Hi Everyone,
I've been in Jordan for less than a week, and I already feel like I have enough stories to tell for a short novel. This post will be long, but I promise the stories are good. They involve a car crash, scandalous Muslim women, and an arrest. Yes, I'm safe.
First off, members of the tribe, happy new year.
Second, I have met my host family, and they are wonderful. I am living with my parents (Mama and Baba), my 20 year old sister, Fatoum, (with whom I share a room), and two younger brothers, Ahmed and Rashid. They speak a bit of English, and I speak zero Arabic, so I have spent a lot of time silently, with no idea what is going on. It's OK though. I start learning Arabic tomorrow. In the mean time, though, I'm smiling and nodding, well aware that everyone is laughing at me perpetually. It's all good.
Yesterday was crazy. My host family and I had a picnic dinner at a park near the house (called Sports City), and afterwards I took a walk with my sister. At one point, she pulled me behind some bushes in a secluded area, and her friend Mahmud joined us. She shook his hand, which surprised me, because Muslim women don't normally make any sort of physical contact with men that aren't directly related to them (father, brother, son, husband). He asked if we wanted to go with him to drink coffee, and she said she could not, because her mother would kill her for being out with a boy. Ultimately, he and I convinced her that it would be OK--it was just coffee.
We went to the top floor of a nearby shopping center and ordered drinks. It turns out that Mahmud is a dentist from Bagdad who is traveling through Jordan before going to Egypt to finish school. His english was perfect because he had grown up learning the sciences completely in English. I was relieved, and happy to be able to communicate. He told me that even after the war, Iraqi people have no problems with Americans, but rather, only with our government. He also said that normal Iraqis hate al Quaeda and the other Terrorists as much as we do, because they give the good Arab people a bad name.
As I watched my host sister and him interact, I noticed that they made much more eye contact than we do in the west. I think partially, this is because she wears a hijab (head scarf). Pretty much everything but her face is covered, so he looked directly into her eyes. It was very cute. They were flirty and giddy, and he kept whispering things into her ear, making her smile. By the time we left, my sister and he were holding hands walking down the street, and she had sworn me to secrecy. Oops...
We left the mall to walk back to the park to meet her family, and within a minute, we watched two cars barrel into each other on the street. Mahmoud, and every other Arab man in the vicinity ran to the two cars and tried to break up the fistfight that had started between the drivers. I was fascinated, but my sister wanted to go. Mahmoud came back, and we walked away. I wasn't sure how to react to the fact that they were holding hands, because I know that in Muslim culture, that intimacy suggests that they are very much together. I didn't want to get in their way, so I just walked behind them, letting them chatter.
When we got back to the park, she and Mahmoud hugged goodbye. It doesn't sound like a big deal to us from the west, but this much contact suggests a lot. As he walked away, she was quite distressed. Unfortunately for her, she didn't have much time to cope with these emotions, because we had to meet up with her family.
After about a half hour of sitting with her family, pretending as if she and I had gotten coffee alone, we saw sirens blaring in the parking lot. We brought down our chairs and watched as a man climbed up a stadium light (he wound up about 200 feet off the ground). Firemen tried to go up, and as they came up to rescue him, he climbed up higher and higher. Eventually, after a half hour or so, he came down and was arrested in front of the 200 person crowd that had gathered at the scene. My family then piled into the car, drove home, and went to bed.
This was all last night, on my first full day with my family. I don't really know how it could get much more exciting from here, but to say the least, I will learn a lot this semester. Classes start tomorrow, and I am now at the program building with some of my american friends pretending to do schoolwork, relieved to be speaking English.
I will post more about cultural things later, but this story was too good not to share when it was still fresh.
Til Next Time,
B
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