1.
September 2004

I’ve finally found a house in Damascus.

   By house, I mean a room in a house—in this case my very own corner of a majestic, three-story Ottoman giant I stumbled upon early last week, when I was knocking on doors in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, searching for a place to live. My house was so thoroughly hidden behind high external walls that I was lucky to have noticed it at all. But from my room inside of those walls I can hear the entire world outside: church bells ringing and the call to prayer drifting through the air from distant mosques, the woman next door gossiping with her husband and the nearby vendors shouting out the prices of their wares. Every morning my neighbors scrub their laundry by hand in our single marble fountain, and in the afternoon I watch from my window as the courtyard fills up with their shirts hung out to dry, some of the arms pinned up in the air, others with their sleeves wide open, embracing the light.
 
   When I arrived in Damascus from Boston ten days ago, I had little more to my name than two black wheeled suitcases, an outdated Syrian guidebook, and a modest supply of textbook classical Arabic. I didn’t have a single friend in the city, a place to live, or even a concrete plan for what I was going to do with the next twelve months of my life. I also had no idea how to navigate the local real estate market, which is how I ended up doing the only thing that I could think of under the circumstances and knocking door-to-door in the neighborhood of Bab Touma, asking total strangers if they had any interest in giving shelter to this young, lost American girl for a year. 

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