafting our thought patterns onto the rest of the world with atrocious results, and I see that in myself more than anything. I'm not quite over the anger, but I'm starting to get to the other side of it.

I'll try to recreate my conceptions of how my experiences reflect different parts of the middle east, I hope they will be helpful to both cultures. That's really my only purpose here.

However, for those that would like to categorize and write off the middle east, I still do run into ubiquitous acts of kindness and generosity.