"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 1am, we ate a traditional Arab dinner, had a dance-off competition of sorts, and trudged to bed around 3am to fall asleep – everyone it seemed but myself. Soon I was punching my pillow in frustration for being stuck in a tent with a comically loud snoring woman. Rather than disturbing her and risking some sort of miscommunication, I decided to seek an empty tent at 5am, and finding one, fell fast asleep thinking I could sleep a few hours – surely no one would be doing anything before 8am. I was wrong.

At 7:30am the flap to my tent flew open and half a dozen dark faces peered in, silhouetted by the early morning light. Alarmed, I grabbed my mobile phone and leapt up, pulling the sheet with me (it was hot in the tent so I had shed my outer layer of clothes). But their voices sounded distant, for I had left my earphones wedged deep in my ear canals even though they were insufficient to block the lion-like snores. Jerking them out, I heard cries of, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you since 5:30! You gave us all a heart attack! We thought you left the camp! We’re leaving now, so you can go back to sleep.” They ducked out as quickly as they intruded. Right. Adrenaline pumping and heart pounding there was no way I was going back to sleep. I ran with the sheet wrapped around me for modesty to my original tent, and I dressed frantically. I reemerged, bag packed, to find myself practically alone in the camp. “We’re leaving,” they had said, but they should have added “to go on a tour of the desert”. Having dressed and realized they hadn’t left the camp for good, only for a tour, I stood at the edge of the camp, waiting for my heartrate to slow, feeling like an idiot. When they returned an hour later, my shame grew.

“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.