Traveling with a group of students in a Middlebury College-sponsored language school in Amman, Jordan, Hannah McMeekin of Braintree enjoys the windy landscape of Wadi Rum, a desert site popular with travelers. Talk about the transformative power of a student exchange experience!

It was just by chance that Braintree’s Charlie McMeekin, driving home from work, heard on radio station WDEV of a three-week student exchange between Vermont and Jordanian teen­agers. There were still a few openings, the broadcast said.

Little could he have guessed that that chance broadcast would take his daughter Hannah to Jordan four times by the time she entered her senior year of col­lege. Of course, neither could he have guessed that on one of those visits, Hannah and other Middle­bury College students would discover they had been housed in a building well-known in Amman, Jordan as a brothel. But that comes later in the story.

The important story is that when Hannah heard about the student exchange, she was ready for the adventure.

“For some reason, I just pounced on it,” she told The Herald last month after returning from her fourth visit to Amman.

Her instincts were right; the three-week exchange has changed her life.

“That was my first taste of the people there,” she said. Just a 10th grader, Hannah saw today’s history lessons from a different perspective.

Her friends all considered themselves Palestinian, she noted, and when they spoke “emotion was visible on their faces. It brought it all down to a personal level.”

A couple of the young people she met there have become “fast friends,” she said. “I have seen them every trip since.”

The trip also convinced her that she wanted a college with a good Arabic program, which drew her to Middlebury. And since she would enter college in February, she had the fall semester free, and she knew what she wanted to do.

“I knew I wanted to go to the Middle East in some capacity.”

Second Trip

She signed up with Willing Workers on Farms, a volunteer organization, assigned to a Bedouin establishment in the Jordanian desert. It quickly turned out that there was no farming going on, and that volunteers like Hannah were there to help run a tourist bus­iness. The tourists, she said, were “awesome,” but they didn’t spend much time there. Nor was there much interaction with the Bed­ouin women, but still she stayed there two months and was glad she did.

Since then, she’s taken enough Arabic to be comfortable speak­ing it, and stayed a full semester last year through Middlebury College at the University of Jordan, taking all her classes in Arabic from Jordanian profess­sors. Even when that semester ended, Hannah decided she needed more of the people-to-people contact she craved. So after a few weeks of travel, she returned for another month.

“That’s when I fell in love with Amman,” she said. “We were living in an apartment close to town, nestled into a hill, living among the people.

“The hospitality in Jordan is very outstanding. You can talk to people and they are interested in getting to know you.”

Jordan, she noted, is also relatively stable among Middle East countries.

“The monarchy there is trying to preëmpt a revolution” by emphasizing “evolution,” she said. “Everybody I’ve talked to thinks the monarchy will stay in power.”

A Little Glitch

So … what was the story with the inappropriate housing when she was enrolled in the program at the University of Jordan?

Hannah explained that the Middlebury students living in the apartment block began to notice that there were “other people around.” Eventually, she said, it turned out that the building was known as “part of this prostitute underground.”

“The very expensive cars parked outside were there for a reason,” she concluded.

Middlebury fixed the problem quickly, and Hannah remains enthralled with the city she met as a 10th grader.

“I know I’ll be back,” she said last week. “For me it’s been about a personal level, and I can see I can have a positive effect.”