So it’s high time I talk about the place of been living for the past month-ish. I live with the lovely Samira Abu-somethingorother. The name doesn’t make sense to me, because she’s not an abu (father) she’s an umm, a mother, but anyways. She is a widowed Christian woman in her late 60s, who came to Jordan from Lebanon at some point and married her now-deceased husband from Kerak, a city near Amman. She raised her 5 kids in a house in Kerak; 4 are married now, one of her sons and one of her daughters live in Amman with their families, 2 daughters are married living in the UAE and Australia, and the other son is unmarried and lives with her in the apartment in West Amman I currently live in with my program roommate Rory (she moved from Kerak sometime after her kids grew up, but whether this was before her husband died is unclear)
Most of this information I’ve inferred or picked up from her conversations. This is because her Arabic is the most dialect-y Arabic I’ve run across, and when I don’t understand something, she has a tendency to repeat it again with different words, but faster. Having Madhat, her unmarried son around, was helpful, but their unoccupied house in Kerak was recently robbed (common for unoccupied houses) and he jumped on the opportunity to get out of the house. Besides his interpreting help, the dynamic between a grandmother and her 30 year old live-at-home son were endlessly amusing and are missed.
She is endlessly nice, and after living here for a bit and making the lifestyle adjustments, everything is great. This is not to say it wasn’t a rocky start. The first time I was chided with “ya haram” (essentially for shame) for not finishing my ungodly proportion of dinner, I felt super cruddy. Rory and I soon realized the importance of being firm in saying while we love her food, we really don’t want any more, as to avoid the haram of throwing food away. A ten minute conversation about locking the door when she went out the first weekend, in which I understood less than I started the discussion with, left me pretty feeling pretty defeated, but these things have been picking up.
She is endlessly nice, however, and I will never forget when she called the pick-up taxi service for Rory and me so that we could get to the American bar/restaurant where the Superbowl (which started at 2 am) was shown. After dinner, Rory and I are always brought Turkish coffee and a parade of fruits and sweets, most of which I save for the next day, while we study. Needless to say, when I can help her out by going to the local grocery store to buy her an international calling card, or pick up bread, I get a very special host-son-fulfilling-his-duty feeling.
From what I can tell, she spends most of her day cleaning, calling her daughters abroad, receiving guests, and of course, watching TV. TV watching is an important Jordanian custom, and the TV is on, even without being watched, from approximately 7:30 when she gets up, till she retires at 11 or 12. Her favorite programs are Turkish soap operas dubbed by Syrian voice actors, infamous for their ubiquity through the Middle East, and Arab Idol. Personally, I am really hoping Yousef Arafat (the Jordanian) wins, because the Saudi guy is really smug looking.
Despite the drawbacks of a curfew and sometimes limited menu, I really think the advantages of being invited to Jordanian family events and constantly practicing my dialect are well worth it. Although the birthday party for her 15 year old granddaughter attended mostly by, you guessed it, overdressed 15 year old Arab girls—with whom I was forced to “dance” once or twice”—w as awkward (a word that does not exist in Arabic, despite all the times Arab culture manifests the phenomenon), her married son Ala, who always eats himself till he hurts and chain smokes Marlboro 100’s, is always a good time.
The neighbors in the apartment building, too, are really wonderful. Saif, pictured with me below, is my neighbors youngest son, and he is by far the cutest and most well behaved child in the country. While Ala’s 5 year old is a brat who never stops yelling, the annoyance of which is compounded by the fact that it lisps due to missing front teeth), and his 2 year old is goes immediately from picking up a phone and dialing a number, to pressing every button on the tv, to pulling on the table cloth which has many breakable glass things on it, Saif is an angel. He is quiet, but not shy, we have fun drawing dinosaurs together, and I can actually understand a chunk of his Arabic. However, he seems to be the exception, and I think it is because Jordanian parents, from the collective observations of home-stay kids a) feed their children a lot of sugar and b)are always picking them up, tossing them around, and generally not doing anything to discourage their hyper-rambunctiousness.
While Saif’s older siblings, around 10 and 12, are also great, their English is a constant point of content for me: they just know so much of it. Their knowledge of English either acts as a source of motivation of frustration to me daily. When I go to the UJ library and see students there reading Engllish textbooks on surgery and organic chemistry, it turns mostly to frustration. Sometimes this is with myself, and sometimes it is with the fact that the U.S. public education system didn’t deem it necessary to give me a competitive edge by teaching me a foreign language from a young age. While it is true that some American students spend their time developing cutting edge technology in specialized fields, time that Jordanians spend learning the English so they can work better in this field, it is certainly true that most American students (including me) don’t, and we really should, as a country, be learning more foreign languages in order to be competitive, and to have the world like us more.
I communicated a related thought earlier tonight to my cab driver (in Arabic, yay!) that part of American’s ignorance of the world stems from the fact that there are enough oppurtunites for work in America that we are not forced to live in other countries, learn other languages, and meet foreign people, in order to have a job. When cab drivers inevitably ask where I’m from, and I say “Amreeka,” they either tell me of their experience working in a foreign country, or a list of relatives and where they live in America, or both. And while this may not make them cosmopolitan cultural scholars, it does give a rudimentary knowledge of at least one foreign language and culture, more than an unfortunately large percentage of the American public.
Next post, I will rant less about American education and talk more about public transportation in Amman and comparative cultures of nationalism.
