“What’s your hometown?” You heard it all through New Student Orientation and you’ll probably hear it for the rest of your time at Georgetown, every time you meet someone new. It’s a pretty simple question, answerable in one word. This is not the case for me. People can’t understand why I hesitate when they ask it. They often continue, “But where are you from?”
The truth is, I don’t really know. In the abbreviated version of my life story, I was born in New York and moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia when I was three, but continued to live in New York for falls and summers. The only exception was during the Gulf War, when it was too dangerous to leave Saudi, where we stayed for the duration of the war. I went on to live in Virginia, London and Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia once again, before finally moving to Washington, D.C. to finish high school.
I’ve loved moving and wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything. But, as lucky as I’ve been, it hasn’t all been fun. Moving felt impossible. Powerless to do anything about it, I moved with my family, knowing that I would never see many of the places I left ever again. I took one more tube ride to Bond Street. I tearfully ate my last shawarma sandwich, and was woken by my local Mosque’s 6 a.m. prayer call for the final time. But, as much as I loved one place, each new country seemed more comfortable and more like home. Rather than making moving easier, this only made it harder. While each new place had the promise of adventure and, especially in the case of Saudi Arabia, a totally new culture, it also meant leaving behind what had become my home. I’m not saying I ever felt like I was British, and certainly not Arab, but as I made friends, I began to feel as if I belonged there and could not imagine myself being happy with anywhere else.
To this day, each group of friends still knows things about me that no one else knows, or would even believe. One group knows my “English self,” another my “Saudi self.” Now, at Georgetown, I look back at all those homes and their respective versions of my self and wonder, “Which one is the real me?”
I guess they all are and each little part of me comes out when I see my old friends, or even just talk to them on the phone. That is the hardest part of moving. It’s not leaving your friends behind, because you can always talk to them, e-mail them, and in some cases, visit or be visited by them. It’s the fact that you know that once you leave them, nothing will be the same.
Consequently, no one here would understand the part of me that still finds it scandalous to go out in public without my hair covered, to see a newspaper that doesn’t have its photos blacked out, or forgets that bacon isn’t illegal like in Saudi Arabia. People here won’t stand for my Arab sense of time, where one says “inshallah,” which means “God willing,” never committing to a simple “yes,” and eight o’clock sharp means midnight. People will always giggle when I say British words like the “boot” of a car, or accidentally spell “color” as “colour.”
Eventually my friends here at Georgetown will stop making fun of little eccentricities like dipping my french fries in mayo, like I did in England. In the end though, they will never understand these oddities. I have to accept that certain differences are insurmountable, and that is OK. Because, in time, we’ll make our own memories together, like going to the movies together (theaters are illegal in Saudi), having women drive cars, or drinking at the Tombs, things that friends in Saudi Arabia could never understand.
Kathryn Brand is a first-year in the Business School and an assistant leisure editor of The Georgetown Voice. This is what you look like after three weeks of life in the business frat.
