"Loving the Alien" by MSIH first year blogger Flear Vaknin



In recent years, the practice of referring to someone as an ‘alien’ has been contested by articles in the New York Times (“Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien’”), Salon (“Stop Calling People Aliens”), and Immigration Impact, to name a few sources.  One of the definitions of the term, from the Oxford English Dictionary includes “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful,” so it is not surprising that many are calling for the abolishment of this term when referencing people.

But then there is the pregnant alien of Bialik street in Beer Sheva: cartoonish, endearing, and a little odd, but more inviting than off-putting. Before seeing her for myself, I heard others refer to this pregnant alien and believed her to be a sculpture that was merely reminiscent of what was being described (something more abstract perhaps). When I happened upon her on a walk, I was thrilled to find out that, first, I am living in a city with a sense of humor, and that maybe this is the sort of place where being from somewhere else can be celebrated.

 Beer Sheva is a city that may be able to use the term “alien” in a positive way. Most of the city’s population is composed of people who have immigrated, or whose parents or grandparents have immigrated from other countries. That said, being an American living in the Negev offers a  feeling of other-ness; being an outsider gives you the high of wonderment with just a tinge of fear. This is an experience I cannot recommend enough. Living in a culture that is not your own compels you to pay closer attention to how people interact, and how your interactions are perceived. Receiving this education in tandem with studying medicine has expanded my appreciation for other-ness exponentially. I am learning that the things we may fear —the unfamiliar— are often the things that make us the braver, more ardent people we came here to become.
 

And, in a moment of weakness, if ever I am taken by the need to go home, I need only to look out of the 6th floor of Soroka onto our medical library to see that our spaceship is parked right where we left it…


*Also a David Bowie song. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"A World Outside of MSIH" by rising second year student Chelsea Powell

Image
You may have heard that all medical students do is study.   It certainly seems that way at times.   There are, however, opportunities to fit in some other experiences. Here are a few of the things I have done this year:      I’ve always liked to run, and the endless desert trails in Beer Sheva provide great places to train.   In November my roommate and I decided it would be great fun to run the Tel Aviv Half Marathon , scheduled for February.   What seemed like such a good idea when we registered in November, however, became a source of stress as the February date approached, because we realized that the race fell on the day before a pharmacology quiz.   Fortunately, we were able to come up with a creative solution to our loss of study time.   While other runners wrote split times on their arms, our arms sported names of the drugs we needed to memorize.   I suspect we were the only runners in the race who quizzed each other about COX ...
Read more

"Think" by MSIH first year blogger Ayal Levi

Image
This little statue is called "The Thinking Man."  My (future) mother-in-law bought it in Uganda, then passed it over to me as a present, before I joined the rest of this inimitable group here in the Desert. Now, he sits on my desk, eyes half-shut, staring at me. He never stops staring, this “Thinking Man.”  He certainly is consistent; I’ll give him that. As we spend considerable hours together, trying to find our way through a waterfall of information, he has become a constant reminder to stop and think. To pause, shake my head, and work through the intricacies of acid-base metabolism, the autonomic nervous system drugs, and what feels like a black-hole of microbiology “Slow it down there sparky, and use your head.” Or something to that effect. A classmate of mine, a sort of philosopher-king, quoted me a short line from a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (complicated relationship). “Education is  the ability to play gracefully with ideas.”  What a grea...
Read more