where are you from?

Tonight in my Sudanese class, we focused on the question word, "where?"  We asked, "where are you from?" and taught north, south, east, west, mountains, ocean, coast, middle, town, city, country, etc.  We drew a map of the U.S. on the white board, and then asked them to draw a map of Sudan and put things on it.  It's funny to me to think about this question being so important in the classroom.  Never is the U.S. or Iowa or Wisconsin as important to my identity as it is when I'm traveling.  Only in a foreign land do you realize just how much your culture and the "where" of your life make up who you are.  I can only imagine how much a homeland would mean if you were displaced by war.  I feel like I get a lot of that here, Jordan is made up of some insanely small percentage of actual Jordanian citizens; the rest of the people here are foreigners and refugees.  Palestinians, Iraqis, Sudanese, Syrians, you name it.  And all of these people have a different "where" that they come from, and most of them a different "where" they want to go.  My privelage amazes me in these situations- I am in complete control of my location. I live in Jordan for a while, I buy a plane ticket to visit my sister in Germany, I explore Egypt and Turkey with friends, I return home to the U.S., I come and go as I please, to anyWhere I want.  When some friends and I traveled to Aqaba a few weeks ago, our bus was stopped at a checkpoint where everyone of Palestinian descent had to get off the bus, check their passports, and then get back on again. The process was, in my opinion, stupid, but because Palestinians have to register in certain areas and I dont know what all else, it was ayadee (typical).  So, I count my blessings for that little blue book I have that allows me to go everywhere I want (unless I have an Israel stamp...) and at the same time wonder how something that people have so little control over has so much control over human life.  I think more than "where are you from" the question I want to ask is where are those imaginary lines from that make up so much of our being?