I choose to tell a story because as humans we evolved to be story tellers...I grew up in a family of eight girls. I was the eldest. My only brother was born twenty years after me. So, for two decades, the eight of us were raised in a tight-knit sisterhood. My mother was in charge of everything; she was the head of the household from our point of view. Our father, despite being severely myopic, built a successful career as a physician.
When he returned from work, his role in our home was to play with the children and enjoy late-night conversations. I had no cousins, and no close friends. We went to an all-girls school, and we visited friends and family in women-only settings.
For all these reasons, as a child I was never challenged by female-male stereotypes. My entire world was run by women. I was gender blind, so to speak.
Five Scares: Doing the Impossible book by Dr. Rana Dajani
The book is like a self-journey in the biography of Dr. Dajani, the success that she achieved in her scientific and cultural life, and the important initiatives that she launched in developing scientific cooperation, the quality of education, the love of reading, and others.
The title of the book, the Five Scarves, expresses the five basic tasks that Dajani practices, which are the mission of the mother, teacher, scientist, social pioneer and women’s rights activist.
She lived the experience of a mother and a PhD student together in the United States accompanied by her husband, who made a major contribution to supporting her by traveling and being with her to take care of the family.
In the book, she explains many of the challenges that accompanied her during that stage before she was able to fulfill her dream and return to university teaching in Jordan. Dr. Dajani writes about the challenges that women face in the sciences and how to build a human society characterized by equal opportunities and overcoming the gender gap.
She also presents her own vision for interactive education with students and trying to highlight their best talents, and explains several initiatives that she undertook, namely; the We Love Reading initiative, which contributed to the establishment of hundreds of free reading for fun clubs/libraries in several mosques and churches all over Jordan, including poor and refugee areas, and spread to several countries in the world.
Rana Dajani is an associate professor of biology and biotechnology at the Hashemite University in Jordan. She is an authority on the genetics of the Circassian and Chechen populations in Jordan. Her research focuses on genome-wide association studies concerning diabetes and cancer and on stem cells. She advocated the establishment of the law for stem cell research and therapy in Jordan.
Dajani has written in Nature about education and women in the Arab World as well as science, and she is on the Arabian Business list “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Arab Women.” In 2017, she was among seven Fulbright alumni to receive the inaugural IIE Global Changemaker Award. Dajani is the founder and director of the nongovernmental organization We Love Reading, for which she has earned the Library of Congress Literacy Award Best Practices, a Stars Impact Award, the Synergos Arab World Social Innovator award, a WISE Award, and recognition from IDEO.org. A 2014 Eisenhower Fellow and a member of Jordan’s Order of Al Hussein for Distinguished Contributions of the Second Class, Dajani earned a PhD in molecular cell biology from the University of Iowa.
Written by Ruba Hattar
