Reflection Journal - Expectations for Service/Experiences While in Jordan

 My time in Jordan, went by so quickly, it is hard at times to unpack everything that occurred, and to truly reflect on every detail of the journey and trip.  The organization I worked with was wonderful, BPWA in Amman, and helped coordinate many presentations for me to give to female Jordanian lawyers on human trafficking and its ties to pornography, allowing me to meet with a fraud investigator who is developing the First Middle Eastern Fraud Forum, and allowing me to meet their members (other Jordanian businesswomen) and share my ideas, information, and listen to their experiences, was all very valuable, along with the enduring friendships that I made there, especially with the BPWA Assistant who I shared an office with, when I was in the office. She is a young Muslim woman, with a caring and genuine heart, and I enjoyed our discussions and looked forward to conversing with her every day. 

Going into the project, I don't think I knew what to expect, or had any pre-conceived ideas of what I would be doing, but it started to develop once I got to Jordan and met with the Executive Director at BPWA. During my time there, I was also able to have several conversations with a female member of Parliament, who is the one who introduced me to BPWA in which she is apart of, and she was most gracious in inviting me to the girls school to speak on human trafficking and pornography to the 12th grade girls at the school, a very memorable, and unforgettable experience. My roommate and I spent several hours with the girls, outside of the lecture, talking to them about what a good female rolemodel is, and looks like and they had questions for us on American celebrities (specifically women who they admired), and we told them that is important that you have good, and decent rolemodels, if you do look up to anyone, and its rare to have that in a celebrity - since they are teenagers, they are heavily influenced by American media, which really amazed me to see the impact of Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and other younger American female celebrities, and how they have a following worldwide, even in Jordan. We wanted to express the importance to the girls, of what a female celebrity does with her body, is very important, and the ones that freely show skin, and not decent when it comes to having respect for themselves, should not be people that they consider a rolemodel and admire.   The girls were very frank, and would let you know that they were big supporters of certain celebrities, and really wanted to have an open dialogue about what they thought of these young American celebrities.  These were great girls, modest girls, and educated young women, and I enjoyed being able to talk with them, and being frank, but I also thought to myself if I ever did adopt, or have kids someday, I never would want my daughter to consider a celebrity a rolemodel. My hope is that I would raise them to respect people that are world changemakers, who care less about fame, and more about the well-being of others and animals. This is what I would want to instill in my children if that was ever to be a part of my life. I would want my daughter to not be concerned about American Hollywood celebrities, but to be interested in the lives and to model the lives of Mother Teresa, Muhammad Yunnus, Somaly Mam especially; those who have dedicated their lives to fighting injustice sometimes even alone and without many resources, and yet, who did it with a smile on their faces, and despite of major threats to their lives-this is heroism. This is to be admired.

I have often felt very alone in the porn fight.  People who don't fight the porn industry, and go against them via campaigns to try to squelch their business, have no idea of the toll it takes on you not only physically, but emotionally.  That is why it is very much like a close knit family those of us who are in the fight, and we stick closer than brothers to each other. Knowing that the porn industry is connected to drug cartels, human trafficking rings, billions of dollars of funding backing them up, its crucial to stay healthy, emotionally and physically, and to take time off, from such a dark arena when needed.  I was so re-energized while in Jordan to meet so many like minded individuals who thought that the porn industry was a travesty, and understood the destruction it causes, even the young people there, such as the girls at the girls school, who clapped loudly and applauded when I told them that The Playboy Club on network television had been shut down, through the efforts of our coalition, the War on Illegal Porn, and all of the members efforts to make this happen. I felt good to be able to deliver news like this to people of the world, to these young Jordanian women, so that they knew there were Americans out there who cared about their well-being, and who wanted no part in the type of trash, that gets sent to them via American hard-core violent and obscene movies and programming. I wanted to report to them, that we were doing what we could to make sure they weren't exposed to such trash, and I felt a little bit of an accomplishment in that, that they would be spared from ever seeing such a trashy show, glorifying a pornographer, whose magazine supports the molestation of children through the cartoons even on its pages.

My expectations of the encounters that I had with Jordanian women were really rewarding, especially with members and those associated with the BPWA. The open dialogues we had with each other, after presentations was great, and open, and collaborative, and I can see that it may lead to future collaborations someday on anti-porn initiatives on a global scale, working with Jordanian lawyers to do what can be done to put pressure on the American government to prosecute pornographers once again. The Jordanian female lawyers I spoke with were so frustrated that the American Embassy refused to do anything about the pornography complaints that they made to the Embassy, and they continually fall on deaf ears.

I think my expectations for what I would be doing with the BPWA were exceeded, and every experience was rewarding. In addition, after the trip and the speaking, and working with Jordanian women, I told the BPWA that I would continue to help them, and develop a social media guide/handbook for their female members, and draft some helpful guides so that they can hand this out to their women, who need to setup and get established on social media, so I look forward to finishing that this summer, and providing those tools to them, for the women to benefit from also.