Abroad in Amman: Unbelievable.

It’s been a while, so this will be a long one. For the sake of maintaining the narrative flow, I’ll post the pics at the end.

I feel like the theme to this post will come across on the more self-aggrandizing side as far as my blog goes. Sure, most of my posts include pictures of some really interesting place I’ve been, or what I’ve experienced so all of my friends, family, and interested “others” can share a bit in what my life has been like living in the Middle East. I’ve steered the tone (or at least I’ve tried, I guess the reader can confirm or deny this for me) away form a sort of, “Oh my god! Look how fucking cool my abroad experience is! So much cooler than studying in Western Europe…” mentality. (Youtube the “gap yah” video for a great lambasting of over-romanticizing living abroad in “exotic” places.)

And yet, I feel like it’s important to remind myself of how completely ridiculous my experiences have been for the past two and a half months, and how they’re only going to get crazier in the next few weeks. I was always passively aware of the crazy things I would do or see, like, for instance, eating outside at a McDonald’s on University Street (which, surprisingly, runs by University of Jordan) while a huge parade of cars filled with pro-government demonstrators went by, honking their horns and waving massive Jordanian flags. – Assuming you haven’t been keeping up on Jordanian current events… the last few weeks have seen much less confrontational demonstration from reform groups, with large rallies occurring in support of the King or government. We’ll see what happens tonight. - But, I would only really come to appreciate how strange/weird/awesome and truly unbelievable things have been when I was forced to analyze them for an assignment, or someone engaged me in a conversation that was analytical enough to put me in that mind frame.

I came to fully appreciate the absurdity of what my life has been like when I was emailing one of my best friends from Bates. We haven’t really had an opportunity to talk at all since I’ve been over here, and I really value her opinions so when I had some things on my mind we shot a few emails back and forth. It was hard to give the right texture and nuance to how I was feeling when I was put on the spot during our one skype session, but when she asked in an email for me simply to “tell (her) about (my) life),” I sat down at a coffee shop, and spent an hour or two thinking over my answer to that and other things I wanted to tell her. In many ways it was even a post script to my response to one of my best friend’s questions a day or two before I left of “what are you looking to get out of (going to Jordan).” Here's what i said to her:

My life is literally, the word incarnate, unbelievable. It's unbelievable that within the first few days before I left Egypt and Tunisia had full blown revolutions, and now the sentiment is spreading and I'm living/researching in the middle of it. It's unbelievable that the night before I left I woke up multiple times in cold sweats, and that (at least until lately- something I'll get to later) now I sleep soundly, even through the 5 am call to prayer, and feel comfortable enough to walk down the street with my headphones on and my purple shades. I went to a wealthy oil sultanate in the Gulf that was like another world. I've lived for months in a Arab Monarchy that derives its legitimacy from a bloodline to the Prophet Muhammad. I see cars on the streets with Kuwaiti and Saudi plates, as well as Iraqi, and can safely say that car has probably driven on a street where a car bomb has gone off. I can read, albeit very slowly and not knowing WHAT I'm reading, in a different alphabet and right to left. I can carry on a conversation with a cab driver (I meet two new ones everyday) in arabic, when before I came I knew maybe 4 words. I came here because I knew it would be unbelievable, but if I lived it, it's real. I have to remind myself sometimes that it is both, and just how ridiculous it seems if you were thrown into this situation. I also chose to come here because I knew most people would think I'm crazy, because “the people here are crazy.” I wanted to prove them wrong... and almost everyone I've met has done just that. Not only is that "unbelievable" for some, it's invaluable to me. This was the best decision I've ever made.

I found myself having a similar dialogue with another student this afternoon when we were in Madaba. - I believe I have some pictures from a church with a huge mosaic floor in Madaba in an earlier post. A group of students went to Madaba for a night to celebrate our friend’s 21^st birthday. We rented a few hotel rooms, went out to dinner, and then had a good ol’ fashioned hotel party. – Anyway, I was expressing my newfound appreciation for how ridiculous our time here has been, as we, clearly dressed like western tourists, walked through the city to the bus station. I told her, “can you imagine if you just plucked up some random Americans and stuck them on this street (where if you looked around all the writing on signs is in Arabic, people stare and call out for you to come into their shops in Arabic)? They’d instantly shit their pants.” She laughed and thought it was a pretty good way of describing it.

This has been the first official week of Independent Study, and so far things are coming together incredibly well. For the sake of my laziness, I’ll paste some more of my email to express my feelings on the subject:

I officially start my Independent Study Project period tomorrow- I think I told you about my topic, but as a refresher... I'm researching Jordanian opposition groups calling for democratic reforms. There's been a lot of talk about the region "not being ready for democracy"... People are afraid that a democracy with an organized Islamist party which supports certain backwards positions will inherently be a threat to democracy and what we need is stability... not liberty. I want to talk to them, read their statements and platforms, and show how an alliance of organizations with drastically different positions is forged over a discourse of the need for democratic reform- a network that just so happens to fit very nicely into political theory on deliberative democracy in divided societies- a discourse that is a signal of democratic processes.

I'm so excited for this project, but I'm also very nervous. I don't know what type of data I'll get from them... but I'm confident that the situation and my hypothesis will work out. But I'm also worried because the (stakes) are very high… I need to make a very convincing argument, as my research is making a defense of democracy in the Middle East and North Africa for western eyes that are horribly critical and cynical. This is an unprecedented opportunity for me, and for the theory I'm working with. I don't want to blow it.

I had my first interview yesterday morning, with a poli-sci professor at the University of Jordan. He is the spokesman for a reform group that is a small network of several dozen like-minded individuals from varied walks of life. They include Lawyers, Academics, Doctors, Farmers, Sheiks and tribal leaders, etc. Their primary focus is anti-corruption and illegitimate government. They feel that to reach their goals, which, in their eyes, Jordan must undertake, certain democratic reforms are necessary. They are calling for a scrapping of the current constitution, and the creation of a constitution that isn’t “so antiquated.” They also call for, more realistically within the current dialogue between reform groups, the dissolution of parliament, and a complete restructuring of how elections are run in Jordan. The interview went very well, and I got especially useful information from our discussion of where the heart of democracy lies, in discourse and deliberation rooted deeply in the public sphere, or within the aggregation of individual preferences expressed through indirect representation and deliberation in institutionalized forms, as well as from questions about their cooperation with organizations across strong ideological differences. Again though, the fact that I was talking to this man, who is a spokesman for a group of fairly influential people, calling for such substantive change, and that I will be able to help him make the case for the legitimacy of democratic desires in Jordanian opposition groups, at this time, is unbelievable.

On Monday I will be going with another student to conduct an interview with the General Secretary of the Islamic Action Front (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.) Unbelievable.

The perspective of whether the region is “ready for democracy” and questioning the veracity of democratic values in the Arab and Muslim world has pervaded the thinking of my local newspaper as well. In an opinion piece in the Standard Times’(the primary newspaper for South Coast MA), the paper’s editorial board claimed that “Libya was not worth the fight,” that the reasoning behind supporting the Libyan revolution was no different from the use of American military force in Iraq, and that “unbridled democracy is too dangerous in a region that has never known it.” (Here’s a link to their piece: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110330%2FOPINION%2F103300304%2F-1%2FOPINION01 )

Given what I’m researching, and that I can provide a local opinion from the region in question, I crafted a response, which was published last Wednesday. Here’s a link to my response: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110413/OPINION/104130302

Now to move onto the reason why many of you may continue to read my blog: the travel stories!

Last week from Saturday till Wednesday we took a trip through a number of sites within the southern part of Jordan. With the weather improving exponentially, and the places we were heading to see including: The Dana Nature Reserve, Petra (a new 7 wonder of the world), Wadi Rum and Aqaba, it promised to be a phenomenal last break before ISP period kicked in fully.

Our first stop was an old crusader castle in Karak. The castle was huge and offered an incredible view of the surrounding area. It’s hard to believe that people lived and fought within the walls we were scrambling over. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a besieged crusader fighting off an attacking army. Pretty intense.

After that we went to the nature reserve. It had an incredible view, and we went for a short guided hike to a natural spring where the water was drinkable. A couple days later we had a discussion for class about Environmental issues. It seems Jordan has come to understand pretty quickly that conservation and the impact of environmental degradation on human population (typically the most vulnerable) are two sides of the same coin: environmental justice if you will. Their efforts to involve communities within efforts are only a decade or two removed from the initial calls for conservation. It took closer to half a century in America.

Our second day was what many of my friends and peers back home were most excited to hear about: Petra. It is absolutely incredible. Huge structures carved into the sides of massive cliffs of beautiful, beautiful stone. We hiked for a while along a route that was less commonly taken by tour groups. I happened to be wearing a Bates t-shirt, and as I was beat boxing while descending into a valley, a man ahead of us looked up and called out “do you actually go to Bates?” After I told him yes, he said he graduated in ’97, and him and his girlfriend (though if our friend Ian was as successful as he hopes when we ran into them in our hotel bar, they might be married soon) were there for his job, and they were traveling in Jordan checking out some sites. We talked about the campus, recent happenings at Bates in regards to town-gown and so on. Small world. Or “jabal ealla jabal ma tuqaabl (or something like that) bas alnaas ealla alnaas tuqaabl,” as I recently learned from a cabbie who happened to not only know the SIT staff, but regularly runs errands for them. In English the phrase is literally: “mountains won’t meet mountains, but people will meet people.”

Petra was an amazing experience, but it will unfortunately always be tarnished. While we were there one of my friends on the program was sexually assaulted. Talking with a mutual friend a few days afterwards, we both agreed that though it would be horrible for it to happen to anyone, for it to happen to this girl was just tragic. Seeing her have to deal with it broke my heart, and for something like that to happen to someone I care about made me want to scream (see previous post). It made me think of a great quote by Audre Lorde: “the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” Thankfully she wasn’t physically harmed. She came forward, she described what happened to the police, she put the guy in jail –he won’t be hurting anyone for a long time- she wasn’t silent… she even blogged about it. (I know, unbelievable, right?) If you wanna read her thoughts on this and many a topic, she’s one of the blogs I follow, “Amman Amusings.”

The next day we went to a special needs center, where for some reason I wasn’t particularly engaged in the tour, but it was very interesting to see how Jordan deals with certain disabilities. “Patients,” there, if that’s what I should call them, work on handicrafts projects to sell. A number of these co-op style societies seem to exist in Jordan (like the one we went to in Salt).

After Petra it was off to Wadi Rum, an incredible swath of desert and valley with incredibly soft rose-colored sand. We stayed at a desert camp with tents set in between some small cliffs. The camp had two puppies, which everyone enjoyed playing with (despite the health and safety warnings from our SIT pre-departure info!), and a third one, a stray arrived just about when we did. I was talking to one of the workers after dinner and he said they would keep it and care for it because it came with us, and was already settling in.

We took a “jeep tour,” of Wadi Rum, which was actually riding in a pickup with benches in the bed. It was RAINING when we first started our trek. It was so much fun, and I think the drivers were having as much fun, if not more, than us at some points, driving quickly through the desert, over dunes and racing each other. We went to watch a sunset, which turned out quite beautiful in my pictures, but was less stellar at the time because of the high winds and cold.

Then we headed for Aqaba! Aqaba was, without a doubt, one of my favorite days of my life. We went out on a chartered party boat into the Gulf of Aqaba, where one can clearly see Eilat (Israel), Egypt, Aqaba, and beyond a mountain, Saudi Arabia. We stopped over a coral reef and took turns jumping off the top deck of the boat, and then went snorkeling. We had a barbeque lunch out on the water, cruised around for a bit and then headed back to the port. That evening we “socialized” for a while at the hotel, and then headed out to a karaoke bar, where the main clientele were Filipino domestic workers. I think watching us perform was the most fun they’ve probably had there.

The next day we rolled back to Amman, and the gear up for ISP began. I felt great walking out of SIT as Abdoun (the neighborhood where the school is) began to take on that late afternoon glow that I love so much. I walked in rhythm in front of the British embassy, my shades on, my headphones bumpin’ some Spoon as I strolled by two women in Niqab (the full face veil) out for an afternoon stroll. I felt surprisingly at home. Unbelievable.

Walking into Karak Castle

Walking through the village at Dana.

Petra- here's where you can make the Indiana Jones joke...

Dave at the High Place of Sacrifice. Apparently he really likes sacrifice... and being high.

Oh man. Too funny. I thought it was a generic stock photo. But apparently that dude was sitting just out of frame. Hope he didn't take too much offense.