Global Guides at the Penn Museum

Penn Museum has always been fascinating and cool and it just got cooler with its new Global Guides program, which has natives of Iraq and Syria serving as guides. I wrote about it for the Associated Press. Read the story
here.

Here’s an excerpt from the story so you can see what kind of personal touches the guides bring:

On a recent tour, guide Abdulhadi Al-Karfawi pointed out cuneiform tablets used for accounting, legal text and, in one case, a school boy’s recounting of an argument with his father. Using a blunt reed on a clay tablet, the boy detailed how his father had scolded him, saying “Why are you wasting time? Get to school! Apply yourself at school!”

“I read that and think of my father, who was a tough person who had 15 boys and girls but was on top of everything,” said Al-Karfawi, 40, a former translator for the U.S. Army in Baghdad who settled in the U.S. with his wife and children last year. “Today, as a father, I have the same argument with my kid. I never thought it was happening thousands of years ago.”

In another part of the galleries, Moumena Saradar, 41, paused in front of bronze and brass balance scales and weights dating back to the 1800s. The scales are similar to the ones used at the market near her home in Damascus. Saradar remembers when, as a teenager, her mother taught her to use the scales so she could double check the weights of the fruits and vegetables she’d purchased from a vendor.

“Because if he cheats her, everyone in the town would know,” Saradar said, drawing laughter.