Homes
There's a summer physics program at LMU that shares a bus with the media program when we go on field trips. The physics kids are charming and much older than us media kids; quite a few of them are in grad school. I like the carefully considered way they approach life and how prone they are to get caught up in protracted arguments about hypothetical scientific questions apropos of nothing. The faith of good scientists never fails to cheer me up; the best of them are not too far away from artists. I admire their confidence in the existence of an answer, and the way they care so much about invisible things- particles, forces, energy. The group of physics kids that I hang out with the most on our car rides are from the Middle East, with a couple guys from Pakistan as well. Raneem is from Syria but she's lived in Egypt for a number of years now; she likes to tease the other kids from Egypt by complaining, but in fact she likes it there. I sat next to her on the bus on the way back from our disastrous trip to Salzburg and we had such an interesting conversation that I thought I would try to write it down here. It's pretty jumbled, and not by any means an accurate record, but this is the closest way I can get to writing down how the conversation made me feel.
....
I thought Raneem was that rare sort of physicist that doesn’t take themselves too seriously; and then I learned that she was actually studying pharmacy back at college and it all made much more sense.
When I asked her about Syria, she got the same smile on her face as when she talked about her brother. She spoke about the ancient market in the town of Aleppo where the shops are made of stone and have ornate wooden doors that slide closed; about the special soap that Aleppo is famous for, made from the bay tree. “It’s very good for your skin,” she said. I tried to imagine what such a soap would smell like; I only know of the bay leaves my father put in stews (only one or two leaves for all of us because their flavor is so strong) and the bayberry candles my mother buys specially and only lights on New Year’s Eve. To me, bay smells of tea and musty books and the back of the spice cabinet where we keep all the rare spices that are only taken out occasionally, for special meals. Is this what Syria smells like? She spoke briefly and with sadness about the way the war was destroying the historical sites that belonged to all Syrians. Watching how animated she became as she spoke about her homeland I thought that Syria must be incredibly beautiful; I imagined I could see it reflected in her eyes as she remembered it. I have to admit it was a pretty pretentious flight of fancy, far too serious for our conversation. But homes, I think, are serious things.
It’s at times like these that I am reminded just how much I don’t know. I wish I had studied geography beyond sixth grade. I have a poor sense of direction as it is; I seem to lack the internal compass others are born with. To me the world is a paper road map outside on a windy day. The places I’ve been are weighted down and stay put for the most part; I can grasp them when I need to. But everywhere else escapes me, fluttering in the breeze and threatening to fly up and away with the next strong gust. Talking to my friends here from Asia and the Middle East I wish I knew better how the world fits together, the shape of things. I have been reading a lot about Syria in the newspaper but never did they mention the bay trees.
I asked Raneem about her research. She is doing a master’s degree on pharmacy, and (having dealt with my scientist mother all my life) I prepared for an onslaught of details through which I would have to wade to understand her. I didn’t need to- Raneem is incredibly well spoken and knows how to talk to a layperson. She is working on making cloth out of nanofibers, fibers that can be centimeters in length but only a nano thick. The cloth looks like paper to the naked eye, she told me; only under a microscope is its true structure revealed. Raneem is studying how to put chemotherapy drugs into this nanofiber cloth. The goal is to make a cloth that surgeons can insert after they remove a tumor to attack remaining cancer cells. “Wow!” our guide Regina said. She was also listening. “You’re saving lives!”
“Yes, and they’re only giving me a masters for it, can you believe it?” Raneem said. “I keep asking them to give me a PhD but they say I have to study three more years!”
She said that there were a lot of promising cures that scientists had come up with, but no drug companies would pay for them to complete clinical testing because they were afraid the cures would be too efficient and the drug companies would end up losing money. She said she knew people who were working on a very promising drug for diabetes that was being tested on mice, but they could not find a company to back them for human testing. Wow, I thought, the things she must know! The knowledge inside her head! If only I could see it- just for a second- the whole world would look different.
She told me her professor was presenting her poster at a conference in the US this weekend. Before she’d decided to go on the physics program in Munich, she’d been thinking about going. “But it is very difficult to get a visa,” she said. I must have had my face screwed up in some horrible shape, because she quickly said, “it’s okay, you don’t have to say anything.” (I think the Middle Eastern students get annoyed with the way I try to explain or apologize for US actions in political discussions, often actions that I vigorously oppose. Even I get annoyed with myself. Still I have trouble extricating myself from my country. Some of the other students keep gently suggesting that as a citizen I don’t really have that much to do with US foreign policy- and perhaps I could shut up now?- but I never can shut up, somehow. I am compelled to look, even in the ugliest parts of America that my foreign friends see, for some part of the home and the people that I love.)
The thing Raneem didn’t know is what her work means to me, although I can barely understand the principles. My father died of a brain tumor that came back after a surgery. In another life, if the timing were different, if circumstances had been different, she might have saved my father’s life. She could yet save the lives of hundreds of people like my father. It was so strange, thinking that while she was speaking. All that pain, now obsolete. What a funny thought. But the conversation reminded me of the sweetness of memories, and how wasteful it is to let them spoil with bitterness, so I let it go.
The fact remains that her work might have saved my dad’s life, yet my country is too afraid to allow her to come visit us, and that is a special kind of shame.
