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Dina's
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Tanjila's
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Brie's
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Joseph's
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Daniel's
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Zachariah's
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Dina: I was surprised to see I hadn't seen any of this history. I had read about it, but to actually see it, and to meet the people who came along. I was really very nicely surprised by the hospitality of the people in Morocco, the way everyone treated us and were really excited and happy to have the four of us there.

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Tanjila: I had never been to Morocco before and I have actually spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I grew up in the Middle East. I studied and traveled all over the Middle East but I had never been to North Africa. It was very exciting for me to go to a new Muslim country where they do speak Arabic but there is a definite French influence, Spanish influence. And then walking around, going into the Jewish quarters, hearing what the Moroccans have to say for themselves, about their views towards tolerance and then walking around and seeing how Moroccans themselves view what it means to be a Muslim and what it means in regards to the way they dress or the way they interact with one another or the way they worship at a mosque. It is very different from the way I have seen people in mosques in Saudi Arabia or in Jordan or in Egypt and so that was a very unique experience. And then in Spain, it was amazing just to go through Cordoba and Grenada and see the remnants of this golden age of Islam and understand that that was actually there once and see it in all its splendor and that was amazing.

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Brie: Some things surprised me, traveling through my territory, the fact that I was in Oklahoma, the level of interfaith dialogue that existed, in what we consider middle America, not necessarily from an elitist standpoint but just a cultural perspective, I wouldn't have imagined Tulsa to be a hotbed of inter-religious dialogue and have such a large Arab Muslim population. So it was really for me to see and deal with my misconceptions.

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Joseph: What surprised me? Tulsa Oklahoma was a big surprise, the producer and director didn't tell us really why we were going there and I was unsure and tried to speculate. Why are we going to Tulsa, Oklahoma? That was yeah, a surprise for me in terms of what was going on there, interfaith in of all places Tulsa, Oklahoma. That there were Muslim students in the heartland in the middle of Oklahoma, when you think of Oklahoma, you think, I don't know, football, corn fields, oil, that sort of thing, so that was surprising. In terms of the rest of the program, meeting...a lot of it was not surprising. I will say that, some of it I expected. Also in Los Angeles, I remember meeting with the Imam there and he was saying that he definitely felt that the mosque was discriminate there. I remember he was saying about how the mosque was colorful and it is off a street, and the people in the local government were worried, thought there would be accidents because it was a bright building. It was clear that if you know they were trying to build a church, or something like that, I don't think they would have come up with ridiculous assumptions. And I can relate that again, where I am from in New Rochelle, we have been trying to build a new synagogue for years, for years and years and years, and the local town you know, has been fighting with us any way they can. From complaining about trees that will be environmental things, birds, traffic, a lot of it is hoopla so, I could identify with that.

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Daniel: It is a tough question, I have spent the better part of my life traveling to the Middle East once or twice a year, so I wasn't so much surprised by the people of the land. What was special on this trip was the diversity of the group that I traveled with, I had never traveled with such a diverse group and to me that was what made this particular project unique.

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Zachariah: I guess I was most struck by the deepness of the tensions between the two sides. We talked to a number of different Israeli peace organizations and the way they sort of laid out the tensions between the two were disheartening to say the least. I felt like even though there were times to bridge the gap, that those attempts were in themselves stunted for whatever internal reasons existed within the organization. I guess I wanted to believe that things were better than they seemed but I didn't come away from this experience thinking that.