Editor's Note: This is the seventh installment in a semester-long series. For the first time in six years, the BYU Jerusalem Center has opened its doors to 44 BYU students. Stephanie Schaerr is writing about their experiences in Jerusalem.
It's about time to pack my bags and say goodbye to Jerusalem. There are 88 new students waiting to take our places here, and judging from a rumored 2,000 applicants for summer term, there will be many more to follow. Not long from now, there will be a different girl sleeping in the first bed on the right in room 405.
One week from today, my 43 best friends and I will be on a plane headed home. Our bags will be stuffed with olivewood Jesus statues, headscarves and baby blankets from Bethlehem, and our hearts will be full of memories of our three months in the Holy Land. It's now time for us all to go back to the real world, to make decisions we've been avoiding since January. Some of us would rather not leave, but somehow I feel better prepared for the rest of my life than ever.
As I think about our trip home, I remember meeting a man on the way here who carried a beat-up BYU Jerusalem Center backpack. He told us this experience would change our lives and that we couldn't possibly understand until we'd lived it. He was right. The people I have met here have changed my thoughts, my plans and my life. I look back on my first orientation meeting, when I looked across the room and judged people from afar. I had no idea I would forge friendships so deep, cry so hard at soul-searching moments or laugh like a 13-year-old while jumping on my bed and singing Seve vs. Evan songs.
It's also time to say goodbye to the land where devotion to religion trumps almost everything else. My life's been so saturated with religion since January that I will likely be shocked when I return to my more secular home. Last weekend was a particularly interesting one, with Christian Easter and Jewish Passover occurring at the same time. The Jerusalem Branch had its Easter service on Saturday. Later that evening, we spent hours packed in between thousands of people in a sort of Christian mosh pit at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for their midnight mass. Just a few hours after getting home, we went to the Garden Tomb for their sunrise service, complete with Christian rock band and hallelujahs.
At the same time, the Jewish Passover feast brought thousands of visitors and banished leavened bread from the Jewish quarters of the city. McDonald's served hamburgers on pancake-like discs and all of the bread in kosher grocery stores was roped off into its own section. It's funny how I've come to expect my daily life to be interrupted by religious observances, be it the Muslim prayer call five times a day or lasagna made with mazza, a Passover-friendly flavorless cracker, instead of noodles.
Periodically throughout the semester, I would wake up disoriented, wondering what in the world I was doing in Jerusalem and how I ended up here. But at the same time, the rest of the world seemed like a dream - some far-off land that I could only vaguely recall.
I predict that soon that is how I will view this experience: a really good dream, the kind that makes me want to curl back up in my covers and return to once the morning comes.
Stephanie Schaerr is a former metro editor for The Daily Universe. See dailyuniverse.byu.edu for her past columns.