"I would like to go to school with the donkeys in the field. To stand all day in the free air with an open mouth. No bells ringing." (p75) - Naomi Shihab Nye

Arab culture is full of great story tellers, and it is one of the favorite pastimes of Arab people. I think that there is a deep hunger in the human psyche for story and the nourishment it gives us. People don't live on one level chatter alone, rhetoric or just the conveyance of news. We need the threading and layering of a day that story gives us, and that's very much from the culture.

I've always felt that any little bit of other in our lives - even if its that we grew up on the edge of town and all our friends were on the inside of town-gives much more than it takes away.

if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions.