An Unexpected Meeting

Israeli and Pakistani relations, what it’s like to party in the Middle East, and how America is playing a role in the war of people groups and how Allah will come down and set the Middle East then the World to order. The first conversation I ever had with my conversation with Tara Nour, was a insightful and terrifying experience to say the least. She was incredibly confident and a women that had seen a great deal of the world that I had never seen. She spoke with elegance for someone attempting to master a new language. Her stories and tales were brilliant, interesting, and a bit scary all wrapped into one. Tara told me of her homeland being completely separated from the majority of the luxuries that here in America are so taken for granted. She spoke with an incredible accent and one that made it seem that she was drenched in the culture of her homeland and had no desire to depart from her ways. Hesitant to talk, Tara moved through our conversation where she noticeably held back her true feelings or beliefs out of fear, privacy, or simply not knowing what she felt. But our conversation turned out to be anything but surface or reserved.

The conversation started as most awkward arranged meetings first begin. With a customary uncomfortable few minutes where the two people involved have no clue what the other thinks about the situation. The moments are then filled with questions that we people say and barely care enough to ask let alone listen. But after our perfunctory questions that dealt with majors, hers being mechanical engineering, hometown, Jerusalem, among other questions she read my face perfectly and proposed a conversation I was so curious about but could not bring myself to question. She said, “Austin the Jews and Arabs still hate one another and that is all this war is about, it is about more than 1,000 years of hating one another.” So taken back I barely mumbled, “Tara we in no way have to talk about this, I understand living in it and seeing it from my view are two very different things.” She was far more in tune with own thoughts and knew the curiosity that had building in my head. We then jumped head first into something that was more than a conversation or required meet and greet. It was a time of Eastern ancient culture educating the Western ignorance. Religion dictating wars, passions deciding foreign policy, life being lived on a set of codes and ethics. Throw in a generation of young people who largely feel that this war is their fathers war, not their own. They feel as though they must inherit the hate or be outcast of a society that is the only one they know. Tara though embodied a different attitude. She showed a belief that was similar to that of her fellow countrymen but was unwilling to say she agreed with the war. She was learning that the war was not her best option. A fact all mankind will hopefully learn at some point. That through understanding others, we can avoid the mistakes of our forefathers, but only through understanding.