Personal Statement, Mary Elston, Political Science, Yemen Women move down the streets slowly in Sana’a, black veils blowing in the sandy wind, faces completely covered except for their eyes. At first, the baltu, hijab, and niqab that the women in Yemen wear intimidated me. My uncertainty, though, quickly dissipated after I met Saba. Almost every day after my language classes, I went to Saba’s house to sit for hours with her and her seven sisters, talking about books, work, and dreams of traveling. We painted henna on each other’s arms and legs, drank spiced hibiscus tea, and sought advice from each other about the problems of day-to-day life. Through my relationship with Saba and her many female cousins and sisters, I was able to discover the vibrant women’s spaces that exist behind closed doors. For those women, segregated female spaces were sources of empowerment, enabling them to work through familial, employment, and financial problems. In women’s spaces, they felt free to say and do whatever they wanted, and I did too. When I returned home from studying in Sana’a, my family was curious about the position of women in Yemen. Particularly after I modeled my baltu, hijab, and niqab for them, I received an onslaught of questions about whether Yemeni women are oppressed and what opportunities they have. I tried to explain to them that segregated gender spaces do not necessarily signal oppression and that the veil does not necessarily symbolize women’s subjugation. Both can reflect a positive choice for women. Learning about this complexity has enriched the way that I understand the position of women in Yemeni society, better enabling me to work on women’s rights issues in that country. The summer before 11th grade of high school was the first time I understood that a willingness to overcome cultural assumptions is integral to working productively in a foreign context. That summer I traveled to Slovakia on a community service program to work in a Roma settlement that lay on the outskirts of a small town. My group came to Slovakia with the sense that because we were educated Americans, we would be able to solve the problems of the Roma in Slovakia. However, we had little actual knowledge of the situation of Roma in Slovakia. Instead of improving anything, my group’s presence exacerbated tensions between the Roma and the townspeople. Our inability to work effectively in Slovakia as a result of our lack of knowledge awakened my desire to study foreign cultures and to spend time abroad. After 9/11, everyone’s world changed, but for me this terrifying event translated into a firm commitment to learn about the Middle East. In the U.S. media, the region had become a hodgepodge of violent crises, extremist Muslim terrorists, and oppressed women. Given the significance of the Middle East in U.S. foreign policy, I felt an obligation to at least personally get beyond these stereotypes. At Brown, I decided to concentrate in both Middle East Studies and Development Studies, and I began Arabic in my sophomore year. Learning Arabic in an American classroom was unsatisfying because it felt too removed from the people whose language I was learning. After some persuasion, I convinced my parents to let me study Arabic in the Middle East. I spent four months in Morocco at a language institute, six weeks in Lebanon working in Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp, and four months in Egypt studying Arabic. This time abroad helped me to move beyond cultural stereotypes, transforming the Middle East into a region of real people rather than of terrorists and violence. When I returned to the U.S., I tried to share what I had learned with the Brown community. In Cairo, I had tutored Sudanese refugees in English. With them in mind, I helped found the Darfur Action Network during my first semester back at Brown. The following school year I became a co-leader of the Middle East Studies Departmental Undergraduate Group and of a group called Common Ground. As a leader of Common Ground, I organized lectures by leading experts on issues related to Palestine/Israel in order to generate discussion and introduce perspectives that were underrepresented on Brown’s campus. My experiences in the Middle East and at Brown have made me understand the power of learning about a foreign society through its people. When I read about the fighting in Nahr al Bared in Lebanon or the women’s march in Yemen, I immediately think of the faces of my friends there. These people motivate my desire to learn about the Middle East, to continue studying Arabic, and to pursue human rights work. During my internship in the Middle East/North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, I learned that successfully advocating for human rights in the Middle East requires extensive first hand knowledge of the cultural context of the issues at hand. Like the time that I spent with Saba in Yemen, experiences abroad can create the cultural understanding that is integral to working effectively on complex and sensitive social issues in foreign contexts.