If you are accustomed to the automobile honking etiquette of the American suburbs, or even better, the rural South, and have limited experience in traffic-inundated cities, then you may be shocked by the excessive and expressive use of the automobile horn in Jordan. Despite its humble beginnings as a simple audible signal for drivers to alert other drivers or pedestrians, the horn in Jordan has many meanings which often elude foreigners. The lingua franca of the street, horn honking ranges from a friendly “hello you’re in my way” to “you look hot, er, I mean haram (forbidden)” to “I just passed my high school exit exam!!” If you plan to visit Jordan, it would be helpful to familiarize yourself with the following five horn-honks:
1. “You’re walking in the road. Move.” This one varies from a light tap to several evenly spaced, urgent taps, but once you learn to recognize the annoyed tone, you’ll know it. You’ll also know it since you’re probably in the roadway when you hear it. Don’t be fooled by the crosswalks you might see in some of the nicer areas, because no one respects your pedestrian right-of-way, and jaywalking is only a problem is you’re hit by a vehicle. But that’s unlikely once you master weaving-in-and-out of traffic; until then, follow closely behind any Jordanians you see crossing the street.
2. “Do you want a taxi? Because even if you don’t, I’m going to keep honking…” You’re sure to hear this honk especially as a foreigner. Like the “Move” honk, it consists of urgent taps, but instead of the rapid, annoyed tone, these taps are less evenly spaced and become longer and more imploring in duration as the taxi approaches you and slows down. Example: “Honk.” You turn and see a taxi approaching, but you wave it off because you, like many a foreigner, prefer to walk. “Honk.” You keep walking; really, you don’t want it. The taxi pulls up beside you, and the driver leans toward the open passenger window, asking “Tak-see? You want tak-see?” Saying anything in Arabic like “La” (No) unless you are a native speaker is not always effective; perhaps you really mean “yes” and are just confused about your Arabic. The best response is to keep walking, looking straight ahead, or try ducking in the nearest dukkan (shop).
3. “You’re hot” aka “Ya haram (how shameful).” No matter how conservatively you dress, if you’re a foreigner, a woman and alone, you’re likely to hear this. Of course, you may not recognize it for what it is, especially if you intentionally dress conservatively. But once you’ve traveled in a taxi and witnessed it from the other side – the driver snaps his head toward a woman standing or walking alone and taps his horn as he passes – you’ll know it. Should you experience righteous anger at this honk, remember that in this gender-segregated society, men don’t actually know what to say to you. This light tap of interest could mean that this male driver simply wants to experience a communicative exchange with a woman, for even one so vague and indirect can be exhilarating. Or it could mean that he is offended by your very gender, especially if you are unaccompanied by a male – especially, mind you, if you’re exposing arms, legs or something worse. In that case, the tap will likely increase in intensity inversely to the amount of clothing you are wearing. If you’re not careful, the driver may try to give you a lift – and then some money for your services.
4. “I just passed my tawjihi (taw-jee-hee)! Yeah!!!” This high school exit exam is a big deal in Jordan, that is, if you care about your academic and career trajectory. The highest scores can propel you into the best medical programs while the lowest will land you in less respected courses like journalism or graphic design. When the exam results are released in the summer, chaos ensues in the streets, with caravans of young Jordanians cramming into vehicles, honking in a particular pattern of two slow honks followed by three quick honks, repeated over and over, and accompanied by shouting, tongue-trilling, and fireworks. If you’re a pedestrian, beware: people hanging out of windows are likely to point and shout at you, reaffirming their superiority (at placing into business management) over you lowly pedestrian. Every year, the Public Security Bureau, aka the Police, vow to catch and prosecute honking-offenders, but there’s little anyone can do when, at any moment in any street, convoys of honking high-schoolers go flying past. That day was today, so you’ve got the next 364 days to avoid this one.
5. “ We're getting married!" This one is like the tawjihi, except that it poses less of a threat to everyone involved: as a pedestrian you’re less likely to be involved as everyone will be focused on the two people pledged to one another and with the support of two tribes backing it and their honor at stake, no one is likely to bother you. The caravan is usually bedecked in flowers and proceeds with the reverence of a funeral procession, only slightly more lively as evidenced by the repetitive 2-3 honking pattern. The real party is the wedding ceremony itself and especially the after-party.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
SJPL #2: Practicing their English with foreigners
Stuff Jordanian People Like #2: Practicing their English with foreigners
Arabic is the official language of
Old Arab man outside falafel shop: Wel-come to Jor-dan.
You: Saken hon. (I live here.)
Old Arab man: From America?
You: Yes.
Old Arab man: Jor-dan and Ameri-ca like this (rubs index fingers together in a creepy sawing motion which means “close”). Min wein enti? (Where are you from?)
You:
Old Arab man:
You: La (No),
Old Arab man:
You: La (No),
Old Arab man: Wash-ing-town?
You can walk away from an inquisitive old Arab man more easily than you can leap from a moving taxi. If a taxi driver initiates a “Welcome to
If, however, you are feeling bold, you may reply “Shukran” with some interest, waiting for the inevitable question “Where are you from?” to which you may reply with the truth or with a country of your choice – but be careful which country you choose:
Taxi driver: Welcome to
You: Shukran.
Taxi driver: What country?
You:
Taxi driver: Ya haram (what a shame/shameful)…
Taxi driver #2: Welcome to
You: Shukran.
Taxi driver #2: Where are you from?
You:
Taxi driver #2: (silent)
Clearly,
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Stuff Jordanian People Like #1: Photos of King Abdullah II
While I have been busy with research, I’ve neglected my blog, not so much because I’ve been too busy to write, but because I’ve had little I can share with a general audience. So to keep the creative juices flowing, I’ll be doing a parody series of "Stuff White People Like" (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/), inevitably titled "Stuff Jordanian People Like".
#1 Photographs of King Abdullah II.
Nations love immortalizing their heads of state in various media, but none more so since Stalinist Russia than perhaps Jordan - like a cult of personality only less fearful and more blissfully ignorant about what the king actually does, which, besides his presumed political duties, is everything: from scuba diving, to piloting helicopters, to riding motorcyles, to acting as an extra on Star Trek, Abdullah has done it and probably has been photographed doing it; all but the most intimate bodily functions are fair game. The English daily features a different Abdullah shot each day, and if Jordanians munched on cereal in the mornings instead of zait ou zatar (olive oil and thyme with bread), they would no doubt collect portraits of King Abdullah in cereal boxes. Whether or not Jordanians approve of Abdullah is inconsequential, like trying to decide whether or not Jordanians actually prefer the desert; that’s just how things are here. And at least in Jordan, unlike some of its neighbors, you won’t be imprisoned for three years over a satirical poem about your leader. Displayed in the ritziest restaurants to the humblest falafel stands, framed astutely inside homes, and weaving in and out of traffic plastered to taxi windshields, Abdullah’s face is more familiar to Jordanians than their third cousin’s – and that’s saying a lot. Consequently Abdullah infamously dons a bushy black beard when mingling with the common folk, like sneaking into a hospital ward to check up on the state of healthcare or smoking argeelah with some old men on a street corner talking about the state of the economy.
He learned such covert activities not from his military training but from his father, the late King Hussein. And while he’ll never have the classic patriarchal and mustachioed Arab good looks of his father, whose now fading visage still graces shop windows and peeling, sun-bleached car decals, Abdullah makes up for this lack of Arab-ness with an appealing Anglophilia: he founded the King’s Academy in Jordan, modeled after his experiences at the prestigious American boarding school Deerfield Academy and from his time at Oxford; he speaks English like a true Briton (much to the befuddlement of Jordanians who recognize that Abdullah speaks Arabic with a foreigner’s accent); he has unusually blonde-haired children; and like many a clever world leader, he’s married to a supermodel. The only personality Jordanians enjoy fawning over more than King Abdullah is Queen Rania whose slim, attractive figure has defied the law of nature that Jordanian women inflate like baking khobez (bread) by kid number five or by age thirty, whichever comes first.
(King Abdullah as an extra on Star Trek, "Investigations", 1996)
#1 Photographs of King Abdullah II.
Nations love immortalizing their heads of state in various media, but none more so since Stalinist Russia than perhaps Jordan - like a cult of personality only less fearful and more blissfully ignorant about what the king actually does, which, besides his presumed political duties, is everything: from scuba diving, to piloting helicopters, to riding motorcyles, to acting as an extra on Star Trek, Abdullah has done it and probably has been photographed doing it; all but the most intimate bodily functions are fair game. The English daily features a different Abdullah shot each day, and if Jordanians munched on cereal in the mornings instead of zait ou zatar (olive oil and thyme with bread), they would no doubt collect portraits of King Abdullah in cereal boxes. Whether or not Jordanians approve of Abdullah is inconsequential, like trying to decide whether or not Jordanians actually prefer the desert; that’s just how things are here. And at least in Jordan, unlike some of its neighbors, you won’t be imprisoned for three years over a satirical poem about your leader. Displayed in the ritziest restaurants to the humblest falafel stands, framed astutely inside homes, and weaving in and out of traffic plastered to taxi windshields, Abdullah’s face is more familiar to Jordanians than their third cousin’s – and that’s saying a lot. Consequently Abdullah infamously dons a bushy black beard when mingling with the common folk, like sneaking into a hospital ward to check up on the state of healthcare or smoking argeelah with some old men on a street corner talking about the state of the economy.
He learned such covert activities not from his military training but from his father, the late King Hussein. And while he’ll never have the classic patriarchal and mustachioed Arab good looks of his father, whose now fading visage still graces shop windows and peeling, sun-bleached car decals, Abdullah makes up for this lack of Arab-ness with an appealing Anglophilia: he founded the King’s Academy in Jordan, modeled after his experiences at the prestigious American boarding school Deerfield Academy and from his time at Oxford; he speaks English like a true Briton (much to the befuddlement of Jordanians who recognize that Abdullah speaks Arabic with a foreigner’s accent); he has unusually blonde-haired children; and like many a clever world leader, he’s married to a supermodel. The only personality Jordanians enjoy fawning over more than King Abdullah is Queen Rania whose slim, attractive figure has defied the law of nature that Jordanian women inflate like baking khobez (bread) by kid number five or by age thirty, whichever comes first.
(King Abdullah as an extra on Star Trek, "Investigations", 1996)
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Anglo-Saxon hips don't lie
From 6 July
“We have a word for it in Arabic,” Katti said. Listening intently, I traced her thickly-applied black eyeliner from one corner of her heavy-lidded eye to the other, following the high-arch of her silver-blue eyebrow ridge, her blackened lashes fluttering up and down at the bright headlights bearing down from the opposite lane and diffusing across the windshield. “You can’t see it, but you can feel it. People are not happy like they were in the old times.”
“Not happy?” I asked numbly, my thoughts still with the party we had left minutes before. At 6:40 P.M. I had leapt from a taxi and had darted through multiple lanes of traffic to reach Katti’s car waiting on the opposite side of the highway. Katti began merging into traffic as I was closing the door, and we exchanged Arabic greetings. Her twelve-year old daughter, Tuleen, meekly said “hello” from the backseat and cradled a bouquet of lilies in her slender, tanned arms. The car smelled like mint chewing gum. Katti had loosely tied a sheer black scarf to obscure the set of curlers wound tightly in her bronze hair. As she gripped the steering wheel, her golf-ball sized rhinestone ring stood out like a sixth knuckle. Silver high-heel pressing the accelerator to the floor, we sped toward Anoud’s party, and I turned my glance out the window, embarrassed by the alarmingly short hem of my friend’s sleeveless dress. Obviously this was going to be a segregated, or women’s only, party. We were late, and I was underdressed – or overdressed, depending how you looked at it.
And there was much to be looked at – but for female eyes only - in this private party of approximately two dozen Arab women and myself celebrating Anoud’s university graduation and her mother’s birthday. It was for female eyes only, and yet the sensuality of their dress, makeup and dancing startled me. Turning up the stereo-system volume, Anoud sauntered to the middle of the salon where the guests sat in a circle. A mischievous smile played across her lips, and Anoud began flicking her wrists, curling and uncurling her long fingers; the women began clapping with the beat, trilling her onward. Soon she was joined by a gyrating, swaying company: plant one foot on the first beat; shift the hips loosely around to the opposite foot; kick that foot out on the next beat; the spiraling motion consumes the torso, extends to the graceful arms, the furling braceleted wrists, slender fingers and manicured nails; pull the hypnotic motion inward again to the core; on the next beat plant the other foot and repeat. Imagine any “belly-dance” you’ve seen and now replace the beaded and fringed two-piece with “Western” party apparel. It was a dizzying array in which every few beats one woman would step out as soloist and the others would clap harder and faster for her, trilling and whistling: women dancing sensually to be appraised only by other women, young and single or aging mothers, celebrating their flesh, their femininity, smiling, laughing, caught up in the dance. My thirty seconds on the dance floor were an exercise in futility. These Anglo-Saxon hips don’t lie; they don’t do Arab dance.
“You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” said Katti as she drove me home. “Maybe because I work in human rights, I understand why women want to work outside the home. I work outside the home. Today, I haven’t seen [two of] my children, but it’s a compromise. I love my job. It’s exciting,” she said, smiling at her contentment. What Katti doesn’t mention is that she employs a live-in Indonesian woman to clean her home and care for her children on a two-year contract, but so do thousands of other Jordanians – women buying the labor of other women.
“But part of my mind is with the old way,” Katti said after a pause. “The woman must build her home, her family, before she can go outside and build other things, other buildings,” she said turning to me. “Why build other buildings when your home is falling down?”
“You can’t see it, but you can feel it. I don’t know what’s happening in Jordan. The people want to live the way they see in movies and on television. But now you don’t see your family anymore. Maybe you don’t even know your cousins,” she said, shaking her head.
Passing through downtown, I saw men in groups silently smoking argeelah, the water pipe resting on the broken concrete beneath their plastic chairs. A luxury vehicle with blue accent lights sped past Katti’s car, dull base pounding. All was bright and empty, alive yet dying. I saw silhouettes of thin men leaning in shop doorways, backlit from fluorescent lights revealing stores without customers. The men also stared outward into the night, seeing yet not seeing. This thing we were all watching, you couldn’t see it, but you could feel it.
“We have a word for it in Arabic,” Katti said. Listening intently, I traced her thickly-applied black eyeliner from one corner of her heavy-lidded eye to the other, following the high-arch of her silver-blue eyebrow ridge, her blackened lashes fluttering up and down at the bright headlights bearing down from the opposite lane and diffusing across the windshield. “You can’t see it, but you can feel it. People are not happy like they were in the old times.”
“Not happy?” I asked numbly, my thoughts still with the party we had left minutes before. At 6:40 P.M. I had leapt from a taxi and had darted through multiple lanes of traffic to reach Katti’s car waiting on the opposite side of the highway. Katti began merging into traffic as I was closing the door, and we exchanged Arabic greetings. Her twelve-year old daughter, Tuleen, meekly said “hello” from the backseat and cradled a bouquet of lilies in her slender, tanned arms. The car smelled like mint chewing gum. Katti had loosely tied a sheer black scarf to obscure the set of curlers wound tightly in her bronze hair. As she gripped the steering wheel, her golf-ball sized rhinestone ring stood out like a sixth knuckle. Silver high-heel pressing the accelerator to the floor, we sped toward Anoud’s party, and I turned my glance out the window, embarrassed by the alarmingly short hem of my friend’s sleeveless dress. Obviously this was going to be a segregated, or women’s only, party. We were late, and I was underdressed – or overdressed, depending how you looked at it.
And there was much to be looked at – but for female eyes only - in this private party of approximately two dozen Arab women and myself celebrating Anoud’s university graduation and her mother’s birthday. It was for female eyes only, and yet the sensuality of their dress, makeup and dancing startled me. Turning up the stereo-system volume, Anoud sauntered to the middle of the salon where the guests sat in a circle. A mischievous smile played across her lips, and Anoud began flicking her wrists, curling and uncurling her long fingers; the women began clapping with the beat, trilling her onward. Soon she was joined by a gyrating, swaying company: plant one foot on the first beat; shift the hips loosely around to the opposite foot; kick that foot out on the next beat; the spiraling motion consumes the torso, extends to the graceful arms, the furling braceleted wrists, slender fingers and manicured nails; pull the hypnotic motion inward again to the core; on the next beat plant the other foot and repeat. Imagine any “belly-dance” you’ve seen and now replace the beaded and fringed two-piece with “Western” party apparel. It was a dizzying array in which every few beats one woman would step out as soloist and the others would clap harder and faster for her, trilling and whistling: women dancing sensually to be appraised only by other women, young and single or aging mothers, celebrating their flesh, their femininity, smiling, laughing, caught up in the dance. My thirty seconds on the dance floor were an exercise in futility. These Anglo-Saxon hips don’t lie; they don’t do Arab dance.
“You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” said Katti as she drove me home. “Maybe because I work in human rights, I understand why women want to work outside the home. I work outside the home. Today, I haven’t seen [two of] my children, but it’s a compromise. I love my job. It’s exciting,” she said, smiling at her contentment. What Katti doesn’t mention is that she employs a live-in Indonesian woman to clean her home and care for her children on a two-year contract, but so do thousands of other Jordanians – women buying the labor of other women.
“But part of my mind is with the old way,” Katti said after a pause. “The woman must build her home, her family, before she can go outside and build other things, other buildings,” she said turning to me. “Why build other buildings when your home is falling down?”
“You can’t see it, but you can feel it. I don’t know what’s happening in Jordan. The people want to live the way they see in movies and on television. But now you don’t see your family anymore. Maybe you don’t even know your cousins,” she said, shaking her head.
Passing through downtown, I saw men in groups silently smoking argeelah, the water pipe resting on the broken concrete beneath their plastic chairs. A luxury vehicle with blue accent lights sped past Katti’s car, dull base pounding. All was bright and empty, alive yet dying. I saw silhouettes of thin men leaning in shop doorways, backlit from fluorescent lights revealing stores without customers. The men also stared outward into the night, seeing yet not seeing. This thing we were all watching, you couldn’t see it, but you could feel it.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Food for thought
From 3rd July
(Befriending camels in Wadi Rum)
Although breakfast was being served after the desert tour I had missed (see previous entry), and I knew I might miss a meal too, I didn’t care. I was getting reacquainted with Wadi Rum camels who were passing just outside the camp. I wasn’t very hungry anyway, and when I slipped back into camp I assumed my absence had gone unnoticed; it hadn’t.
“Why did you not eat?” several Sri Lankans asked as they crowded around me.
“Oh, no problem. I was looking at some camels.”
“No, this is not good. You must eat.” But there was no breakfast food remaining, and I continued to try to convince them I was, in fact, not hungry. “Why do you say you are not hungry? You haven’t eaten, you must be hungry.” Wishing to avoid going into detail about why I wasn’t hungry, I tried to walk away. The group sat me down, saying I must wait until some more eggs could be cooked and jam and bread found. I ate the heaping mound offered me reluctantly, and noticed the camp was strangely quiet and watchful. Thinking the Sri Lankans seated near me and staring at my food were suspicious, perhaps concluding it was a second breakfast, I felt I had to explain myself.
“This is the first time I eat today, ok?” I said stupidly. They continued staring. One of the men said something sarcastic in Sinhala and the rest laughed quietly. Something was up, but I couldn’t tell what, so I asked what the man said.
“He says eat your fill,” a woman explained in English. I nodded in his direction. It was only much later that afternoon that I learned the 1am traditional Arab dinner allegedly made half the camp sick.
“Last night they were smelling it and saying it was no good. The chicken didn’t even have salt,” Angelica, a tall eleven-going-on-twenty year old Sri Lankan whom I had befriended easily for her observant nature, her good sense of humor and of course, her English proficiency.
Recalling how I had eaten the salad, the rice and chicken with relish, I replied, “I didn’t notice anything strange about the food.”
“Oh, they were all saying it wasn’t good,” she said seriously. “Besides, we never eat Arab food unless we cook ourselves [usually for their Arab employers]. My mom says to never eat it off the street [from street vendors] or at another house. We don’t know if it’s clean or not.”
“I eat street falafel and shawarma all the time, and I haven’t been sick from it,” I said. I thought back to an interview with a Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ, like a Free Trade Zone or FTZ) agent three days prior. He had gone at length to impress me with the rowdiness of his Sri Lankan contract factory workers and how unclean their living quarters were despite the management imploring them to clean it. “In their living quarters they fry garlic, eggplants, these things in their small pots,” he had said, wrinkling his nose. “It smells disgusting – no disgusting is not strong enough a word. Is there a stronger word?” he had asked me.
“Repulsive?” I offered reluctantly.
“And when you come visit the QIZ with me, I’ll show you how dirty they live, these Sri Lankans. And we give them good clean food from the cafeteria,” he continued. “And they go on strikes when they don’t get fish with their rice!”
I turned my thoughts back to what Angelica was saying as we strode through Aqaba’s fish market. Placing my hand over my nose, I tried to ignore the bloody bits of fish littering the gutters of the meat shops. Shark fins freshly sliced hung like trophies in shop entry-ways, and Angelica continued: “We always get fish when we come to Aqaba. It’s so much cheaper here than Amman.” I watched her family members haggle over a slab of bloody fish; a wizened Arab shopkeeper placed the raw fish meat barehanded on a scale.
“Won’t it smell on the bus on the way back?” I asked, lightheaded at the thought.
“We brought coolers and ice,” Angelica replied cheerily. Then less cheerfully she commented, “I guess I’ll be eating a lot of fish this week.”
Fish shopping completed, we returned to the bus for lunch. “Where are we eating, do you know?” I asked Angelica.
“Burger King,” she said. That, more so than the raw fish, make my stomach turn. Two weeks ago the international church I attend took a field trip to the nearby Burger King; over the next few days, about half the congregation became sick, myself included (see entry “All part of the experience”). At the time, I had assumed it was the Filipino or Sri Lankan meals I had been served; now I was more suspicious of fast food joints than any “ethnic” dish offered me. I told Angelica about my food poisoning at the Burger King in Amman.
“Well, this should be better than the one in Amman,” she affirmed.
The 46 orders had been placed in advance, but when we picked them up, intending to eat them on the bus, the confusion began. Angelica’s uncle opened one of the brown bags and held up the tiny sandwich, a greasy, junior sized bun, and began shouting. As an example, the single serving greasy brown bag was passed around, and the angry voices multiplied. Since they spoke in Sinhala, I only could guess at what was happening. After ten or fifteen minutes of arguing with the poor tour guide in broken Arabic, the Sri Lankans gathered up the food and returned the three large sacks containing 46 smaller sacks to the Burger King. “What happened?” I finally asked the Sri Lankan priest.
“My people have been cheated!” he exclaimed. “They got this small bun only for 3JD (about 5 dollars) – no fries, no drink!” I suppressed a laugh.
The Brazilian and I were unimpressed, having seen the Burger King menu in Amman. Fast food in other countries, Jordan included, is often expensive and indeed, a luxury, and I said this.
“Yes, she’s right,” the Brazilian joined in. “My friend and I ate at a McDonald’s in Amman and for the two of us to eat a burger and fries, it was 16 JD (about 25 dollars). It is too expensive,” he said.
The priest just blinked, bewildered at this revelation that reputedly cheap fast food was not cheap after all. Long story short, the Burger King honored the request to add fries and drinks – the smallest size, mind you – but reduced the meals by half. So half the group, enraged at being cheated, visited the Popeye’s restaurant next door and purchased what they considered a reasonable amount of food for a reasonable amount of money. The Brazilian and I exchanged, once again, a knowing look. Again, I thought back to the QIZ agent’s rant about Sri Lankan factory workers “taking their food for granted”. “They don’t know how much it costs us to have that food for them – good, clean food from the cafeteria,” he had said in defense of factory policy. “We can’t have fish every day like they want. That’s expensive!” And as the argument continued on the bus, I wondered who was right: the QIZ agent, the Sri Lankans, or no one. It certainly gave me some cross-cultural food for thought.
(Befriending camels in Wadi Rum)
Although breakfast was being served after the desert tour I had missed (see previous entry), and I knew I might miss a meal too, I didn’t care. I was getting reacquainted with Wadi Rum camels who were passing just outside the camp. I wasn’t very hungry anyway, and when I slipped back into camp I assumed my absence had gone unnoticed; it hadn’t.
“Why did you not eat?” several Sri Lankans asked as they crowded around me.
“Oh, no problem. I was looking at some camels.”
“No, this is not good. You must eat.” But there was no breakfast food remaining, and I continued to try to convince them I was, in fact, not hungry. “Why do you say you are not hungry? You haven’t eaten, you must be hungry.” Wishing to avoid going into detail about why I wasn’t hungry, I tried to walk away. The group sat me down, saying I must wait until some more eggs could be cooked and jam and bread found. I ate the heaping mound offered me reluctantly, and noticed the camp was strangely quiet and watchful. Thinking the Sri Lankans seated near me and staring at my food were suspicious, perhaps concluding it was a second breakfast, I felt I had to explain myself.
“This is the first time I eat today, ok?” I said stupidly. They continued staring. One of the men said something sarcastic in Sinhala and the rest laughed quietly. Something was up, but I couldn’t tell what, so I asked what the man said.
“He says eat your fill,” a woman explained in English. I nodded in his direction. It was only much later that afternoon that I learned the 1am traditional Arab dinner allegedly made half the camp sick.
“Last night they were smelling it and saying it was no good. The chicken didn’t even have salt,” Angelica, a tall eleven-going-on-twenty year old Sri Lankan whom I had befriended easily for her observant nature, her good sense of humor and of course, her English proficiency.
Recalling how I had eaten the salad, the rice and chicken with relish, I replied, “I didn’t notice anything strange about the food.”
“Oh, they were all saying it wasn’t good,” she said seriously. “Besides, we never eat Arab food unless we cook ourselves [usually for their Arab employers]. My mom says to never eat it off the street [from street vendors] or at another house. We don’t know if it’s clean or not.”
“I eat street falafel and shawarma all the time, and I haven’t been sick from it,” I said. I thought back to an interview with a Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ, like a Free Trade Zone or FTZ) agent three days prior. He had gone at length to impress me with the rowdiness of his Sri Lankan contract factory workers and how unclean their living quarters were despite the management imploring them to clean it. “In their living quarters they fry garlic, eggplants, these things in their small pots,” he had said, wrinkling his nose. “It smells disgusting – no disgusting is not strong enough a word. Is there a stronger word?” he had asked me.
“Repulsive?” I offered reluctantly.
“And when you come visit the QIZ with me, I’ll show you how dirty they live, these Sri Lankans. And we give them good clean food from the cafeteria,” he continued. “And they go on strikes when they don’t get fish with their rice!”
I turned my thoughts back to what Angelica was saying as we strode through Aqaba’s fish market. Placing my hand over my nose, I tried to ignore the bloody bits of fish littering the gutters of the meat shops. Shark fins freshly sliced hung like trophies in shop entry-ways, and Angelica continued: “We always get fish when we come to Aqaba. It’s so much cheaper here than Amman.” I watched her family members haggle over a slab of bloody fish; a wizened Arab shopkeeper placed the raw fish meat barehanded on a scale.
“Won’t it smell on the bus on the way back?” I asked, lightheaded at the thought.
“We brought coolers and ice,” Angelica replied cheerily. Then less cheerfully she commented, “I guess I’ll be eating a lot of fish this week.”
Fish shopping completed, we returned to the bus for lunch. “Where are we eating, do you know?” I asked Angelica.
“Burger King,” she said. That, more so than the raw fish, make my stomach turn. Two weeks ago the international church I attend took a field trip to the nearby Burger King; over the next few days, about half the congregation became sick, myself included (see entry “All part of the experience”). At the time, I had assumed it was the Filipino or Sri Lankan meals I had been served; now I was more suspicious of fast food joints than any “ethnic” dish offered me. I told Angelica about my food poisoning at the Burger King in Amman.
“Well, this should be better than the one in Amman,” she affirmed.
The 46 orders had been placed in advance, but when we picked them up, intending to eat them on the bus, the confusion began. Angelica’s uncle opened one of the brown bags and held up the tiny sandwich, a greasy, junior sized bun, and began shouting. As an example, the single serving greasy brown bag was passed around, and the angry voices multiplied. Since they spoke in Sinhala, I only could guess at what was happening. After ten or fifteen minutes of arguing with the poor tour guide in broken Arabic, the Sri Lankans gathered up the food and returned the three large sacks containing 46 smaller sacks to the Burger King. “What happened?” I finally asked the Sri Lankan priest.
“My people have been cheated!” he exclaimed. “They got this small bun only for 3JD (about 5 dollars) – no fries, no drink!” I suppressed a laugh.
The Brazilian and I were unimpressed, having seen the Burger King menu in Amman. Fast food in other countries, Jordan included, is often expensive and indeed, a luxury, and I said this.
“Yes, she’s right,” the Brazilian joined in. “My friend and I ate at a McDonald’s in Amman and for the two of us to eat a burger and fries, it was 16 JD (about 25 dollars). It is too expensive,” he said.
The priest just blinked, bewildered at this revelation that reputedly cheap fast food was not cheap after all. Long story short, the Burger King honored the request to add fries and drinks – the smallest size, mind you – but reduced the meals by half. So half the group, enraged at being cheated, visited the Popeye’s restaurant next door and purchased what they considered a reasonable amount of food for a reasonable amount of money. The Brazilian and I exchanged, once again, a knowing look. Again, I thought back to the QIZ agent’s rant about Sri Lankan factory workers “taking their food for granted”. “They don’t know how much it costs us to have that food for them – good, clean food from the cafeteria,” he had said in defense of factory policy. “We can’t have fish every day like they want. That’s expensive!” And as the argument continued on the bus, I wondered who was right: the QIZ agent, the Sri Lankans, or no one. It certainly gave me some cross-cultural food for thought.
"Getting to know you"
From July 2nd and 3rd
The engine choked, spattered and gurgled, and then the bus lurched forward, lumbering out of the church parking area and through the narrow Jabal al-Weibdeh streets en route to Wadi Rum. Some of the 44 Sri Lankans seated behind me trilled their tongues in excitement and began clapping and improvisational drumming on water bottles and the backs of bus seats, including mine. The Brazilian priest-in-training seated across the aisle and I shared a knowing look. As the only other near-proficient English speaker on this trip, conversing with him would be like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke preserving my precious sanity threatening to burst.
If only all cross-cultural exchange were like that scene in Roger’s and Hammerstein’s The King and I where the English teacher Anna and her “Siamese” pupils sit in one big happy circle and delightfully sway back and forth to “Getting to Know You”; if only becoming a part of their circle was as simple as donning one of their hats. Instead, cramped in my tour bus seat, I was serenaded by traditional Sri Lankan tunes during a three hour sing-along of trilling, clapping, improvisational drumming and karaoke through the hapless Jordanian tour guide’s microphone passed incessantly from one performer to another. It was like a Bollywood musical gone bad, and more than once I found the high trilling female vocalists grating on my nerves. And the food! Every ten minutes some novel spicy cuisine was shoved in my face, with admonishment to “try this – it’s a little hot but very good”. Spiced chai (tea) with ginger and black pepper, spiced desserts – doughy balls of cooked rice, minimal sugar and generous amounts of black pepper – and Halls’ throat lozenges in between, perhaps to clean the palate? I wondered if the lozenges, too, were appreciated for their “hot” menthol qualities. I quickly tired of listening for the ten or so words in Sinhala that I know, and I soon found myself daydreaming out the window, seeking escape. I was appalled to realize that I might be experiencing a sort of culture shock; did I really think I was beyond that? Brushing that thought aside, I nervously hummed “Getting to Know You.”
It was an anticipated three-hour trip turned five-hour exodus to Wadi Rum, a popular desert locale known for its rosy and golden sands eroding from majestic rock formations which attracted the makers of Lawrence of Arabia and thousands of tourists each year – but this group was unique. These were Sri Lankan migrant workers and their families now turned tourists for the two-day trip for which they had saved their salaries and collected donations. Their transformation from workers to tourists was completed by their sunhats, sunglasses and snap-happy camera fingers. As their volunteer conversational English teacher on Fridays and Saturdays, I was invited along, but it was no vacation for me; every moment, every incident was an opportunity to observe. After we pulled in camp around
At
“Why did you do that?” asked one of my tent-mates, quite upset. I had to decide then whether to explain about the snoring woman and risk embarrassing her or to make some other excuse; I chose the former.
“What, you can’t sleep with a snoring person?” asked another women incredulously. I began to wonder whether my light-sleeping as we call it wasn’t culturally conditioned; does anyone in this [Sri Lankan] culture not sleep as soundly as a rock in the desert?
“No, I can’t sleep with noise like that.” I loudly imitated the snoring, which evoked some laughter from a group standing nearby. I looked around and realized everyone was studying me, some glaring, some whispering, some laughing.
“How could you sleep on the ground by yourself like that?” one of them asked. “Were you not afraid?”
“It seemed like the natural thing to do,” I said, realizing as I said it that it would never seem natural to the group no matter how I explained it. It was noisy, so I went to a quiet place where I had assumed anyone would think to look should they need to find me. When the Sri Lankans discovered my original bed empty, they concluded I had left the camp, for why would anyone voluntarily sleep alone on the ground in a strange place among strange people (Jordanians) who can't be trusted? The presumably empty tents were the last place they looked after a two-hour search. I couldn't believe they concluded that I had wandered off from a camp in the middle of the desert.
And that was only the beginning of the (mis)adventure.
The naming of things
From 25 June 2009
“You like the hubbly bubbly?” asks Anoud, pointing mischievously to the argeelah, the Arab water pipe. Her Saudi friend and former college roommate giggles and remarks on the name “hubbly bubbly”.
“Na’am, bahebb argeelah (Yes, I like the argeelah),” I reply.
“Oh, you call it argeelah, not hubbly bubbly?”
At this I’m getting a bit “huffy puffy”. Why do Arabs so enjoy this running gag about foreigners and the hubbly bubbly? “Yes, the Americans I know and I call it argeelah like everybody else.”
“Wallah (really),” says Anoud, a hint of disbelief in her exclamation.
“I don’t know who calls it hubbly bubbly” I begin, but remembering the British couple seated behind me at the film showing (see previous entry), I continue, “but I think the British call it hubbly bubbly.”
“Yeah, maybe because they occupy Jordan long time ago,” Anoud says, half-serious, half-joking.
“Occupiers, colonizers,” I affirm.
“Yes, colonizers.”
Take that nasally British woman.
We’re seated on a hillside in Salt, a hilly, rocky region dotted with olive trees and a flock of sheep meandering through an adjoining field, their shepherd slumped over a boulder and keeping a watchful eye on them. The waning sunlight of the hour before sunset frames their wooly outline in warm, golden hues, and the breeze stirs the tree branches of the tree shading our group; the air is dusty yet fresh. Katti is my language partner of sorts, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who approached me a few weeks ago at a café. “I need someone with whom to improve my conversational English,” she explained. I smirked; with her correct grammatical construction, clearly this was going to be an imbalanced language partnership. I couldn’t construct a sentence like that in Arabic if my life depended on it. But in the past couple weeks, while I haven’t, regrettably, learned Arabic, I’m pleased with how natural Katti’s conversational English is becoming – and that she’s my ticket to social occasions like rowdy graduation parties and picnics in the countryside outside Amman to see the sunset.
“Eyeyeyeyeyyeyah!” trills the proud mother of a recent university graduate, and she begins dancing proactively Arab style in the middle of the 40 or so guests on the patio. “Amrekiyyah!” she shouts pointing at me. “Taeli!” (You, American, come here!) I’m no dancer, and my awkward efforts at Arab dance evoke laughter – a lot of laughter. I felt my face redden, but I smiled it off. Smiling, acting eager to learn, and taking advantage of my youthful appearance and presumed inexperience have been effective research strategies, and the same goes for such social settings. And more and more I’m learning that being willing to embarrass oneself, to laugh it off, and to be patient and humble, are key for this kind of fieldwork.
“What do you call what you study?” asks one of the younger Jordanian women, impressing me with her studied, clear American accent, and tossing her long, amber hair with cosmopolitan flair.
“Sociocultural Anthropology.”
“What is that?”
“The way people live and make sense of their world.”
“Sounds fascinating,” she said turning back to the woman seated next to her.
Believe me, it is.
“You like the hubbly bubbly?” asks Anoud, pointing mischievously to the argeelah, the Arab water pipe. Her Saudi friend and former college roommate giggles and remarks on the name “hubbly bubbly”.
“Na’am, bahebb argeelah (Yes, I like the argeelah),” I reply.
“Oh, you call it argeelah, not hubbly bubbly?”
At this I’m getting a bit “huffy puffy”. Why do Arabs so enjoy this running gag about foreigners and the hubbly bubbly? “Yes, the Americans I know and I call it argeelah like everybody else.”
“Wallah (really),” says Anoud, a hint of disbelief in her exclamation.
“I don’t know who calls it hubbly bubbly” I begin, but remembering the British couple seated behind me at the film showing (see previous entry), I continue, “but I think the British call it hubbly bubbly.”
“Yeah, maybe because they occupy Jordan long time ago,” Anoud says, half-serious, half-joking.
“Occupiers, colonizers,” I affirm.
“Yes, colonizers.”
Take that nasally British woman.
We’re seated on a hillside in Salt, a hilly, rocky region dotted with olive trees and a flock of sheep meandering through an adjoining field, their shepherd slumped over a boulder and keeping a watchful eye on them. The waning sunlight of the hour before sunset frames their wooly outline in warm, golden hues, and the breeze stirs the tree branches of the tree shading our group; the air is dusty yet fresh. Katti is my language partner of sorts, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who approached me a few weeks ago at a café. “I need someone with whom to improve my conversational English,” she explained. I smirked; with her correct grammatical construction, clearly this was going to be an imbalanced language partnership. I couldn’t construct a sentence like that in Arabic if my life depended on it. But in the past couple weeks, while I haven’t, regrettably, learned Arabic, I’m pleased with how natural Katti’s conversational English is becoming – and that she’s my ticket to social occasions like rowdy graduation parties and picnics in the countryside outside Amman to see the sunset.
“Eyeyeyeyeyyeyah!” trills the proud mother of a recent university graduate, and she begins dancing proactively Arab style in the middle of the 40 or so guests on the patio. “Amrekiyyah!” she shouts pointing at me. “Taeli!” (You, American, come here!) I’m no dancer, and my awkward efforts at Arab dance evoke laughter – a lot of laughter. I felt my face redden, but I smiled it off. Smiling, acting eager to learn, and taking advantage of my youthful appearance and presumed inexperience have been effective research strategies, and the same goes for such social settings. And more and more I’m learning that being willing to embarrass oneself, to laugh it off, and to be patient and humble, are key for this kind of fieldwork.
“What do you call what you study?” asks one of the younger Jordanian women, impressing me with her studied, clear American accent, and tossing her long, amber hair with cosmopolitan flair.
“Sociocultural Anthropology.”
“What is that?”
“The way people live and make sense of their world.”
“Sounds fascinating,” she said turning back to the woman seated next to her.
Believe me, it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
