"You are Seeta. We give you the famous Bedu name."

12 October 2008 (with excerpts from 27 September 2008):

“You are Seeta. We give you the famous Bedu name.”

Al-Badia: the northern semi-desert land of the Bedu, the traditionally nomadic pastoralists of Jordan. In the early days of Transjordan, the Bedu filled the ranks of the Desert or “Arab” Army as T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) dubbed it, and to this day, Bedu dominate the armed forces. Attempts to settle them within the emerging nation-state have been long and largely avoided, as most Bedu, even those with substantial homes, continue to pitch their tents beside the house and occasionally move them with the sheep and seasons. No land is private land; even in Amman livestock occasionally graze on the hillside next to my apartment complex. Theirs was a beautiful, windswept plain dotted with rocks, shrubs, livestock, and tents – literally “houses of hair” in Arabic; beyond a horizon extended far and blue toward Syria in the north and Iraq in the northeast. Romanticizing about the freedom and nobility of the nomadic life, with its open spaces and fresh air away from Amman, was inevitable; reconciling this beauty with the despair of poverty and the lack of development in the region proved far more difficult, especially when compounded with my sickness and harassment (subjects on which I will not elaborate here).

The following excerpt is from my field notes. In the Badia I lived for three days in a village called Naefa in a fairly "modern" home with a family of five - a husband and wife with three boys ages 2 to 6 - but even in their seemingly modernized life I saw much of the traditional Badia I was I told to expect. I have so much I could share with you, but something about these observations concerning the conservation of resources and the maintenance of the household are a good summary of the sort of activities to which I (as a woman) was confined the first two days:

“…'My wife, she clean the house today,’ began my Badia home-stay father. I was taken aback that he spoke English; he broke my awkward silence: ‘You help.’ Thus, I quite literally stepped off the bus in Naefa and onto the inch-thick coating of soapy water in Umm Hashem’s house, looking back at Rob [another SIT student placed in a home-stay in the same village] who was standing hesitantly on the landing. I looked back at him with a mixture of amusement and despair. Was this going to be my Badia experience – sick and scrubbing floors…?
Now that I reflect, I see that I had the opportunity today not only to observe the maintenance of home and family, but also to participate as a fellow cleaner. I have never seen water so deftly used…when I’ve observed my Amman home being cleaned, the work is done, about ninety percent of the time, by the family maid who uses primarily a damp wipe to quickly swipe surfaces with some mixture of cleaning products in original containers. The furniture is rarely moved...here Umm Hashem entirely unassembled the floor furniture (cushions and pillows) and systematically moved from room to room…using a recycled bucket, Umm Hashem splashed water with a flick of her wrist into the corners of the room, filling the windowsills, and splashing the doors – all with a certain precision, directing the water from one end of the room with a floor sponge, moving it into the hallway and into the next room to be cleaned.
I stood in the soapy water, the hem of my abaya soaked, struggling to follow Umm Hashem’s rapid, guttural Arabic. Is this even Arabic? When Umm Hashem pointed to my abaya, saying “helua, bas…”, I scampered into the bedroom and changed into pants and shirt…Umm Hashem placed the floor tool in my hand and gestured to the hallway. As I fumbled with the cleaning, I realized I’d had this misconception that the traditional abaya was worn at all times in a society too simple to have different clothes for cleaning, that all the women probably wore the abaya and hijab at all times. But in the freedom of her home, Umm Hashem wore rolled up sweat pants, a t-shirt and no scarf. She approved of me doing the same, and I felt somewhat scandalous without my abaya and hijab…
As I waded through the soapy mess, wearing Abu Hashem’s cumbersome house slippers, Umm Hashem directed me to a back patio…the uneven tile on the back patio allowed water to collect, making “sweeping” water off difficult. Thinking the cleanliness of this back patio to be insignificant, I gave it a few broad strokes and returned to Umm Hashem. She peered out the window in the back door, laughing and shaking her head. “Moush qweyes (not good) ?” I asked.
“La, kul mayyeh (no, all the water),” she said, returning to her work inside. So I “swept” it again, only to have her come behind me with her rapid, precise strokes, leaving me wondering why anyone would be so concerned about the cleanliness of a back patio. (As I later observed, it was the main reception area for evening iftar or coffee guests, and the indoor cushions were placed directly on this surface, as was the food. In the Badia, as is the tradition, Bedu eat on a mat or blanket on the floor from communal dishes without utensils.) All the while Umm Hashem deftly fielded her three rowdy boys aged 2 to 6 as they interrupted her work with requests and complaints; I watched her with a mixture of appreciation for the versatility of space and conversation of resources and of sadness for the way her days seemed dominated by domestic duties leaving her hands rough, especially after observing how she more or less collapsed onto a cushion after our several hours of cleaning and cooking [she later asked me if I had any lotion and sorted through my toiletries with great interest]...I was feeling feverish and dropped onto a nearby cushion.”

It wasn’t until after my sickness improved on the third day that I, in my abaya and hijab, boldly stepped out from our small doorway alone into the blinding, open space before me in a scene befitting John Ford a la Stagecoach (only in this case the cowboys were Bedu and the horses were camels, which much to my disappointment were not common in Naefa.) That was when the adventure, for better or worse, really began.

One day is honey, one day is onion."

6 September 2008
“One day is honey, one day is onion.”

I’ll forgo the awful details; it was the fast fast. While determining to join my family in fasting for the month of Ramadan endeared me to them, and while it was a meaningful experience for me, it was, alas, short-lived. Better the fast short-lived than myself. The Qur’an mandates that the sick (or those who become sick during the fast) cannot continue the fast, and when my family discovered me sprawled on my bed after a miserable night of sickness, they decided I was dehydrated (considering the general indifference regarding food preparation/storage/expiration combined with the arid 115 degrees of the other day, this was no surprise; we SIT students often comment on how much we sweat in this un-air-conditioned place: just sitting in class, lying in bed – even in the shower. The temperature in my room has hovered around 90 the last few days). Each family member rebuked me in turn for feeling sick and trying to fast, Khatm last of all, patting my hand tenderly and saying “Ya, habibi (oh my dear)”.
The Arabs have a proverb which says “one day is honey, one day is onion”. Having gotten past the onion, I spent some of the weekend recovering – doing some much needed laundry and spending time with my family, the highlight of which was teaching my host mother’s four grandchildren how to play checkers. Watching them learn and in turn teach each other was fascinating, as they are bilingual in Arabic and English and frequently code-switch (they’re unaware sometimes of which language they are speaking to me and seemingly to each other). The day was hot, the sunlight seeping in through the heavily curtained window of my bedroom warm and golden, slow and thick like honey. Ismein had spread her homework papers on my rug and was absorbed in them. Aiman, her younger brother and taekwondo fiend, marched in donning his usual camouflage pants, and demanded to know what Ismein’s younger sister and I were doing. Ismein, intrigued and now merely pretending to be studying, kept stealing glances at the checkers game as three year old Yusuf flung himself on my bed to watch. Soon all four kids were entranced by this new game; they played it for three hours until iftar (the evening fatoor when we break the fast). “I like this game,” Ismein said to me. “I forgot how hungry I was.”
*****

The Temple of Artemis, the Roman ruins, Jerash, Jordan (north of Amman): Craning my neck, I’m squinting, staggering into a fathomless blue and a sun so intensely bright I can’t locate its position in the sky. It’s somewhere behind one of the columns soaring fifteen meters above me and bowing outward like my wobbly legs. As I teeter on the top of the temple steps in the 100+ degree heat, I don’t feel hot or thirsty so much as fragile and trembling like a dry leaf. From this high place I survey the ruins of an Roman city, circa first century. In its heyday, this marvelously unearthed complex of temples and residences housed 15,000 people – until 749 when an earthquake leveled the pagan Decapolis. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”