Rana Sweis

Mideast Blog

Lost and Found

Conversation Bubble 0 Comments

The wind is what struck Dim Niang in those first days—a constant dry wind that knew no boundaries, wind that could lift a stretch of road dust and seem to cast it up to Oklahoma, New Mexico, and beyond. Back home in Myanmar, the tropical humidity would have pounded dirt like this into submission. How different Amarillo was. Paved roads that did not buckle under monsoons. Grocery stores built like giant boxes. Big trucks with cowboys for drivers.

Dim was more curious about Amarillo than she was intimidated by it. A slim beauty, the second oldest of six in a family that had farmed rice and cotton in Kalaymyo, a remote village on the southern edge of Chin State, she’d always been resilient. This was a quality of her people, the Zomi, a tight-knit ethnic group in the lush, green mountains that border India and Bangladesh. After moving from western China as late as the eighth century, the Zomi had staked out an existence in the isolated mountains, preserving their dialects and ceremonial dress even after adopting Christianity when American missionaries arrived, in the late 1800s. Dim had studied hard in school and eventually graduated from a local Bible college, an achievement that shaped her conditions for a suitor: he had to be Zomi, he had to be educated, and he had to be kind.

Zam Kap was aware of these criteria. A bold young man from the same village, he had met Dim’s family as a teenager, and as he and Dim reached their mid-twenties, he began to court her openly, announcing to everyone in the neighborhood that he loved her. He was a handsome college graduate with a degree in psychology and a fondness for story who showed promise as a community leader, and his enthusiasm seemed boundless. Standing before Dim, he’d stretch his arms wide, flash a contagious smile, and say, “I love you. Do you love me?”—a candor that made a shy but flattered Dim laugh. She dropped enough hints with her family about her admiration for him that when Zam’s father approached hers about a wedding, the ceremony took place within a week.

Read more.

Rana Sweis Articles

Mideast Blog

Trump’s warm welcome in Mideast

Conversation Bubble 0 Comments

Arab autocrats are gleeful. Islamic extremists seem ecstatic. Israel’s right-wing government is exuberant. Only Iran seems nervous about the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to transform U.S. policy in a region with four wars (in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen), rising extremism, the return of authoritarian rule after the collapse of the Arab Spring, economic instability, and demographic challenges transforming almost two dozen societies.

The first world leader to telephone Trump after his victory was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former field marshal who orchestrated a military coup, in 2013, against a democratically elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi then ran for the office himself a year later. Thousands were killed during the bloody transition, and more than fifty thousand have since been imprisoned in “one of the widest arrest campaigns in the country’s modern history, targeting a broad spectrum of political opponents,” Human Rights Watch reported this fall. In September, Sisi met with both Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. The candidates’ positions on Egypt—the Arab world’s most populous country, with more than ninety million people—reflected their widely divergent foreign policies. During a primary debate with Bernie Sanders, Clinton charged that Egypt had become “an army dictatorship.” Trump, after his meeting with Sisi, called him “a fantastic guy” and commended their “good chemistry.”

With an apparent touch of envy, Trump added, “He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it.”

Read more.

Rana Sweis Articles Previous articles...‎
Load More