The Raphael Smith Memorial Prize 2024: In Words I Can Understand
Pillowed pockets of fresh, steaming pita burning my hands, bagpipes deafening my ears, the slippery worn-out stones of the amphitheater bruising my legs. Jordan was teasing me, a playful game of collecting and embodying my senses one by one. We travel to learn: to smell, taste, feel the newness of the unfamiliar, to test our expectations and biases, and for the environment to test us in return.
But we were guests, not tourists. The Kraft Global Fellows were listening to a Bedouin tribe explain their livelihood, halfway through our two-week delegation to Amman’s Columbia Global Center. We sat there for an hour in the dusty silence of a desert sunset, posing questions to our hosts as we were expected to. Among my cohort, my friends, we looked to each other to raise a question when the dialogue lapsed. It was something we had become so accustomed to doing, ensuring our hosts knew how grateful we were to be welcomed as guests in so many places throughout our visit to Jordan.
In the geographic discipline, when we layer a space with a specific meaning we’ve ascribed to it, it becomes a place. In this place, so much meaning had been gouged: Waves of civilizations came and went, and rivers had dried up as eons brought new sediments to rock formations. Temporal and spatial planes truly converged here — a rich tapestry of human and natural meaning.
But threaded through time, something eternal. The nomadic indigenous Bedouin tribe still living as they have for centuries, in coexistence with the “middle-of-nowhereness,” the blues and oranges of Mars, the towering canyons.
Or so I had thought. Here we were, another jeep-load of tourists that cycle through these visits each day. The journey was clinical: Offload guests, fire up the open flame of the saj (domed iron griddle), sizzle the dough into shraak (bread). Our entire trip to Wadi Rum was a series of tightly scheduled and contained activities. Next, we were guided to see their animals, those of us willing with the chance to milk their goats. Another pair of unfamiliar foreign hands squeezing their teats, a bleating sound of a cyclical discomfort. The camels, with patchy fur and evident signs of strain, were overworked and in pain.
Outside the tent, in the hazy distance of the blistering sun: my friends, taking photos. I looked down at the tea I had been poured, the date biscuit crumbs in my lap, the same crumbs that had woven themselves into the threads of the rich-red embroidered carpet on which countless others had sat before me. The very experiences we had sought out for embodied learning, for newness in the unfamiliar, instead drew more distance with the unfamiliar. We weren’t there to participate, but consume and observe. After all, the trip required us to publish reflections each night.
I could suddenly see the true cost of our visit, and was drawing into question why we even choose to engage in travel at all. Their lives had become defined by performing their livelihoods to educate visitors, and in return we had reduced these livelihoods into what they believed visitors wanted to see. But who does this learning serve if it doesn’t allow them to live how they want to live, nor offer us the authenticity that travelers crave? The relationship between visitors, the Bedouin, and their animals was a trio marred with a changing tension.
The animals were now just props for this performance, the milk they produced immediately thrown out. The introduction of visitors had thrown off course their mutually supportive ecosystem, where animals and Bedouin sustained each other. They were now viewed through the economic lens of how they could be used through tourism, their only income source. When visitors stopped coming during COVID, they had to sell off the majority of their camels. In trying times, the Bedouin had no choice but to claim the role of master.
It wasn’t the cohabitation of humans and nature I was so craving to see. No, they had offered us their voices and shown us their lives because they had no other choice. As a development practitioner, I was everything SIPA had taught me not to be: an agent of recolonization of their self-determination.
We travel to experience comfortable discomfort, to have our expectations palatably and predictably challenged. But what if what we see is too uncomfortable?
We pay, and take time, to travel— and accordingly, we expect that our expectations will be fulfilled. We travel to be challenged in words we can understand. We travel to meet someone who spares their time and resources to work out a way to demonstrate differences between us that neatly fits into our frameworks of understanding. We travel to experience joy, for the production of others to be deemed worthwhile.
Night fell. As the darkness illuminated the stars above us, our voices floated to the carved stone boundaries of the desert and into the distance, not echoing back. While we spent hours lamenting our unchallenged expectations, the canyons were just sitting there. They
were passive, unresponsive, not disagreeing with our words. But for those very reasons, they were teaching us lessons they’ve held on to for millennia: that we didn’t need a response that makes sense to us, or even a response at all.
We don’t need to intellectualize, or even to understand, our encounter. Sometimes we just need to simply be, just as our hosts ask of us, instead of deciding what kinds of guests we must be. And this is what being a development practitioner is all about: observing without expectations in order to meet those in need exactly where they are, not where we think they should be.
ABOUT THE RAPHAEL SMITH MEMORIAL PRIZE
The Raphael Smith Memorial Prize is given in memory of Raphael Smith, a member of the Class of 1994 who died in a motorcycle accident while retracing his stepfather’s adventure of motorcycling from Paris to Tokyo. The prize, established by his family and friends, is awarded annually to two second-year SIPA students for travel articles that exemplify the adventurism and spirit of SIPA. The winners of this year’s contest are Alice Lassman MPA ’24 and Ben Ritter MIA ’24.