Marhaba ! Welcome to my blog !
I am setting this up from the hotel in Amman, so the connection is flimsy at best and I’m a day behind. I will try to update you on the past two days. I hope you keep up to date with me and my journeys, and I will try to blog about as many consecutive days as possible. I will also try to keep it light, but the days, I feel, will be such dense learning opportunities, I'd like you to learn along with me.
Yesterday (what??) I landed in Amman. I slept the entire flight. Woke up with one hour of journey left. I look up at the television, and instead of showing the plane veering towards New York, or towards Paris, the cities I was approaching were Damascus, Tel Aviv, Baghdad. The landing is the most awesome Biblical scene. The mountains are dirt and sand which form snake shapes for miles and miles. The sky is a never ending blue, melting into the dust. I’ve never seen such a landscape. Three..two..I saw my first mosque in the area with a beautiful blue roof..one.. we land. LAND. The woman behind me starts to pray, AlHamdulillah! Praise be to Allah! The boy next to me vomits. I want to pray and vomit too. I am in the Middle East.
The airport has windows in the shape of a chapel. Every possible porter is in my face. Bags? Teeps, teeps! No teeps? I’m running out of teeps money…
The drive over to hotel, there arevsigns “Saudi border --> , “Iraqi border -->". I’ve now met five other students from New York. They will keep me sane. The night we use to get to know one another, to have Iftar, breaking the fast of Ramadan, and to begin our nausea of hummus. I’ve now had hummus for every…single…meal, including breakfast. They say we gain weight here? Please… At night a group of us explored the city a bit. We found a hookah bar, obviously, and paid the 2.75 dinar (stunning) for the “Hubbly Bubbly” as they call it here.
The next morning, I am awake at 4:45am. I’m not angry, I’m not anxious, I’m smiling and fifteen minutes later, I hear the trance-like sounds of the call to prayer. He repeats the call three times, and I am awake until it is time to get up at 6:30am registering my coordinates. After hummus, that is, breakfast, we drive through Amman and the bordering cities for an hour and a half. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan houses approximately 6 million people (one million of which are “guests” (which means they well eventually leave, hopefully)- Iraqi, or “refugees” (which means they probably won't)– Palestinians.)
3 million of these people reside in Amman proper. Half the country resides in Amman… We drive through the smaller cities, noticing the goat herders, the radish cultivators, the closed shops for the holiday, until straight ahead, an enormous body of water appears out of nowhere. The landscape is rocky cliffs with indentations so profound and rigid and peaks so rounded and tall that it gives the impression of being on a ski cliff that God poured sand upon.
We drive down to the lowest point on Earth. The Dead Sea. 400meters below sea level. Across us is a mass of land, we can see the minarets. The minarets are my favorite part of Jordan. They are erected above every building on the cliffs, above every cliff top. They are beautiful. These minarets are not on Jordan’s territory however, those are Palestinian minarets. We are looking at Israel. If we wanted to, we could float out to Israel.
We are currently at the Dead Sea Spa Hotel- luxury. We are using their access to the beach, and, more importantly, the mud. A couple of us pay one dinar to be covered in the magic mud. We bake in the Jordanian sun overlooking the Palestinian territorties that Jordan is proud to support. I find this ironic. Regardless, we are told by locals that the healing powers of the Dead Sea mud are found only on the floor of this quickly disappearing body of water. By 2050, if patterns do not change, it may be gone.
Jordan’s water problem is no joke. We do not flush toilet paper (often times, we simply use the female bidet), we do not shower daily, we do not do loads of wash the same way...i.e. in the sink. We are rationed water. The water which naturally flows into the Dead Sea is dammed so as to cultivate every last pivotal drop for the thirsty population. The U.S. population growth is somewhere around .88, which over time, means a decrease. In Jordan, this is a 2.2% increase in population. Imagine if a population of 303,000,000 had to accommodate such a growth.
Anyways, we learned many lessons about the demographics and delicate balance of life here in the Middle East. There are many minor but significant nuances to learn about interacting with people, ways to treat people and the modes of thought. The western logical thought pattern does not apply. Using “logic” as we know, does nothing, using personal contact, personal connections, asking about the family, the children, building bridges, this is how you get ahead here. This is a topic I would love to elaborate upon but I’m not certain how much you can read before you sign off in serious misery at the length of this post.
Tomorrow we find out more about housing, classes, life. We are visiting the University as well as the Embassy for a security briefing. This should please my father.
Inshallah, I will post more tomorrow, and my arabic will improve so I can use more than my ten words I repeat non-stop. Hopefully, I will come to show you how the "marginality" in my title does not apply to one select group. Instead, I will try to show how being marginalized, ostracized or even lauded for being a foreigner occurs and how to cope. Maybe I will never learn the coping strategies myself and maybe that is okay, but I'm certainly loving the challenge.
The mountains of Madaba and a few reference points.
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These are some of the views of what Jordan looks like an hour outside Amman in Madaba on the way to the Dead Sea. 
