Before I begin my story, there are a few things one ought to know about me. I am the very definition of petite, and I’m told that I look young for my age. On a day when I’m being generous, I am five feet tall. If one were to guess my age, they would wrongly guess anywhere between ten and seventeen years old. At the time of this occurrence, I was twenty years old.
The summer following my sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Israel. I lived and studied at the University of Haifa, which is on the northern coast of the country, for four weeks. The experience influenced my life in an incomprehensible number of ways, and pushed me further outside of my comfort zone than I had ever ventured before. However, the tale I tell now is that of my journey home.
On July 28, 2017, after four weeks in a foreign country, away from everyone and everything familiar, I was eager to be home. I said farewell to my temporary home in the early afternoon, weighted down with a suitcase half my height and twice my width, a duffel bag slung over my shoulder, and my dear old Rose-Hulman backpack on my back. Under the advice of several students I met during my stay, I decided to take a bus from the university to the train station, and then a train from Haifa to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. This proved much too difficult for me to handle, but with the help from some kind strangers, I eventually reached the airport.
Although my flight to New York was not set to take of until 11:00 p.m., I arrived five hours early because, since it was a Friday, all public transportation ceased at 6:00 p.m. for Shabbat. My parents had assured me that I would be able to check in for my flight, but after walking the large, empty corridor several times, it became apparent that I could not check my bag yet. By this time, I was fairly hungry, so I decided to look for dinner. Unfortunately, just as public transportation had stopped, the majority of the restaurants in the airport were closed as well. I lugged all of my bags back and forth across the food court, stopping every so often to rest, until I found something to eat. I then found a place to park myself and settled in until the ticket counter opened.
Around 8:30, I ventured back to the ticket counters where I saw one of the girls in my program checking her bag. She told me that I needed to print my ticket at a kiosk and go through a preliminary security check before I could check my bag. I printed my boarding pass and then proceeded to stand in line for security. After what seemed like a while, an Israeli security office motioned me over to his station. He asked me some general questions like, “When did you arrive in Israel?” “What was the purpose of your visit?” and “What did you study at the university?” He asked about my roommates, which was a difficult question because I did not have a roommate and hardly ever saw the other girls living in my apartment. Then he started asking me some weird questions like “Has anyone given you any gifts?” and “Have your bags ever been out of your sight?” Of course I answered “no” to these questions, given that I don’t generally accept presents from total strangers and leave my bags laying around airports in foreign countries, but apparently it wasn’t good enough. He looked at my passport for a long time and then he WALKED AWAY with it.
When he returned, he had a female officer with him. She proceeded to ask me the same questions that I had already answered as well as some more detailed questions about my time in Israel. I answered them to the best of my ability, but I admit, it probably struck them as odd that I didn’t know the first and last names of all of the girls in my apartment. She walked away eventually, and I thought I was in the clear. When the male officer proceeded to walk with me to the baggage counter, I thought it was odd, but being a bit naïve, I thought maybe he saw little me at an international airport, with more bags than I could reasonably carry, and figured he would help me with my bag.
After I checked my suitcase, he told me it was time to go through security. At this point, I was a bit annoyed, but since I’m used to being treated like a minor, I decided to endure it. In the hours that I had been at the airport, I had found security, so I started waking in that direction. I knew something was wrong when he said, “No, this way,” and pointed me in a different direction. “Shoot. What have I gotten myself into?” I thought. He brought me into a room with a few chairs and a baggage x-ray machine. He had me set my duffel bag, backpack, and cell phone on the conveyor belt, told me to sit down on one of the chairs, and then left. Shortly thereafter, two female officers came in and gave me a pat-down. I can confidently say that it was not what I would call a fun experience.
They then proceeded to tear apart my bags and everything in them. I laughed a little to myself as they examined the most innocent items in my bag with great detail. They held my pajama pants up to the light for the longest time, trying to determine if the elastic in the waistband was indeed what it appeared to be. The laughter turned to burning anger as I watched them haphazardly unwrap the souvenirs I had carefully packed. My anger peaked and nearly turned to tears as one of them took hold of my beloved stuffed animal and started to feel her up. I did my best to calm down because I knew I had to be accommodating if I wanted out of there and it wasn’t going to do me any good if I started crying, so I just sat there watching, fighting every instinct in my body.
As two security guards examined the items in my bags, a third left my view with my cell phone and my hefty Lenovo ThinkPad. Eventually she returned with my cell phone and set in on the conveyor with the rest of my stuff. I desperately wished I could grab my cell phone so that I could inform my parents of what was going on and check the time, but I knew that would not be a wise decision, so I stayed put. After a while, the security officer brought my computer over to me. I can only imagine who they thought I was when they saw me with such a powerful brick of a laptop, but I’m fairly certain that Engineering Student wasn’t at the top of their list. “Unlock it,” she said. By happenstance, I had talked with some of the other students in my program about privacy rights when going through customs, so I was pretty sure I had the right to refuse, but I decided to comply as my ultimate goal was to make it out of that room.
My dad had told me to clear my browser history prior to going to the airport, but in the rush of things, I had forgotten. As part of a course requirement, I had visited the Qur’an website, as well as the websites of several terrorist organizations and terrorist sympathizers. Needless to say, I was desperately hoping the security officer would not ask to see my browser history. I was quite relieved as she asked me to navigate through the file folders on my desktop. Eventually, we landed in a folder called “Videos.” I don’t use my school computer for personal use, so the folder contained only the video that came on the laptop. She instructed me to play the video.
Gazelles frolicked across grasslands, birds flew across a clear blue sky, and zebras drank from a watering hole as soothing music played in the background. The sassy part of me wanted to give her a look that screamed “Happy now?,” but I showed restraint. We watched the nature film for a few minutes before the officer decided there was nothing malicious about it, and then she took my computer out of view again.
At this point, I was fairly confident that I would be finally be released to go on my merry way, but boy was I wrong. After several minutes, the security officer returned with my computer, and without saying a word to me, wrapped it in bubble wrap and stuck it inside a box, which she then taped shut. My blood began to boil and my whole body shook with fury; I bit my lip in order to prevent myself from screaming (or crying, I’m not sure which would have come first). In time, not short mind you, she approached me and squatted down so that we were at eye level. She then began to speak to me as though I was, you guessed it, a ten year old. “Your computer cannot come on the plane with you tonight,” she said. “WHY. NOT?” I replied. A bit taken aback by the coarseness of my statement, she paused before responding, “It just can’t come on the plane tonight.” We repeated this conversation several times. I tried my hardest to get her to reveal more, but she refused. She told me that it would come on the next plane, and it would remain in the box until it was returned to me, but I didn’t believe her.
When I realized that fighting for my computer was futile, I turned my attention elsewhere. Much to my chagrin, the security officers began to throw all of my stuff back into my bags, paying little attention to where the items came from and how fragile they were. I immediately hoped that there would be time to repack them before I got on the plane. They allowed me to pick them up, and finally gave my passport and boarding pass back to me. When I looked at my phone, the time matched that of the boarding time given on my ticket, which caused me to panic more than I already was.
One of the officers escorted me out of the room, assuring me that I could bypass the next security checkpoint. However, once we arrived, one of the officers at the checkpoint didn’t want to let me through without going through the body scanner. The two of them discussed it in Hebrew for what seemed like forever, but ultimately decided that the pat-down was sufficient.
On the other side of security, there was what appeared to me to be a reverse border control. As I waited in line for one of the booths, I impatiently tapped my foot. Upon reaching the front of the line, I handed my passport to the woman manning the booth. As if enough hadn’t already gone wrong for me, the woman could not decide for the life of her if I matched the photo in the passport. I watched in amazement as she painstakingly examined my passport photo and then me, the passport and then me, and over and over. Just when I thought she had made up her mind, she handed my passport to the lady in the booth next to her and asked if she could identify me. The process began again, but finally they came to the conclusion that I was who I claimed to be. My passport photo had been taken six months prior to this incident.
After I made it past this point, I was in the clear. I sprinted (as fast as one can sprint with a backpack and a duffel bag) to my gate, and thankfully arrived mere minutes before my boarding number was called. Once on the plane, I finally had a chance to text my parents about what had happened. I’m sure they were panicking a little. My dad called the airline to see what he could find out about my package, but in the bag shuffle, I had misplaced the receipt for my computer, so he wasn’t able to locate it. I started to freak out that I had dropped it during my mad dash through the airport, but I wasn’t able to conduct a comprehensive search of my belongings because the plane was about to take off.
Thankfully, I was able to settle in for the fourteen-hour plane ride, and was even able to sleep a little. I had intended to use my computer to write about my trip and complete a final essay for one of my courses, but since that was no longer an option, I passed the time by reading books and watching movies. When we touched down in New York, the scramble began again. Unsure if my bags would be examined by border control, and desperately wanting to avoid another incident, I sat on the floor in the long corridor after exiting the plane, and attempted to reorganize my bags. Then I headed to border control, which had just opened. I was a bit nervous about making it through, since I had been told that U.S. Border Control Agents can be rude and my track record was looking fairly weak, but the agent I spoke to seemed nice enough and I made it through without a hitch.
Next, I picked up my suitcase from baggage claim. I waited around to see if a cardboard box matching the one ingrained in my mind would appear on the conveyor belt, but it never did. I plopped myself against the wall in baggage claim, and again began to ruffle through my bag for the ticket I had been given for my computer. Eventually I found it stuck to the back of my passport—so close to me this whole time. I sent a picture of the ticket to my parents so that they could try to locate my computer. At last, I felt like I might have a chance of seeing my computer again.
I waited in a few more lines, rechecked my suitcase, went through security, and found the gate for my flight to Indy. I had breakfast and then waited to board my flight. I think I slept the entire trip to Indy, so I felt better when I landed. My parents and sister were waiting outside of security with a sign welcoming me home. It was so good to be with them again. They were anxious to hear everything about my trip, but the airport debacle hung over my head like a gloomy cloud. We spent the next couple days trying, quite literally, to determine where in the world my computer was. Big surprise, it had not made it onto the next plan after all. Each update we received from the airline simply said, “We are still working to locate your baggage,” which did not ease my concern. On Monday evening, when my computer arrived at my house, I finally breathed a sigh of relief; I was home and everything was as it should be.