"I have wasta in high places."

13 June 2009

Lacing my gym shoes as slowly as possible, I kept watch on the janitorial closet across the locker room. I could see her flip-flopped feet under the doorway. A Jordanian woman came puffing around the corner from the exercise room, and I quickly turned back to my temporary locker and fumbled with my belongings, stalling for time. She gathered her things and headed for the showers, and I moved to the changing station across from the closet. I felt a little odd for essentially stalking this woman, and I was ready to leave, except that I had paid too much for a one-day pass in this gym in upscale Abdoun as a means to contact the migrant women I heard were working here. The latch turned and I jumped to meet her as she emerged from the closet.

It registered a few seconds after I began speaking rapidly in English to this woman that she didn’t understand me, and that she was not, as I had been misinformed, Asian. After a few minutes of charades and a spattering of poorly spoken Levantine Arabic (I don’t know any Egyptian colloquial), I remembered I had an Arabic cartoon about maids (similar to the one from the May 31st post) in my field notebook. I watched her face as she ran her eyes over the cartoon and the captions. Meanwhile, I wrote my mobile number on a scrap of paper and offered it to her. Unexpectedly she shoved the papers in her cleaning uniform pocket, propped her mop against the wall, and led me upstairs to – not other cleaning staff as I hoped – her employer. He looked at it, laughed ominously, and said, “She knows about this, yes, but she cannot read!” Relieved, I reached out to take the cartoon back, but he held onto it, and continued: “What do you want with her? We treat her good here, not like this [cartoon]. Are you investigating?”
“No, I’m just a student. I’m sorry, I don’t want anything from her [Egyptian worker]. I’m sorry, it was a mistake.” Faye walked past the front desk, her blue eyes widened in concern.
“You’re gonna get me kicked out of this gym,” she whispered as she walked behind me and into the machine room. I excused myself and pedaled my frustration away on a stationary bike. “You’re the worst researcher ever,” said a half-joking Faye jogging on the treadmill behind me. In that moment of frustration, I believed her. Later as we packed up our things in the locker room, I looked up to see the Egyptian woman shuffling toward me in her lavender flip flops. I grimaced, thinking of all the better ways I could have managed that situation, but then she slipped a scrap of paper in my hand.
“Afaafa,” she slowly pronounced her name. “Wa hada mobili (and this is my mobile number)”. Then she smiled a wide, toothy smile.

A rocky start to the research, perhaps, but I had rediscover the value of wasta (not what you know who you know) in Jordan. When I stopped trying to do it on my own, I saw the resources all around me; a Palestinian Christian friend of mine connected me with some international congregations, particularly Filipino ones, and I’m optimistic about what’s to come because I have wasta in high places.