St. Paul’s Cathedral, a shining beacon into the night.

To move almost directly from a nation of sand to a nation of water was shocking.  I used to watch the dust storms rolling in, across Amman, from the desert to the East, blocking out the sun in waves of red grit and dirt and sand.  If I were Seurat, I would have used blobs of brown, of yellow, and of white to paint the Middle Eastern cityscape.  Here, it is as if that photograph is polarized and reversed.  Shades of green and gray dominate the pallete, along with pouting, pregnant blues and flashes of bright red- those double-decker busses zigzagging across the Thames.  There, sand was an active factor impacting your life; you cursed and accepted the grit in your clothes, in your hair, and the sun’s heat as much as Brits accept yet grumble at the seemingly constant drizzle that dribbles from the sky.  There you saw the ladies protected by their bejeweled hijabs.  Here, women nestle safely under black umbrellas and into no nonsense boots with marching orders.

His shtick is to show up in different parts of London, don his top hat, and blow fire out of his tuba to a recorded tune from Carmen. Hey, everyone’s gotta make a living.

This is London.

He meandered down Fleet Street wearing a smoking jacket with patches on the elbows, brown corduroy pants, fancy narrow leather shoes an old fashioned newsboy cap over his snow white hair, complete with long sideburns.  He carried a wooden cane and smoked a fat brown pipe, clearly visible against his neatly trimmed gray beard.  The tobacco exhaust curled serenely towards the sky as he walked, leaving a trail of pleasant smelling haze in his wake.  He was more British looking than any modern Brit had any right to look.  A barrister’s wig peaked out of his leather briefcase.

Bertran works at the local Tesco Metro near to my flat in Southwark.  He is from Cote d’Ivoire, is built like a football linebacker, and has a constant smile.  He has lived in London for ten years now.  The first time I went into the Tesco and stood, hand on hip, looking at the vegetables, he offered recipe options for kale in his low sonorous voice.  He now waves to me when I pass by the store, and we catch each other’s eyes.

A musician playing sax at Portobello Road Market. He was pretty good actually.

“Do you want this umbrella?” I was asked by a pleasant looking middle aged man with a thick British accent. He looked up at the light rain coming down and proffered a large black umbrella with a wooden knob handle.  I was sans umbrella, but was wearing a hat, so all in all, I thought I looked less bedraggled and pathetic than the average girl caught in the rain unprepared.

“Don’t you want it, sir?” He wasn’t holding up another umbrella, and his hair was plastered in strings across his pate.

“I don’t need it.  I have loads at home.  This lady just came up to me a few minutes ago and said, ‘I no need!  Go to home China!” and before I could protest, she thrust the umbrella my hands.  It is a very nice umbrella.  It’s made of wood.”  His voice had gone plaintive; he once more pushed the umbrella towards me.  I accepted it, thanked him, and used it for the rest of my walk.  It now sits in my room at home.  Someday soon, I plan on finding someone desperate looking in the rain and passing it along, perhaps with “Chinese Lady.  British man.  Luca, American.  Pass it on and add your name and nationality!” written on the handle in black permanent marker.

Tower Bridge by night. I live near here. Here!

Kay, originally from Malaysia, lives in Shoreditch, and is an avid swing dancer.  She is enrolled in a cupcake making school and wants to make cakes for a living.  She is passionate about frosting and Manchester United.

When I moved to London in September, I was told by a British friend that I only had to remember one piece of advice to assimilate nicely into British culture: ‘Drink more, worry less.’  Her advice has proven apt, if sometimes hard to follow.  In Amman, I was told to ‘Smoke more, worry less.’  I suppose it’s nice to know, that despite being oceans and color palettes apart, some things are universal.

This is London.

This is London, for the careful, wandering American, reaching for a gestalt world.

Printed on a wooden door, next to the south side of the Thames.

FROM A PALESTINIAN IN AMMAN, JORDAN: “Jews are just concerned with money.  Their hearts are black colored, and one day, they will all be killed.”

FROM AN ORTHODOX ISRAELI IN JERUSALEM, ISRAEL: “How could you live in Jordan?  Arabs are animals.  Brutal, unthinking animals.  They would kill you if they knew you were Jewish.”

Now, I am not saying that all Palestinians and all Israelis think this way.  But wouldn’t it be lovely if I couldn’t find another man like these two in the Middle East?  Thus, a picture blog from the past four months.  All the following photos are of Arab or Israeli children.  Notice how the Jewish children are not counting their Jew-gold, they don’t have horns.  Notice how the Arab children aren’t strapped to bombs, or running around on all fours like animals.   In fact, besides the presence or absence of kippas, notice how the children are pretty much alike: playing, watching, smiling, eating.

I am not going to tell you where these photos were taken, or whether the child is Jewish or Muslim.

Because it doesn’t matter.

Please spread messages of tolerance, not intolerance in your daily lives.  Let’s not perpetrate damaging stereotypes ourselves.  We have power, in our writing, in our words, in our votes, in ability to condemn or laud.  Please use that power wisely.  Thank you.

In front of the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem.

This is least ambivalent I have ever been to leave a foreign country I lived in.  I am ready to leave Jordan tout suite, yalla bye. My customary lack of ambivalence is sad, in a way. After a few months of living in a place, I usually can see myself staying there longer, living, loving, working, being.  Cape Town and London both impressed me as cities in which I could be happy, not for my entire life, but for a couple of years, sure.  I don’t feel the same way about Jordan.  I wanted to.  I loved this country through my research with its academic uniqueness as the confluence point of Western and Arab forces, and I think I would have gladly married King Hussein for his charisma, despite the 70 year age difference.  I wanted to love Jordan in its actuality: I expected to, really.  But I didn’t.

Maybe it is the gender issue.  Maybe, if I were a man, living here would be the right balance between thrillingly different and safe, but as a woman, it’s been hard.  Women aren’t just allowed to live in peace here, do their own thing.

This mosaic is of Putin and Medvedev, commissioned by the Russian Embassy in Amman. Stranger than a velvet Elvis, saah?

Maybe it is the language barrier.  In Cape Town and London, English is predominantly spoken.  Here, the educated folks know English, but choose, understandably, to communicate still in Arabic, with English words thrown in when appropriate; words like “public relations” and “email.”  I have spent many nights with my roommates in the back courtyard, sitting in a circle with their friends, trying to pick out individual words here and there.  I would see the others suddenly guffaw in amusement, and I would smile thinly, always left out of the joke.

Maybe it’s the whole Jewish thing.  Knowing that if I was truly honest about who I am and one of my secret selves, that I’d be running a real risk.  How can you trust someone fully when you are afraid they might turn on you?  And without trusting others, what’s the point of friendship?  Connection is superficial at best.

So, that’s what it comes down to then, ultimately.  A lack of trust.  The reason that I am glad to leave Amman stems from the fact that it is hard for me to trust people here, whether it be men on street, people speaking a language I do not know around me, or their ability to handle my religious background.  I cannot fully assimilate here, just live, if I cannot have a baseline level of trust of those in the society around me.

This shirt amuses me.

I am glad I came to Jordan, don’t get me wrong.  I have learned a lot, both subtle lessons and overt, about Arab and Muslim cultures, touristic visits to natural wonders and more cosmopolitan journeys to local shisha cafes.  I have done some good work for a worthy NGO, improving their PR systems, and conducting research on water use in agriculture in Jordan.  I have improved my Arabic from a basic grip of FusHa to something I can use in everyday life, get around with.  I have met some people that I hope will become lifelong friends.  And I have continued to grow into the person I ultimately wish to become, learning, as I always do when plucked out of my little DC bubble, what is truly is me, vs. a byproduct of the environment I am in.  It’s an important distinction to make.

Living in Amman did not defeat me.  I am still going to London in the fall to study International Relations, with a focus on the Middle East. to figure out where the heck I actually stand on a one state or two state solution.  I still intend to come back to this region, and work towards creating an atmosphere conducive to fomenting Arab-Israeli peace, as ridiculously difficult as that path may be.  I still want to work towards becoming fluent in Arabic, so I can be an American Jewish woman, who is pro-Palestinian and speaks Arabic, which I believe is a strong combination from which to begin this sort of bi-partisan work.   Living here has shown me, however, that I don’t yet have all the tools I need to thrive.  At 23 years of age, I am still on the wrong side of 25 for engaging in the Middle East with competence and class.  But as forward as it may sound, I have complete confidence that I will get there.

See you Stateside,
Luca

Come closer, my children, and listen to the tale….

If you believe the legends, modern day Jordan contains the ancient sites of Sodom and Gomorrah.  For those of you who haven’t read the old Bible story recently, its tells the tale of Lot, the only holy man in the entire city of Sodom.  And God told Lot through two angels that he should leave his home with his family, as God was going to smite and destroy the two cities.  Lot begged God to stay his hand, and God said that the cities would be spared if Lot could find ten good men in the city.  To make a short story even shorter, God was right: Lot was the only good man in all of Sodom.  And so the walls of the two cities crashed down, and the people burned, with only Lot and his family escaping the destruction, tears in their eyes, packs on their backs.

The physical ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah are technically near the Dead Sea, not Amman itself.  That said, I have come to an unfortunate conclusion regarding their spiritual location: Amman.  Find me ten good men that live within these city walls and are Jordanian, and maybe I’ll change my opinion, but right now, like Lot, I despair of the white matchbox city and prepare my leave-taking.

Notice how I say “find me ten good men.”  The wording is deliberate.  For the women of Amman have nothing to prove to me.  I have met many women, hijabed and bare-headed, who I believe are worthy of every respect.  It is men that I take issue with.

Imagine that you are walking down the street, minding your own business.  Imagine it is a nice neighborhood, actually, with mansions and silvery olive trees lining the almost properly maintained sidewalk.  There are gendarmerie all along the street, standing in their uniforms, at attention, protecting their respective embassies and expensive homes.  Now if you please, picture seeing two men, boys really, perhaps 18 or 20 years of age.  And as you notice them, walking towards you on the sidewalk, they notice you back.  And wicked little grins light up their faces, and they flick their eyes carelessly over your entire body, and you are sure, absolutely positive, that when they get close enough, they are going to harass you.  How to stop them?

Men, women-watching.

Walking across the street won’t work; they will raise their voices to make sure you hear what they have to say.  Looking down and passing them quickly, showing subservience to the superior race that is the human being with the penis, only makes them bolder.  Yelling “Ayib!” (Shame!) apparently is hilarious when a Western girl says it.  Any type of interaction thrills the stalker.  And so the only recourse is to continue with your walk, and pretend you don’t know what is going to happen next.

They swagger closer.  You hold your head up high, refusing to be cowed, but inwardly your stomach swoops.  They are right in front of you.  They don’t move or make way for you on the sidewalk, so you step out onto the street, to pass them.  One opens his mouth to speak.

“Hey bitch, suck my dick!”  Laughter.  The other shebab mutters something in a low derogatory tone in Arabic.  You think you hear the word sharmuta but that could just be your paranoia.  You continue on your way, pretending you didn’t hear.  They keep walking, the illusion of a normal sidewalk encounter intact, except they crane their heads back to see if you turn around, if you react in any way, hoping you’ll escalate the situation, give them a moment of your day.  The gendarmerie in front of you has heard everything, of course.  He has the power to discipline them, or scare them off.  And he does nothing.  Just like he did nothing when the man in the pickup truck got out of his car and tried to make you get in.  Just like he did nothing when a man threw an empty beer can at your face and it hit when you refused to answer his cat-calls.  The gendarmerie just stands there, and when he looks you in the eye, he shows no trace of shame.

“They will never actually touch you,” a male friend told me.  “You are safe from being physically molested.”  He doesn’t realize the damage is already done.

This is Amman, for any woman who dares to walk outside without a muscular male escort or a full niqab.  This is daily life in the safest Arab city in all of the Middle East.

“Don’t wear thick belts, like a man.  Don’t wear pants that only start at your hip, wear shirts with high collars, wear shirts that are long enough to cover your entire butt.  Don’t show your beauty by having your hair down, always wear it up.”  I dutifully take notes.  But it doesn’t matter how I dress, it seems: I am harassed on days when the only skin that shows is my face and hands.  Just like I am harassed on days when my shirt is short-sleeved and my skirt doesn’t quite touch my feet.

Every time my roommate showers, as she shuts off her water, she hears a rustling sound.  It is the man next door, brushing aside his curtain to get a front row seat, to watch her as she enters her bedroom and changes.  When she pulls the blinds to cover the window, he makes noises of discontent.

Boys become dangerous as early as ten years old.

“Why?” I ask various male friends and acquaintances.  “Why do men do it?  Why make the world a little bit of a worse place like that?  Do they honestly think that be being rude to me that I am going to say, ‘You are absolutely right, honey bunches, let’s have sex here and now!’?”

Their answers differ.  Some say that men do it because they fear women’s increasing societal power, and push back against it by asserting their masculine power over women when they can; a subtle ideologically based war against women’s rights.  Others say that’s it’s because men can’t* have sex until after marriage, and getting married is increasingly difficult.  Thus angry, sexually frustrated men cruise in cars on Thursday night, lashing out blindly at women because of their sex withheld, because women remain an unknown.  (*Please note that though men are supposed to wait until marriage if they are a good, little Muslim, many don’t, especially if they are at university, where there is very little supervision and many girls willing to mess around anally or orally as long as they can claim that they are technically virgins afterwards.  They have to still be virgins, see, because in Jordan, husbands to be are legally allowed to have a doctor check if their bride is a virgin, and if she isn’t, they are allowed to not marry her, with no penalty.)  Other men-folk speculate that the reason Jordanian men are such persistent harassers is because they are unconsciously trying to establish a sense of their own power in a country where they are poor, have limited opportunities, but have a satellite connection so they can see on TV just how much they are missing.  And while I agree that all three of these theories have merit, I believe there is a powerful fourth force at work.

These men think it is fun.  It’s a game for them.  Who can succeed in getting the strongest blush?  The biggest reaction?  Who is man enough to make a woman cry?  I don’t see any capacity for empathy in their eyes.  They make the streets feel unsafe for women, and god, do they enjoy it.

It took going to Israel to come to this final conclusion.  At six in the morning when I left to catch the bus to the Jordanian border, a car with two men in it actually went around the block three times to have three chances to yell “pussy” at me, throw gum wrappers at my face, and lick their lips suggestively.  They spent significant time and gas to hunt me, as I walked to the main intersection, trying to hail a taxi.  And I wondered, after I was safely in a cab, tremors running through my body from the aftermath, as much in fury as in fear, why?  What were they doing in their car at six in the morning?  Simply cruising for women to bother?  And why do none of the men on the street seem to care, say anything to these assholes?

Later that day I crossed the border to Jerusalem, a city only 42 miles away from Amman, but a different world nonetheless.  Here I can wear T-shirts and skirts, here I can say I am Jewish without the furtive glance and decision on whether to trust the other person.  Here, I am free.

On my last day in the Holy City, I went to Yad Vashem.  It affected me strongly, as holocaust museums always do.  I can all too easily imagine my own family being gassed, my little brother torn from my side so I can’t protect him.  But I was struck by two aspects of the museum in particular on this trip.

The first was a sign, near the beginning of the exhibit, which detailed the establishment of the ghettos, and the culling of the Jews from the gentiles.

The sign I saw on the wall.

No one objects when these Jordanian men choose women as their victims.  For the watchers aren’t women, after all.  And women are already marked as an ‘other;’ they need no yellow star stitched upon their clothing.  A simple silhouette is enough of a tell, and almost impossible to disguise.

The second thing that struck me was a photograph of two high-level Nazi officials, next to a brief transcript.  I unfortunately didn’t have the forethought to snap a photo of it, but I can roughly remember it as a discussion about speeding up the schedule of genocide, interspersed with one man asking the other about his wife, and her disapproval of her husband working too hard.

What horrified me about this conversation was the casual acceptance of brutal and inhumane acts; the interweaving of their little domestic life dramas, caring about a wife while unthinking and unrepentant about the genocide of thousands of other men’s wives.  And I thought to myself, that I could easily imagine my tormentors in Amman as being men like these: eager to inflict their dominance over others, and able to easily compartmentalize.  Compassion and mercy and the precepts of Ramadan of charity towards others applies to one group of people, and swift punishment and pain is how one treats the other group of people.  Nazis were just men, men who had been organized and focused to attack select groups.  These youth, these bored and listless and opportunity-less men of Jordan, their hatred and amusement and lack of empathy towards those weaker than them….

Women and men at the Abdali market.

After all, it’s not like humankind erased all aspects that lends itself towards cruelty after 1945.

So, I empathize with Lot, I really do.  I want to prove to myself, if not to God, that these acts are done by a minority of men, not the majority.  I want to thank those good men of Jordan, who do exist, for not making the streets a dangerous place for women.  I want to encourage them to be even more vocal when they witness harassment on the street, as they must, every single day.  But in my heart, I fear that I might lose this battle.  That though I have met some wonderful Jordanian men, (and please don’t misunderstand me, I have indeed met a few deeply good men, more than 10, actually, though that destroys the rhetoric!) perhaps there aren’t enough to save this city for me, at this age, in this time.

Maybe there is hope for future: not that the men will change, but that the women will.  As more and more women in Jordan leave the domestic sphere and take jobs, join the government, and become a visible force causing change in Jordan, perhaps they will no longer condone the actions of these men.  They will no longer be apologists (telling me things such as “View the harassment as a compliment, it means you are pretty!”) and they will no longer be tolerant.  The women of Jordan have the power to de-mystify themselves, and show men that they are not victims, and that there will be consequences to men’s bullying actions.  I hope one day that women will be able to move freely in Amman, go about their day’s tasks without duress.  That walking down the sidewalk won’t be an emotionally fraught event.

As I get ready to leave this city in a few days, I realize that I have failed to find the symbolic ten good men necessary to save Amman from being my Sodom or Gomorrah.  But I have to hope, someday soon, that the women of Amman will manage to do so for themselves.

A Walking Club Jordan group, men and women, together.

“It’s just like tying a tie. Double Windsor or half, your choice.”

He wrapped his keffiyeh around my head to protect my neck from the sun. His brown hands deftly wound the fabric into and around itself. We now matched, the American girl and the Bedouin boy. He smiled at the effect. He is almost exactly my age.

Later that night, he and I shared a water pipe, played a popular card game called ‘Hands,’ with cards so faded that though I quickly learned the rules I was slow to identify a spade as a spade, and eights often wreaked havoc as sixes. “Let me show you the hedgehog,” he said as the stillness of the night spread. He pronounced ‘hedgehog’ with gusto, the word clearly amused him. “Gunfud?” I asked, cupping my hands together instinctively to represent the hedgehog. “Is that right?” “Yes. Gunfud in Arabic. Good-food in English, saah?” It had become our joke.

We walked out of the pavilion made of carpets and into a night of moonlit sands and craggy mountains of rocks looming above. He spotted his prey and dashed off, a long legged predator all in white, beautiful in his natural lope. He scooped his hands down to the sand, and came to me with darkness held in his palms.

He set the hedgehog down on the ground. It quivered, shut up inside in its spiny hide. We crouched over it, expectant. The gunfud unwrapped, his large ears seeking danger, his wet little nose sniffing. I touched its spines and it cowered once more. “So big,” I noted. “I would need two hands to hold it.” He smiled.

Wadi Rum, just after sunset.

“Want to walk for a bit?” he asked.

I considered.  “Sure, let’s walk and then look at the stars a little.  I never get to see stars like this at home.”   The hedgehog slowly ambled away.  The desert dog found us and cavorted with boundless happiness, thrilled to have partners in play this evening.  She sniffed at the hedgehog, but decided to leave him alone.

We ambled a bit away, around the mountain at the base of the camp, the sand cool against bare feet.  The stars were bright, but the moon was brighter, and I tried in vain to angle the mountain in between me and the glow.  Resigned at last to the moon outshining the stars, despite its merely reflected glory, I lay down on the skin of the desert.  With a whuff, the dog landed on top of my legs, and I scratched her head as her tail thumped against me.  The Bedouin boy lay down next to me with a little more propriety than the dog, and I asked him about any constellations he might know.

He only knew their names in Arabic, but that was alright.  We both knew the dipper, under different names, and Cassiopeia too.  I showed him Draco the dragon. I asked him the name and ages of all of his 11 siblings again.  He gave me the litany: Ahmed, himself, Mohammad, Yusuf, Abdullah, Zait.  He never mentioned the girls’ names, no matter how many times I asked him about his siblings.  They were merely described by age: “Mohammad, then a girl aged 17, then another girl aged 15, then Yusuf…”    I grew bolder, and I asked a question that had been bothering me for a while.

Three of the brothers: my Bedouin, Zait, and Yusuf.

“Where are the Bedouin women?” I asked.

“In the village,” he answered promptly.

“Why do I never see them?”

“Because they are women, they are with the children.”

“Do they ever work outside of the house?  Lead tourists around Wadi Rum, like you do for your brother?”

“No.  That is not what women do.  They don’t scramble around in the desert, deal with camels.”

“But I do.  Am I not a woman?  How come I do these things, and they don’t?”

He didn’t even have to consider before answering me.    “Our cultures are different. Bedouin women are different from the women in your culture, where they belong is different.  Women working in the desert is fine for you, I guess.”

I looked back up at the stars.  Questions were like tumors on my lips; he could see that we were both women, the Bedouin ladies and I, with the same biological makeup.  He could see that it was culture, not natural capacity that placed women in the home, men in the wider desert.  And yet, for him, this was as it was; it did not stress his mind to believe that Bedouin women belonged in the home, but Western women did not have to.

I don’t think he would have tied his keffiyeh around my head in the masculine Bedouin way if, I were, in fact, Bedouin.

More words were spoken that night.  We connected he and I, despite our differences in upbringing and values, and the scopes of our lives.  He knew every mountain of the desert by name and by feature and had explored all of their caves.  I knew how Nigerian princes laundered money across UK borders by creating shell accounts.  He knew how to avoid being poisoned by a scorpion’s sting – it involved swallowing a dead scorpion’s tail as a child, and rubbing its body over his arms and legs.  I knew how to write a resume, find a place to rent on craigslist, and dance salsa.  We both knew how much ice cream should cost, how to tell a damn good story to our little siblings, and how to make a fire in the wilderness.  We both appreciated the stars.

On the back of a camel named Sinan! (after the great Turkish architect)

He had an interest in seeing America, though ultimately he wanted to live in the desert, maybe start his own tourism business.  He needed to learn how to make a website first.  I told him he had a place in DC, should he need one.  I tried to imagine him out of his long white thob, in jeans and a T-shirt.  I couldn’t picture his long, thick hair under a baseball cap or his large, nimble feet covered by sneakers.  I tried to imagine him holding a map upside-down, keen to see a museum, or him walking in a mall, in front of a Hot Topic.  Under this type of scrutiny, civilized life seems a little abstract, almost silly, for a man so himself, free of insecurity.  He clearly connected strongly with his life, and knew who he was here.  I envied him for that.  Nee-al-lack.

We headed back to the camp, our dog butting her head against our hips to nudge just a few more pats out of us.  She traveled between us as we said goodnight.

The next day, we tourists ate, the Bedouin men saddled up the camels and we left the camp with little fanfare, riding inexpertly on the camels’ backs behind little Yusuf, brown and grinning. The dog trotted by our side, tongue out, chasing lizards for lunch, and then rejoining us just when I thought we lost her. We made it back to the village, had our last cups of sweetened tea, and walked to our car.  My Bedouin (for part of him is mine, and part of me is his) promised to keep in touch.  He told me that I should keep his keffiyeh, that it was now mine.  We clasped hands.  He waved to us in our hospital-green, rented car, the word Thrifty featuring hugely on its bumper, until we left the village of Wadi Rum behind.

I had a scarf, about two pounds of reddish sand in my shoes and pants, and some photos of the desert.  But I also left with a sense of my own rigidity; for if a Bedouin boy can reconcile and embrace having women in his camp, doing men-like activities, why can’t I see him in America, laughing over Chinese takeout?

Abdullah is six. He hopped on those camels like it was nothing, and rode them away.

A lovely little girl I met there.

I was in a small village in the Northern tip of South Africa.  Of South Africa’s eleven official languages, the people here spoke the most obscure: Tshivenda.  And, unlike the rest of South Africa I visited, the people here were not exposed to English at all: they didn’t have televisions, so no American movies, they didn’t have radios, so no American songs.   As for me, I knew exactly one word in Tshivenda before I met my host family: Makuuna, which translates to “white thing!”  It was what people shouted whenever they saw me.

Before I entered my host family’s plot of land, five or six small children of various states of undress and age came running towards me and my fellow (white) Americans.  They seemed excited to meet us; we were big news, the newest thing in their world.   I crouched down in the dusty lane to meet them.

“Hi!!!!” I said enthusiastically to the first child, only steps away.  I waved my hand in their faces to demonstrate the force of my happiness at meeting them.  “Hi! Hi!” I smiled as wide as I could.  “HIIIII!”  The children stopped and stared at me, suddenly wide eyed.  I stopped waving.  “Hi?” I said again, and they scattered, scrambling back the way they came.

Our guide and translator, a local, laughed.  Ruben rested a hand on my shoulder.  “Don’t take them personally,” he said, when he saw my bemused expression.  “In my language, ‘Hi’ means ‘No!’   You were shouting ‘No!’ at the children.  Over and over again.  Loudly.  They thought you were angry at them!”   The children stopped a fair distance away and cocked their heads at me.  Oh.  Well done, you insensitive American, you.

Language is a slippery thing, and we Americans have a distinct disadvantage compared to people of other nations when it comes to being able to communicate in multiple languages.  I think this is a pity.  Not only because it limits the American’s ability to express herself, but also because you think differently in different languages.  I was told by a friend who was fluent in both Chinese and English that he actually thought more collectively in Chinese- the language was more orientated towards expressing for the good of the group, when compared to English’s emphasis on individualism.  I don’t know how true this is: maybe it was simply his understanding of cultural values subtly and unconsciously imposing itself upon the languages. But I do know that different languages have different vocabulary focuses: the hackneyed example of Inuits having 30 different words for snow, for instance.  Or, my favorite linguistical phrase in French: poser un lapin.  Isn’t the idea of placing a bunny in front of a prospective date to stand them up adorable?  Why can’t English have idioms like that?

Language shapes the way you think, and shapes what you can think.  The most chilling part of Big Brother, for me at least, was Syme’s work on reducing the English language down into New Speak in order to limit the possibility for free thought or rebellion.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…  Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.

Therefore, learning a new language actually gives you new ways in which to organize, codify and think about the world.  I also subscribe to this notion of language defining thought; this is why I praise the rapid expansion of English, whether through portmanteaus or neologisms or assimilating words from other languages.  I applaud the playful nature of Lewis Carroll with his Jabberwocky (a word recognized by this Microsoft dictionary, by the way).  I celebrate the Shakespearean penchant for making up words for the hell of it.  And I worship literature like Lolita, which I maintain is hardly about a man’s love for a little girl at all, but rather about a man’s (Nabokov’s) love for the written word.

He loved the English language,

And thus he wrote of sweet Lo

I loved the English language

And into his madness I go.

But I digress.

Much to my everlasting chagrin, I am no great shakes at any language besides English.  For me, language classes were always an exquisite blend of tedium punctuated with terror.  In front of the class I would clear my throat and try to bully my brain into slipping into the syntax and it would resolutely refuse to do so.  Stick to being articulate in one language, princess, my wayward brain would advise.  All of which is to say, that when I decided to learn Arabic, I knew that I was in for a challenge, living in Amman or no.

Let’s talk about Arabic, for a moment, from the perspective of one only versed in Germanic and Romance languages.  Arabic differs in these from the onset: its very mouth sounds require a different relationship between tongue, mouth and throat.  In Arabic, there are deep phonemes and shallow ones; whether one says “dad” or “dawd” completely changes which letter it is, د and ض respectively.  The hardest aspect of learning Arabic, at least in the beginning, is hearing the difference between a throat and mouth letter.  That and distinguishing- and pronouncing!- the haw of ح (like a cough) vs. the haa of ه (the English ‘H’ sound) vs. the Hebrew-sounding khaa خ.  And charmingly, there is no ‘p’ sound at all.  Anyone want a cool, refreshing Bepsi?  Not as good as Coke, of course, but it’s hot here at Betra.

Once you get beyond the foreign nature of the phonemes, there is then the ritualistic aspect of Arabic to untangle.  Unlike in English, where customary, polite exchanges can have variations, many Arabic phrases have one, specific correct phrase in response.  For instance, when I get out of the shower, my roommate says to “Nye-e-man.”  This celebrates and notes the fact that I am clean.  I am not supposed to thank her for saying this.  I am not supposed to say, “I’m all clean so you don’t hold your nose around me!” The only proper response is “Ynaam maliki.”  Likewise Ahlan wa sahlan is met with Ahlan fiik, Salamtik is met with alla –y-selmik.  The back and forth is lovely when you are in the know, but learning so many calls and responses is daunting.

Then there are the differences between FusHa and the local dialect, both with vocabulary used and how to pronounce words held in common.  Then as well, there is the fact that many young, educated Arabs today speak in a quick-paced blend of Arabic and English, with coinages such as “Yalla bye!”  Arabic can also be written in the Latin alphabet with numbers replacing some uniquely Arab sounds like the glottal stop of the “aiyn” ع which is written as a 3 in text messages and Facebook wall posts.  Thus not only does the patient foreigner have to learn which Arabic script letter refers to which sound, but also which Western letter or number corresponds in the modern reality of increasing interconnected globalization.

In short, Arabic deserves its reputation as a difficult language to learn.  But it is also an extremely rewarding one to know as well, and I feel that all of its quirks and permutations lend it a sort of charm.  And it’s nice to know enough, that when I talk to children, I can be sure that I am not accidently yelling “No!” when they are just trying to be friendly.

Little kids enjoying a stream on a hot day in the north of Jordan, near Ajloun castle.

Penguins. Taken in Cape Town, South Africa in 2009.

Ostensibly ignoring them, I maintained a measured pace, closely following my (male) friend across this suddenly vast dock.  I wove my way around the men folk, not touching any of them. Slowly, as if in a trance, they followed my moving body with their predatory, yet blank, eyes.  Their arms twitched and raised.  They didn’t make a sound, just stood, silent watchers.  It was like being in the middle of an army of beach zombies, except that these ones were fixated on boobs, not brains.  I subtly increased my pace as they shuffled and hemmed me in, pushing each other to get closer to me.  I couldn’t decide now if they were more like zombies or penguins on a cliff side, shoving each other until one penguin falls into the sea.  All so the other penguins could watch it with rapt attention; would the fallen penguin become a leopard seal’s lunch?

My friend jumped into the water, having reached the end of the wooden planking.  Almost running, I leapt in after him.  Splash!  As I came back up to the surface (quickly due to the buoyant nature of my wetsuit), I was aware that five or so of the men on the dock had jumped in right after me.  I was pursued.  As I swam away from my unwanted fan club of penguins/zombies, I zipped my wetsuit up all the way, so my bikini and skin was fully covered, with only my face and hands exposed.  Huffing slightly, I reached the safety of the expat divers.  I turned around and saw that the entranced menfolk were now treading water around the dock, not having dared to follow me all the way.  But they were still facing me and still staring fixedly with dark, emotionless eyes.

“The wetsuit is on, the show is over!” I called out, empty bravado in English, mostly to reassure myself and my fellow scuba divers that I was not cowed by the experience.  I resolutely turned my back on the dock and its occupants.  I couldn’t stop the Arab men from staring at me, but I could stop myself from seeing them do so.

The divers were grinning.  “We weren’t sure you were going to make it!” an Israeli joked.  Another diver, a tiny Asian girl who had the sense to stay the hell away from that dock, said, “We had even money on whether you’d get in the water before one of them groped you or pushed you in.”  A fat American laughed.  “They looked like wolves, about to bring down a deer, dear.”  Floating on my back, slowing my heart rate, and staring up at the sun, I contradicted him.  “Not wolves.  Boob zombies, or maybe penguins.”

Surprisingly, I didn’t have to explain myself.  Everyone understood perfectly.

“ZOMBIES! They’re after me!!! Gurgle, Ahhh!”

He said it was simple. “A car, a wife, a house.  Not necessarily in that order, and the car has to be fast.”  He then went into loving detail about his dream car and all the features it would have.

Fancy car from the Royal Automobile Museum

Along with Jordan’s huge wealth disparity, there is a cultural emphasis on conspicuous consumption.  Cars especially seem to be a national fascination.  There is a historical reason for this, of course: the late King Hussein was a fanatic about cars, and collected hundreds of rare and expensive automobiles in his lifetime, now on display in the Royal Automobile Museum.  But the modern iteration of car adoration takes it to a new grassroots level.

Cars here are often large, gas guzzling, expensive, with custom rims and expensive sound systems.  On one level this makes pragmatic sense as everyone spends a lot of time in the car, so it might as well be comfortable; the traffic is horrendous, there is limited public transportation, and few sidewalks to walk on, mostly in poor repair.  One’s car is therefore often on display, and many strangers will see it, and make judgments on one’s economic status based upon it.  And because so many Jordanians are poor, having a nice car is a requisite, not for appearing rich, but rather for fending allegations that the owner is poor.  “Conspicuous consumption, research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor.”

The term ‘conspicuous consumption’ was coined by a dude in the 19^th century named Thorstein Veblen.  He argued that people spent lavishly on goods that were visible to outsiders to prove they were prosperous, even if they weren’t.  Conversely, those who actually were extremely wealthy had less of a need to prove it (assumption of wealth, as opposed to assumption of poverty), and therefore spend money on subtler luxury goods or goods for private consumption.  Concern with buying brand named items, in America for instance, is an attribute more closely associated with those solidly in the lower middle class, than those who are wealthy.  Wealthy people care more about quality than pure name recognition.

But let’s go back to Jordan for a moment.  As I said previously, there is a huge wealth gap in Jordan between the wealthy and the struggling.  Neighborhoods such as Abdoun or Sweifieh are wealthy, and McMansions abound.  On Thursday nights (Friday night equivalent to the States) in Abdoun or Sweifieh, it is common to see people in cars, just cruising around the neighborhood, blasting music.  They aren’t going anywhere in particular; they don’t have residences in the region.  They are just enjoying being in a posh area, soaking in the feeling of wealth that these large houses with their expensive security systems and armed guards and gold plated door knockers exude.

Women shopping at Abdali Market.

Most Jordanians have two or three cell phones, one for each major provider in Jordan.  Many covet and own smart phones, despite the price for one being even higher here than in America, and the Jordanian salary being much lower (I read somewhere that the average Jordanian makes 7,000 JOD a year, equivalent to approximately $10,000 American.)  Jordanian women are known for spending a lot of money on makeup and other beauty products, more than their Western female counterparts.

This emphasis on demonstrative luxury possession impacts many facets of Jordanian life beyond the economic considerations of trying to purchase beyond one’s means.  For instance, I was told in the past twenty years that the average Jordanian marrying age has risen from early twenties to 28 or 29, due in a large part because weddings are so expensive and young Jordanian men cannot afford one.  Before the wedding day even occurs, a groom is supposed to buy his wife gold jewelry (rings and bracelets and a necklace) equal to at least 1,000 JOD, and give her a minimum in cash equal to that amount as well.  This is a sort of dowry guarantee, as she gets to keep the money should they split up.  It is seen as recompense for the ‘damage’ to her reputation, which occurs even if her virginity is intact for the wedding.  The wedding day itself is also supposed to be expensive; the groom has to demonstrate through lavish spending that he can take care of his wife to be.

A sign at a women’s clothing store in al-Balad.

In short, spending money, “the shopping experience,” is an important cultural phenomenon in Jordan.  It is a matter of pride to look wealthy, even if that is far from the truth.  It isn’t as bad here as in the Gulf countries, where oil money wealth disparity is even more stark, and spending on frivolous items more out of control (did you hear about the $450,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom studded with diamonds and plated with gold? Now you have!)  Jordan is still in the process of deciding what kind of country it is going to be in the future.  Part of its economy is West-focused or emulated, another part is more orientated towards a Pan-Arab conception of important values: morality, the home, the community, males providing for all female relatives.  Will Jordan’s wealth disparity increase, and conspicuous consumption with it?  Or will the next generation of prosperous Jordanians subtly decorate their homes with tasteful understated art, spend more on education and health care, and leave the Mercedes Benz for their poorer neighbor next door to purchase?

Amman to the left, a solitary mosque to the right. It stands alone, proud, and a little green in this fair city. It’s a metaphor.

There are certain personality traits that are considered universally good to possess, regardless of the culture you belong to.  Kindness, for instance, or generosity, or intelligence.  These are good traits to have, no matter whether the possessor is Chinese, British, or from Christmas Tree Island.  And until I came to Jordan, I would have added another trait to the list: a capacity for independence and the ability to do things by one’s self.

“Who are you in Jordan with?” is a common question I field from taxi drivers.  They seem confused by the concept that I am here working for a company that is Jordanian and in no way affiliated with the United States, and that I live here without my family, husband, or children.  When I describe plans for the weekend, as prosaic as going grocery shopping or as elaborate as exploring another city or the Dead Sea, I am always asked, “M’3 mean?” which means, “With whom?”   If I say, “lahalee” which means literally “by myself” or alone, they then ask, “Why?”

No one is ever alone in Jordan.  Young Arab adults almost never rent a flat of their own, or even share with friends.  Unless the parents and the entire extended family are dead, or live far away, that’s who an unmarried adult lives with.  Until recently, a single person looking for housing was viewed with suspicion: he must be into drugs, or a bad son, or recently in prison to have been cast out of his own community and left to founder on his own.  Here, being alone is not something one ever chooses: the only people that are alone are those that for some reason lost their community.  Even my flat-mates, two Lebanese sisters, have never lived with someone who wasn’t family until me.  Likewise, people never want to do activities by themselves.  Whether it is smoking shisha, or gardening outside, or watching TV or wandering around al-Balad for shopping.   It is not common to see a man traveling in a pack of one, and extremely rare to see a woman do so.  “It is more fun with friends!” is the common sentiment, but I believe it more deeply ingrained than that.

A sparrow at Jerash, living out its little birdy life.

Arab community is very tight-knit, in a way that is strange to the Western sensibility.  At work, emails are often addressed to me with “Habibiti” (sweetheart) from men and women alike; I have been kissed on both my cheeks by total strangers and invited to tea at their homes.  When I was ill, I was admonished by people I barely knew for not going to them for help.  Men warn me not to trust other men and tell me they’ll look out for me like I am their little sister.  Here, the clear cut relationships of the West become muddled; teacher/student, boss/employee, storeowner/customer… all of these roles blur, and are mutable, turning into people just interacting and relating with other people.   I never know what to expect.

This is lovely in many ways; there is a warmth to many interactions that have become cold and rote in the States.  Going to the grocery store can make you a new friend and I had a lovely and strange conversation in broken Arabic with a taxi driver once about our favorite hobbies (I probably misunderstood him when he told me he likes eating sharks every weekend).  But this sense of community is also disconcerting; it not only obscures for the un-initiated Westerner what is genuine Arab kindness and what are disingenuous attempts at taking advantage of you (of which there many, oh so many), but it becomes smothering.  Enduring weeks of people telling me it is strange to want to be alone has made me all the happier on those rare occasions when I am actually, completely, by myself.

I was on a large group trip out to the Dead Sea area a few weeks ago.  I enjoyed the 90 person camaraderie for the entire day as we hiked up a fast moving stream, jumped off of waterfalls, dried off, and had dinner.  When the group ascended to watch the sunset on a cliff side, I sat down on a rock a little ways from the group to reflect upon the day, and watch the sun disappear over the horizon.   I wasn’t alone long however- one of my friendly acquaintances from the trip soon came over to ask why I wanted to watch the sunset by myself, and not engage in the revelry and dancing that was taking place.  I tried to explain about the spirituality of the sunset, and wanting to think, and about the need to be alone to rejuvenate from constantly talking all day.  He didn’t get it.  I tried to explain that “wahid moo nafsil waheed” which is probably terrible Arabic but translates roughly to “one is not the same as lonely.”  No dice.  Finally, I managed to get him to let me be, after assuring him I’d return to the group in five minutes.  He left, still not understanding the need for introspection.  Does constant social contact preclude even the desire for deep thinking?

Also from Jerash. Look at that community of pillars!

Maybe if I had grown up in such an insistently social culture, I wouldn’t need to have space, have time and serenity to do my best musings.  I wouldn’t prize the ability to self-soothe, or problem-solve equipped with only a pen and paper.  Maybe I simply wouldn’t value the kind of soul-searching that can only occur alone, and be content with the apparent outline of things, without a deeper mental plunge.   It is hard for me to imagine I could be like this.  So much of who I am involves this sort of intellectual feed-back loop, involves a need to prove to myself constantly that I am an independent being first, and part of a community second.

There is a story my father loves to tell about me when I was months old.  Not yet able to talk, or crawl, having barely mastered the ability to hold up my head without help, my father would cradle me to his chest and hold me, his moody black-haired firstborn.  How disconcerting it was for him, when I would push against him with my feeble arms, my chubby hands scrambling against his chest to physically distance my body from his.  How he marveled at this strange personality trait, which he ascribed as a need for me to be my own person before I felt safe being protected by another.  I stopped striving against his arms when I gained the ability to crawl.  I liked cuddling once I could leave to do my own thing when I liked, no longer trapped into affection.  Can culture override something that seems so innate?  Or are there secret people here who need alone-time and I have, for obvious reasons, just not met them?

“But I’m still having fun and I guess that’s the key, I’m a twenty-something and I’ll keep being me.”

And for some reason, I still have a fear, deep down, that I am not independent, capable, adult or good at navigating life’s little quirks.  I force myself to demonstrate my capacity for independence, for initiative, and  I like accomplishing things alone so when I succeed, I can feel secure that it is my own victory and no one else’s.  Travelling around Europe by myself, missing trains and finding hostels and travel buddies and monuments without maps thrilled me, because I felt powerful.  Shit goes wrong in life- a fact like death and taxes- but there I was, dealing with it, solving problems, taking names, and enjoying myself in the process.  I think that is one of the largest issues I have with a culture that prizes community closeness over independence: I don’t see how you can derive a sense of your own efficacy without being able to founder and shape and experience the world through your actions.

So I live my life here in Amman, toeing the line between community and self, lahalee when I need to be, with others when my secret baby self is secure enough in its own power to surrender independence for a while.  I try to dull my suspicious and cynical nature when people treat me like their best friend after meeting me once.  I try to accept their grace with some of my own.  I cannot be all of who I am here, when with others: simply having my hair down and free is enough to excite desperately unwanted male harassment, not believing in God is a dangerous admission to make, and being assertive is seen as being aggressive.  It is exhausting to be with others while eclipsing parts of myself.  It is exhausting trusting people who I don’t know, every day, though I have no choice but to do so with my limited language skills and dearth of cultural know-how.  I simply pray that they have mercy on me, and often, but not always, these strangers do.  The dance between being immersed in the community and true to myself two-steps on, and will hopefully become more in sync before the song ends.

Om Ibrahim, schooling all of us with her perfect scooping technique.

We had been there, on and off, for hours at that point.  We had arrived at a little past one for a huge feast of mansaf, which is a Jordanian dish of lamb over a bed of rice with spices, sour yogurt, and parsley.  The mansaf was served on a large communal platter. The women and men ate in different rooms, which turned out to be a good thing, because no spoons were provided.  Om Ibrahim showed me how to scoop up the rice and meat in my right hand and sort of pop it into my mouth.  I had the scooping motion down after one or two tries, but my pop was all over the place, as was the mansaf. Elle Woods would have despaired.  I know Om Ibrahim did.  After I made a fool of myself for a good ten minutes, spoons were suddenly provided.

After the meal, we washed our hands outside; a young man was there to give us the towel to dry our hands.  We were then told that the entire group was heading to Amman to pick up the bride.  Over an hour there, and an hour back, and that’s if they didn’t stop for hour-long tea (which they would). We decided to leave the party for the next few hours and wait for the bride here, in the countryside.

Fast forward four hours: the bride arrives in the matrimonial car (donated for the day by a co-worker) which was decorated with lots of bright and huge fake flowers adorning the windows and doors.  The car was followed by a bus full of male relatives, and a second bus full of female ones.  All the men wore nice shirts, dishdashas or suits.  The women wore abayas and hijabs, as did the bride.  But hers were covered by sparkly bling and there was no mistaking her.  All dismounted from their mechanical steeds and the bride and her mother dashed upstairs to prepare.

Which brings us to the present.  My boss, Ma’mun, fled to the safety of bro-space, and my female coworkers and I joined the thronging women, waiting to greet the lucky bride.

We were led into a separate doorway to the right of the men’s space into a small courtyard, complete with chickens.  We then threaded our way up the stone steps to the interior. Inside the gaggle of women waited; they chittered like a more beneficent version of the ladies from The Music Man.  They filled the narrow staircase in their finest abayas, lined with colored thread and gold filigree.  Many women’s fingers were dyed orange with henna designs.  Children flitted in and out from behind their robes, mostly girls, but a few little boys as well, who seemed unclear what was going on, but knew it to be exciting and reacted accordingly.

“The bride isn’t ready!” The mother of the bride announced.  A collective sigh went through the crowd.  We filed back down to the second floor, into a sitting room with chairs along the outside walls.  We four Western girls sat, slightly uneasy.  We didn’t know what to expect, not really.  And though Amelia’s and Nim’s Arabic was pretty good, Leia and I were barely treading the linguistical water.  We were the only ones without hijabs.  We were the only ones who had never met the bride before.

Considering I don’t have a photo of the bride, here are the Westerners.

And yet it was the confused Westerners who were allowed to go upstairs and enter the bride’s sanctuary first.

The Bedouin bride was seated on a red velvet couch.  Having cast off her abaya and hijab, she was now resplendent in a long white dress that was generous in showing her ample cleavage.  It was sleeveless, and bedazzled with sequins, sparklies and fake pearls.  There was a large hoop underneath the layers that made it spread out from the bride’s waist like a conical tent, draping over the entire length of the couch.  The fabric was a bit odd, it seemed to be a type of nylon and plastic concoction, almost as if it were from a costume shop.  She wore golden bangles, and two necklaces, one a gold pendant that nestled in between her breasts, and another shorter one that seemed to be made of cubic zirconium and matched her white, sparkling tiara.  Her jet black hair was done up in a smooth and large bun at the back of her head, perhaps with a frame underneath it to give it the loft and size.  A diaphanous white veil was pinned to the back of the bun and hung down to her waist, studded with pearls.  Her makeup was heavy, but skillfully done, with dark pink lipstick and kohl shaped eyes.  She had an intricate henna tattoo on her right shoulder.

We each came in and presented ourselves to her one by one.  She gently kissed our left cheek once, then our right cheek anywhere from twice to five times.  Her cheek was downy with soft makeup powder.  We said, “Mabrook!” or congratulations.  She responded with a wooden nod. Her smile was wide, but her eyes were glassy.  Our Westerners’ nerves twitched.

We were not allowed to take photos; the fact that the bride was so uncovered meant that she was meant to be seen by women only, and her husband, of course.  As we sat in that little room, other members of her family and family-in-law came in and offered their congratulations, kissed her cheeks, and told her she was beautiful.  The bride’s mother asked us if we were married.  When we, two Americans, a French girl and a Dutch girl, all in our twenties, said no, her response was “Insha’allah, soon!” To her, we were old maids already.  We politely responded back in turn, that we hoped we would be married quickly too.

Pictures were taken of us and bride together, all perching on the narrow couch.  In between photo rounds, Nim asked the bride what her name was, how old she was, where she was from.  “Hanan, 16, Amman,” the bride responded.  Nim asked her to repeat herself.  Her answer stayed the same. She was sixteen.  The groom, it turns out, wasn’t much older, though at 21 years of age, he had to appear worldly to his soon to be wife.  They had met only a couple of times before.

Eventually we were allowed to leave the room and scurry back down to earth.  My head was whirling.  Part of me wanted to pass judgment on her age, on a system that allowed two people to marry without knowing each other first.  But most of me knew I shouldn’t, I didn’t understand enough.  So I began to ask some questions.

I found out from Ma’mun that the men had done some wedding talk after all: they joked that they felt for the bride because “the groom was so big that when he peed, ‘it’ was in the toilet.”  I found out that the bride was definitely a virgin, and that if the groom wasn’t one, he was going to pretend he was before this night for the rest of his life.

A bride’s hands, symbolically covered in henna before the wedding.

“What about the henna tattoos?” I asked.  Apparently, a common practice for Arab weddings (not just Bedouin ones) is to have a “Night of the Henna” bachelorette type party (only women, lots of dancing) right before the wedding.  The groom occasionally has one too (though I didn’t notice any henna on this particular groom).

The henna can symbolize several things- historically, women who wore henna were communicating that they were of childbearing years, and that they were now sexually appropriate to bed.  Or as a college thesis I found online put it:  “Henna stains communicate that she is pure, worthy of human and supernatural approval, and an appropriate sexual partner. The fresh dark henna stains denote her readiness, and worthiness, for sexual intercourse.”  The evening before the wedding night, during the ‘Night of the Henna’, all women at the party henna their hands and feet to celebrate the fact the bride is becoming ready to be a sexual partner for the first time in her life.

A henna-wearing bride also has a more modern and cultural significance: in many cultures, a bride does no housework as long as her hands or body is ornamented with henna.  As soon as the henna has completely faded however, it is business as usual, and the honeymoon period is over.

It has now been almost two weeks since I met the Bedouin bride, felt her cheek touch my cheek.  I will never know more of her story, whether she is happy, what her children’s names will be, whether she will ever see a country other than her own.  All I had to share with her was that one tiny moment on a very important day.  I can’t help but to play the outside ethnographer, but I know that, by doing so, I partially cordon myself off from the truth, the core of what it means to be a woman, from a Bedouin background, in Jordan, in the here and now.  I will never completely understand, no matter how much I try.

So in this photo essay, I have complied the most thought-provoking, lovely or whimsical ‘signs’ (for lack of a better, more inclusive word) from around the world.  Enjoy, and let me know which is your favorite piece of art and why.

This is from the map at the Reykjavik International Airport in Iceland; sadly I did not get to see the Penis Museum.

In downtown Reykjavik near the harbor, this sign, on how to tie a tie, was just hanging out on the side of a building. The building did not have a store that sold ties in it.

Mustached women showing off clothes in Reykjavik.

At the Guildfoss Falls tourist store, at the top of the mountain, this sign was located. Iceland has a thing about trolls.

‘Bless’ in Icelandic is goodbye.

In Florence, there were many people creating beautiful reproductions of masterpieces in grease crayon on the sidewalk. I think their accessibility made them even more stunning than the originals.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Florence street style.

The bell on top of the Campanile in Florence. Notice any familiar names etched into it?

Courtesy of a Florence side road. Your guess is as good as mine for what the inspiration for this was.

A poem from the same street as the former picture. In Italian, so any Italian speakers out there want to translate?

From a bar bathroom in NYC, SoHo area. My favorite quote is “Ses enfants sont laides.”

In Washington DC, in front of the White House. People demonstrating about Arab Spring in Syria.

In a girl’s bathroom stall at the New School in New York City. Bathroom stalls are always a cornucopia of random goodness.

About the romanticized notion of being poor in New York, one of the richest cities in the world.

Excellent drawing of the effect weed will have on your body. In NYC.

The last of the NYC bathroom stall series. Profound questions are asked.

This was taken in Rome, in Piazza Venezia. Bus = Fail. I like it.

A poem about Galileo and the movement of mass and light. Found in a church in Rome, with a little mini-exhibit on Galileo in the back.

A poem from the National Museum of Rome. All about sexy times. Original was found next to some pornographic mosaics in a Roman house from way back when.

On a street corner in Rome. Pro-Palestinian signs are everywhere these days it seems.

Found in the steps leading up to the Borghese Gardens in Rome. Is Godzilla your Lord?

A bathroom stall in the Belgrade train station. Again, notice the reference to the Middle East, ie Tehran sucks!. Also note that the comment is torn apart by other international travelers.

In Venice. I think this was the Museum of Natural History, or something like that. The signs are a little blurry, but they read “Mammals” and the like.

A famous cafe in Belgrade, known only by the ? symbol.

Knez Mihailova Street in Belgrade, Serbia. There was a line of politically orientated signs in a row, interestingly enough, in English. This one made an excellent point about feminism and female artists.

Two more politically motivated ads- one about abortion, and the other? Unclear.

Human trafficking and donor stealing. The first, at least, is a complete valid thing to bring to public awareness.

Walk your dog, instead of make war?

A little 2007, but the message still stands; how a Serbian (presumably) views George Bush’s war in the Middle East

As I said, Palestinian signs were common.

I have no idea what this one means. Maybe it is saying video games are the new Communist Manifesto?

I love the mixing of Moses and the Soviets. That is a marriage for the ages.

A crossroads; do I want to go to London, or the Moon? At Skadarlija.

Graffiti by the Sava river, in Belgrade. Vuki sure loves Ceca.

‘Voli’ is apparently the root of the word “love” in Serbian.

The last of the graffiti along the Danube series.

From Washington DC, the Adam Morgan area. Pharaoh cat chasing normal cat represents the way _______ objectifies ____ and _______. (Fill in your own blanks, your guess is as good as mine.)

Another lovely photo of the Amman cityscape.

Amman, as a city in the Middle East, is often gently ridiculed.  Not as fun-loving as Beirut, not as historical or interesting as Cairo, not as religiously awe-inspiring as Jerusalem.  It is treated like the red-headed stepchild of the major Middle Eastern cities.  It lies sprawling, yet forgotten.  Despite it being the capital of Jordan, it is seen by tourists and locals alike as a mere jumping off point towards seeing the more stunning sights of Jordan such as Petra with its ruby walls, Aqaba with its dive sites in the Red Sea, and the rolling desert of Wadi Rum.

Laundry hung to dry in the open air of sky and street.

Amman is huge; home to roughly 3 million people.  The buildings are built out of white stones, to better reflect the heat.  They are square or rectangular, with flat roofs and often have clotheslines strung across balconies, bright T-shirts and dark abayas adding color to the skyline.  West Amman is orientated around eight traffic circles, simply called ‘First circle’, ‘Second circle’ etc.  First circle is the closest to downtown Amman proper (called al-Balad) and Eighth circle is in the outskirts of town.  My office is slightly past Eighth circle.  Amman is also orientated around hills; there are 19 hills in Amman, and one constantly walks up and down steep streets or stone steps, surreptitiously carved in strategic locations downtown.

Amman doesn’t have very many “picture-worthy” sites to go to.  There is a Roman Amphitheatre downtown and a Roman Citadel on Jabal-al-Qal’a (‘Jabal’ means hill in Arabic; there are lots of Jabal-somethings around).  There are several museums of varying size and prestige, and many beautiful mosques, as common here as tiny neighborhood grocery stores and pharmacies.  But Amman doesn’t have a long history to fall back upon; there is no Conciergerie, no pyramids, no Hyde Park, no Duomo or lagoons complete with gondoliers.  After all, Amman didn’t become what we consider Amman until 1921, and it shows.   Instead of the Taj Mahal, Amman has the Taj Mall.  Not quite the same level of grandeur.

The King Abdullah Mosque in downtown Amman.

Still, Amman does have its own culture, and different neighborhoods do have different vibes: Swefieh is rich and hoity-toity, with Starbucks (not common here!) and artisanal chocolate stores and expensive MAC makeup shops.  Wadi-Sier is the land of car washes and car mechanics and car dealers, Abdoun is a wealthy residential area with many embassies with their requisite security guards, Duar Paris (Paris Square) is charmingly bohemian with coffee shops, art stores, the Institut Francais for language study and many nooks and small shops to explore.  Abdali is the land of souks, with wares being sold from kiosks, stores, trays, small children and booths.  You can find almost anything here: live rabbits, cookware, plugs, stuffed animals, clothes, makeup, electronics, gold….  There are amazing hole in the wall (sometimes literally) diners serving kebab, kofta, aruuz and labneh too, if you know how to find them.

And Amman is very ex-pat, especially Western ex-pat, friendly.  Rainbow Street, emanating from First circle, is a self-proclaimed tourist and ex-pat mecca, with lots of cafes with wireless to work in and friendly staff who know English and give you dishes such as Sheppard’s pie and chicken soup just like mother used to make it.  Rainbow Street is also the home of the tiny but present gay community in Amman, with Books@Cafe, a bookstore-cum-café, run and owned by a male gay couple.  I was there the other day, and heard more people speaking French than Arabic; it was a brief refuge from the constant onslaught of learning a foreign language in a foreign city.

Even 'in Arabic' its just called Rainbow Street.

So that’s Amman, in a brief, Western-biased nutshell.  The city is constantly growing from an influx of Palestinians and Jordanians moving to this burgeoning economic center, more and more schools teaching business English are cropping up, and King Abdullah is trying to increase the amount of green space and parks that are in the city.  Amman is definitely evolving, and in a couple of years, who knows?  Maybe the stepchild will outshine his brothers and sisters, and become a new center of tourism, growth and importance in the region.

The Amman skyline, as seen from Rainbow Street.

On the plus side, I had my wallet; my laptop; my camera; a visually, if not olfactory, clean sweater; and my guidebook.  Tilting my situation towards an overwhelming negative doom panic spiral, however, was that I didn’t have any electronic chargers or a change of clothes, and I was wearing my only pair of undies.  Yep.  I rationally decided that FlyDubai having ‘misplaced’ my bag could not be construed as a positive first step towards establishing myself in Jordan.  I decided (again, oh so rationally) to lose it.  Incomprehensible mutterings and jagged incessant crying ensued.  In other words: I was not a happy camper, and I missed my mommy.

All’s well that ends well: five days later my bag finally made it to my door, a roommate and a co-worker were saints and lent me the completely necessary items for day to day living, and my various people helped me coordinate and bully the offending airline into finding my luggage and delivering it to me.

The reason I am sharing this little incident at all is to put what I say next into the proper context.  For, so far, mashallah (the local equivalent to saying ‘knock on wood’), I love being in Amman.  Though, there are differences.  Boy, are there differences in the way people live, think, work and interact here in Jordan, when compared to America.

Some of the most obvious and basic ones include:

The ratio of taxis to personal cars is astonishing; that the traffic isn't worse is a miracle.

People take cabs everywhere, and they are dirt-cheap. Amman has very few busses, and they are primarily the domain of men.  If you don’t have a car, you take a taxi with very few exceptions.  But, guess what?  A taxi ride from my house to downtown, for example, a 15 minute excursion, costs 1.5JD. That’s less than $2US.  Taxis have replaced busses, and account for one third of all vehicles on the road in Amman.  Taking a taxi is sometimes an amusing experience; I have been asked if I was married on numerous occasions, and once a cabby expressed surprise that I didn’t have any children.

Oh, and locations?  Use landmarks to direct cabs, rather than street names.  The street names were only created a few years ago by the government, and most taxi drivers don’t know them.  I say, “Sifara Britainnee, fi Abdoun” (British Embassy, in Abdoun) when I want to get home, and direct them with hand signals and the like when they are close to my place.

Everything is word of mouth.  Want to find an Arabic language course?  Ask a co-worker or friend- most aren’t advertised online, and telephone numbers are hard to come by.  Same thing applies to finding out where the party is at, which company has a job opening and how to get to the Dead Sea.

Smoking is rampant and socially encouraged. It’s alive and well as a practice here, and people smoke cigarettes indoors frequently.  Shisha, hookah, hubbly-bubbly (the most common local term for it) is common too, offered everywhere, and very inexpensive.  Some shisha shops are male havens only, but many cater to everyone.

An all too common site/sight.

Everyone litters.  Over 50% of Jordanians freely admit to littering, and I’ve seen people in cars toss out the usual such as cigarette packets, napkins and empty juice bottles, but also a toy action figure, a towel, and a Turkish coffee pot.  Trash middens are everywhere, and people think very little of it.  In fact, I heard one Jordanian explain it as follows: “I litter because it is good for the economy.  Because people litter, the government hires people to pick up the trash.  I am employing people.”  It must be noted, however, he said this with a sheepish smile, as if he knew he was spouting bullshit that simply wouldn’t fly.

Work.  The work-week here is officially Sunday – Thursday.  Everyone gets Friday off, and many get Saturday off as well, though this is in no way guaranteed.  Also places close early here: for instance, I currently work 9:00 to 4:30, and this is considered by many to be a very long day.  Most typical office jobs here are 9 to 3pm, with long lunches and periodic smoking breaks enjoyed by all.

The Abdali market on Thursday evening, ladies shift through shoes.

The shopping experience, the relationship between customer and shop owner, what is expensive, and what is cheap is all different.  Cucumbers, shwarma, falafel, tomatoes, local ice cream, bottled water… all cheap.  I can get a huge falafel sandwich for .60JD, a shwarma for 1JD, six huge bottles of water for 1JD, and a pound of cucumbers for .30JD.  On the other hand, electronics, imported anything… crazy expensive.  Also, the buyer/seller relationship is less harshly defined; it is not uncommon for a shop-owner to share a Turkish coffee with you, or engage in witty banter, or ask for your number.  Oh, and want to have ‘normal’ American coffee or yogurt that goes well with granola and honey?  Forget about it; somehow Nescafe and slightly salty yogurt are de jour, much to my chagrin.

But the two biggest differences between living in Amman and Washington DC are the differing lingua francas, and the way women are regarded, treated, dressed, etc.  Both of these differences are expansive and somewhat complicated, so I will save going into depth about them to later posts. But, suffice to say, being a woman who speaks English informs my experience here a great deal, and my perspective would undoubtedly differ if I were an Arabic speaking man, or some other combination of demographic traits.

I have now been in Amman for almost two weeks; the learning curve is still steep.  But inshallah (hopefully) I will continue to enjoy and learn from my time here as an expat.  James Baldwin ‘found’ himself while an expatriate in France, and, not to have too swelled a head and compare myself to Baldwin, I plan to do the same.

Happy at a Lebanese restaurant off of Rainbow Street, in a post-shisha, hummus and kebab euphoria.

Please note that most of my posts until September will be travel/Amman focused; there will be a hiatus, likely, from childhood memories and posts related to the amusing instances of shared humanity in the States.

A Senate hearing, for the uninitiated

About a month ago, I attended a Foreign Relations Senate Hearing entitled: The State of Human Rights and the Rule of Law of Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Russia: US Policy Options.  Hearings before Congress are a fascinating political structure because despite inviting experts in to testify in front of them, almost no Congressperson shows to hear them speak. Usually the room is comprised of interns, journalists, transcribers, and a few lobbyists. At this particular hearing, there was the usual blend of savory Washington characters, and four Senators, including Senator Shaheen, presiding.

To give you a quick background on the topic of this particular hearing:

The basic issue at stake in this hearing was human rights and rule of law abuses occurring in Russia. This year marks the 20thanniversary of the fall of the USSR, and in the intervening two decades, less was accomplished on the human rights front in Russia than the United States initially hoped.  Putin’s bid for a third term as President raises concerns of rigged elections, stuffed ballot boxes, political fraud and elections that “are neither fair nor free.”  The wide spread protests in Russia reinforce that this is a time of change, a time to reexamine existing US policy towards Russia.

On the table is the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, sponsored by Senator Ben Cardin.  This act is named, unsurprisingly, for Sergei Magnitsky: a Russian tax lawyer who worked for an American firm in Moscow and whistle blew on the largest known tax fraud case in Russian history.  For this deed he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and then died in an isolation cell.  His death remains unpunished to this day, and his killers remain in positions of authority.  This case of a gross human rights abuse is emblematic of many other, lesser publicized abuses.

The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act essentially seeks to invoke a travel ban against serious violators of human rights and freeze any assets these criminals might possess in US banks. In addition to the passing of this act, Senator Cardin urges the repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, claiming that it is outdated, and actually hurts economic development without any human right benefit.

Sergei Magnitsky

Let’s do a short poll, ladies and gents. Who knew about Magnitsky’s existence before reading this blog post? Are we hearing silence punctuated by crickets?

Before I attended the hearing, I didn’t know about him either. So many human rights abuses are occurring in other countries, cultural flash bulb memory moments as stark as Pearl Harbor was to Americans, and yet we don’t hear a thing about them in our news. At work, part of what I do is monitor the going-ons in several West African countries. It was through monitoring and researching some historical background on Guinea, for example, that I came across information regarding a government initiated massacre of peaceful pro-democracy rally members in 2009.

Altogether, between 150 and 200 people were murdered, with many others raped with bayonets, soldiers telling them they deserved it because of their ethnic identity. These sorts of acts are a crime against all humanity, not just Guineans. And I just heard of this now? When ‘news’ stories about some Kardashian chick are so prevalent that even I, who has so little pop culture caché, know about her?

Back to the Senate hearing. When the experts testified about the proposed legislation, concerns about human rights violations in Russia were always juxtaposed with the economic realities of enforcing American notions of proper rule of law on others. Essentially, the Senate members, and experts, were concerned with capitalizing on Russia as an opportunity for exports- with Russia’s soon to be WTO membership, there will finally be lessened tariffs on US made goods- likely a 40% decline in taxes. Thus, preserving a good relationship with Russia is a key US policy. So the question has to be asked: are measures, such as the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, enough of a US response to maintain the best blend of being a world leader in human rights, even while remaining profit margins? Are the sanctions of freezing bank accounts, and denying access to human rights offenders enough to deter these sorts of crimes against humanity? Should the US be in charge of policing abusive governments at all? I ask these in the format of questions because I honestly don’t know the answer, or what my opinion is or should be.

I just fear that because Americans (myself included) are in general so ignorant about some of the worst human rights offenses being committed by foreign governments, that it is up to experts, to responsible governments to take a stand. The general public doesn’t know enough to demand accountability, and besides, unless they are directly affected, the general public is certainly a sluggish mechanism for change. If the United States government doesn’t concern itself with human rights abuses in West Africa, in Russia, if there is no name-and-shame rhetoric, no sanctions or consequences, real economic and political consequences to genocide, rape and election fraud, who will?

President Obama even said on NBC’s Tonight Show that Qaddafi’s death sends a message to dictators everywhere “that people long to be free.” Obama said that Qaddafi “terrorized his country and supported terrorism” and had been given the opportunity to leave power. When he continued to refuse to do so, Obama noted that he thought “it obviously sends a strong message around the world to dictators that people long to be free, and they need to respect the human rights and the universal aspirations of people.”

However, not everyone celebrated Qaddifi’s death. A South African friend of mine, Kunale, posted the following on his facebook wall on the day Qaddafi was killed:

Qaddafi's living on in Social Media.

As you can see, he even made his profile picture Qaddafi’s image.

Talk about two sides to every story.

For those of you unfamiliar with South African history or politics, let me give ,you a quick background. The ANC stands for the African National Congress, and it is the majority party of South Africa, and has been since post-apartheid elections began in 1994. It is historically the party of Nelson Mandela and other like-minded freedom fighters who peacefully transitioned South Africa to a post-apartheid nation. The ANC still gets some political legitimacy from having this illustrious past.

Apparently, when Kunale referred to Qaddafi “supporting” the ANC, he was highlighting his personal and political relationship with Mandela. Not only did Qaddafi siphon off Libyan oil money to help fund the ANC during its struggle in apartheid years, he and Mandela publicly supported one another in the face of Western disapproval. For instance, Mandela was the first recipient of the Al-Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights in 1989, an award that Qaddafi founded and later gave to more dubiously benign world leaders such as Fidel Castro and Roger Garaudy. Nelson Mandela in return bestowed one of South Africa’s highest honors, the Order of Good Hope, on Qaddafi in 1997. He also stood by Qaddafi and some of his questionable human rights practices in speeches, indicating that as Qaddafi had helped him before Mandela and the ANC even gained power, when no Western power acknowledged their struggle, he would continue to support Qaddafi.

This did help to explain why Kunale mourned Qaddafi’s death, but it still seemed strange to me due to Qaddafi’s deliberate political distancing of Libya from the rest of Africa. Qaddafi’s appeal to sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africans was hard for my to grasp because of Qaddafi’s continuous emphasis on pan-Arabism, and seeming favoritism in his own nation towards lighter skinned, Middle Eastern ethnicities over darker, African ones. If Qaddafi was going to be portrayed as any type of hero, it would have to be as a Middle Eastern, not an African one. And yet there was Qaddafi’s face, where my friend’s face usually was….

Despite Kunale’s sentiments, his view is in no way indicative of how all South Africans think. Another of my South African acquaintances, a worldly 30-something who also spends significant amounts of time in the States, wrote the following when told about Kunale’s Facebook post:

This is not surprising to me and I understand (but don’t share) the sentiment. It’s the same sentiment that leads many Black South Africans to remain sympathetic to Mugabe. In fact it is the same sentiment that made America remain supportive of the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarack and Ferdinand Marcos, even after they had proven to be autocratic despots. In fact, Michelle Bachman just recently lamented the fact that Jimmy Carter did not do enough to shore up the Shah’s regime and keep him in power and that’s why Iran is now a problem.

People often base their views of issues and people on fairly myopic concerns that are usually related to their own self-interest or their own limited view historical experience and evidence. This is what makes democracy great and it is also what makes democracy problematic.

For an excellent blog post that explores the relationship between South Africa and Qaddafi further, please click here.

Larry and I shrugged. “That’s rough, man,” Larry comforted in laconic male fashion.

In South Africa, there are eleven official languages, and as many and more ethnic groups with distinct customs, cultural heritage, and collective consciousness. Everyone was South African, but nationalism wasn’t the strongest ‘ism’ binding people together, not by a long shot. In Cape Town, where Larry, Sanele and I were walking, the most common language group was Nguni Bantu, which includes both Xhosa and Zulu.

(To learn how to pronounce the Xhosa clicks correctly ‘click’ (get it?) HERE!)

However, those who identified as Xhosa far outnumbered the Zulu, at least in Cape Town. Sanele, as a Zulu man, was definitely in the minority. And though he could understand and speak Xhosa well enough (Zulu is to Xhosa what Quebecois is to French, or perhaps even more similar) his cultural heritage was different. Especially when it came to male initiation ceremonies.

Though accounts differ slightly (and there is a certain what-women-are-not-supposed-to-know factor) Xhosa boys graduate into men through male circumcision and ritual seclusion, usually happening when the boys are eighteen to twenty-three years old. Essentially, Xhosa boys in small groups are stripped of their youthful possessions, placed in a special hut, circumcised by male elders in the community and then stay in seclusion, fast, and become a man over a period of two weeks to three months. At the end of this period, they are transformed, leave the hut, wash themselves, burn the hut down in a symbology akin to a benign burning of your bridges, and take part in a huge feast, involving a goat. They are now men in the traditional sense, and are allowed for the first time to own property, marry, and officiate ceremonies. They also wear what modern, urban people would consider “old fashioned clothes”  including blazers and tweed and roaring twenties style hats. They wear these clothes for six months to display to the world their new status.

To read more (or differing!) accounts of this ritual, click HERE and HERE)

I was in the city of Cape Town in 2009; this practice was still prevalent, despite its modern, urban setting. Even brief online research reveals the depth of meaning that this ritual has for those who practice it:

Being a Xhosa man is very special and unique all because of the initiaion process. Nothing needs to be changed in what ever that is being done. As a tradional man i will have to teach my son the very same thing that i was thought starting from A-Z as my farther did. If im not giong to teach my son then who will?, i don’t want my son to be LOST and not know where he comes from (its all about roots).… I consider myself very lucky to be a Xhosa man that had gone trough the curcumcision ritual because some have’nt and they would really love to be made a Xhosa man.

So for Sanele, who as a Zulu, no longer had this custom (Zulus had a similar ritual, but it fell out of practice about 200 years ago), he would never be more than inkwenkwe, a boy to Xhosa women.  Bummer.

Larry and I were quiet for a moment. Then Larry asked, “Hey, did you ever consider dating a white chick?”

Sanele rolled his eyes and punched Larry gently on the shoulder. “I am desperate, but that is too desperate,” he said. He looked at me. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

When I was in Israel, six Israeli soldiers were placed with our group for the duration of our trip, ostensibly for our protection as well as to allow us to get to know people our own age in Israel.  There were two aspects of this I noted and was surprised by: first, how quickly I, an American, got used to and comfortable with being surrounded by loaded guns held by teenagers, and second, how, for lack of a better word – normal, average, like us –  all the soldiers seemed.  Let me explain.

In America, like most countries, military service is voluntary.  Thus, for a person to choose to be in the military, it reveals something about who they are, whether that is a penchant for guns, a true belief in supporting American foreign policy or simply a need to have the military pay for college.  The point is, choosing to be in the military is a decision that a minority of citizens make, and this means that there is a stereotype of what kind of people join the military.  For instance, in films, soldiers are portrayed as highly masculine; smart, but not intellectual; tough, and not particularly in touch with their emotions.

Thus, what immediately struck me in Israel, that due to a lack of choice (In Israel, the army joins you!) you had all types of people in the army, including individuals who you would never see as part of the armed forces in the US.  It was as normal a path as college (more so as approximately 88% of Israelis serve, and only 27.5% of Americans complete college) and that was reflected not just in the personalities of the soldiers I met, but also in the type of jobs that the army supplied personnel for.

For instance, Zaki, fun-loving and goofy, was serving out his last year of military service by being a talk show host on Israel National Radio.  He gave us a tour of the building that he aired from and let us gabble into a few mikes that weren’t being used.  The station looked very similar to the one I visited in DC for NPR, except that instead of being manned by middle-aged, erudite looking men and women dressed all in black, it was completely run and controlled by kids in military fatigues.

Rotem, on the other hand, pointed out the purple braid running down the shoulders of her uniform and told us that it signified that she was an army social worker.  She had never seen combat, though she had served in the Golan Heights on the Lebanese border for a while.   Ayelet, a slight girl who grew up in America and voluntarily returned to Israel so she could enlist in the Israeli army, was a drill instructor for first year soldiers.  Lola was trained in hand to hand combat and lived with her mom on the weekends when off duty.  Guy played guitar off-key; he must have had an additional military designation, but what I remember best was his playing of ‘Time of Your Life” by Green Day.  Nofar was a quiet, nerdy soldier who carried her gun with more care than the rest of the soldiers, never letting it hang loosely when she hugged people or ran around.  It was their very normalcy, in combination with the admittedly cool job that Zaki handled with such panache that made me critically re-examine my beliefs about a draft.

These soldiers believed, at age 18-21, that they had power.  They felt a sense of efficacy.  They had jobs that affected the world around them and people treated them with respect.  They were some of the most optimistic people I’ve met, and I do think that is in part because they knew that they had the ability to affect change, not only survive in the adult “real” world but be an important part of it.

Compare that to the way American early twenty-somethings feel after they leave college, or after high school, if higher education is not their goal.  Increasingly, there is something that has been termed “the quarter life crisis” or “the price of privilege” or what I like to call ‘the twenty-something malaise.’  Young Americans, particularly upper-middle class ones, are having a growing dissociation between who they are and what they are doing in life.  They feel buffeted by the world around them, and feel as unable to change their circumstances as a child would be (what they not-so-secretly fear to still be).  In short, American youth lack optimism about their own abilities, and become paralyzed, especially if they have the perfectionist, materialist and success-driven mindset of a type A, New Englander personality.  Add the terrible economy into the mix (an economy that is driving up unemployment among the young at higher rates than with the general adult population) and you get a perfect storm of alienated and depressed talented young people who blog instead of labor to find a better job. (I know, I know, here’s to the ladies who lunch – everybody laugh).

Back to the soldiers.  Not only do they have a task and a job that is structured (and thus a stepping stone between childhood and adulthood, much like how college provides structure), they have a job that is meaningful and important.  Unlike college students who work to improve their own human capital, Israeli soldiers are developing a personal skill set while also interacting and being part of their nation’s economy.  They therefore develop the notion that yes, they can affect change, and no, they are not reliant on their parents to survive (they have power in and of their own decisions).  Being in the army teaches a sense of pragmatism about their place in the world such that when they stop being in the service and attend university or get a job, the experience of fending for themselves is not a Herculean task of psychologically epic proportions.  It’s just what you do.

There is a dark side to youth having so much power as well, of course.  The recent news article in the Washington Post about the unarmed 24 year-old Palestinian that was shot at the West Bank border can be seen as an example of that.  The Palestinian was killed when a nearby soldier panicked and mistook a bottle in his hand as a weapon.  It is possible that had the soldier not been so young when she was given that gun and heavily instilled doctrine that Israel is surrounded by enemies, that the story would have ended differently.  The bottle of water might have stayed just a bottle of water.

So, to conclude,  would I have wanted to be drafted?  Hell no, I don’t respond well to authority and don’t look good in camouflage.  But still, it is hard to deny, especially in the face of an increasingly depressed and lost generation of middle to upper class American twenty-somethings, that the power and confidence the Israeli army experience afforded its younger citizens is an intriguing, if impossible, solution to the current malaise of being young and real-world inexperienced in bad economy.

Take being miffy, for example.  If you are at all like I was, the word ‘miffy’ connotes a particularly wretched and fluffy children’s story heroine’s name, certainly not a word the proper adults use in everyday life.  But, as Cordelia explained to me at intermission, the word ‘miffy’ refers to the way someone drinks their tea: if they put their milk in the mug before the tea, they’re miffy.  If they put their tea in their mug before their milk, they’re tiffy.  And if they forgo the milk in their tea entirely, they’re Americans.  But, even more interestingly, how one drinks one’s tea is representative of their social status.  And, as Cordelia pointed out, that was something the director of Brief Encounter was highly cognizant of.

In the show, the lower class characters of the railway tea shop owner and her employee, the indefatigable Beryl, both were seen to pour copious amounts of milk into the cups before serving it to the customers.  The higher class characters, the married woman Laura and the charming chance encounter doctor, both had a subtly quick yet telling moment of their eyes meeting in consternation and amusement over their proffered cups of milk and tea.  Later in the scene, they held their forks and knives in (to me, a seemingly unnatural) manner as to cover up the stem of the utensil with their hands.  The lower class characters held their forks much as Americans do, like a pencil.  This too, apparently speaks volumes about how you were raised in Britain.

The fact that the modern Brit can still derive so much class information from activities as simple as eating and drinking serves as reminder how differently orientated America and England still are from one another.  For better or for worse, American ‘class’ is a nebulous concept, with as many as 9 out of 10 people saying they are middle class if they are allowed to throw a “lower” or “upper” prefix label in there.  (No joke.  No really, its Science.)   And it is almost completely defined by economic indicators: how much one makes in comparison to the cost of living in their region, etc.   In contrast, in England, the classes are still more socially stratified, and being of a certain class not only connotes a certain economic position, but also certain social morals and etiquette, values, family structure and linguistic patterns.  That’s not to say it isn’t more fluid than it used to be; it is.  And it is certainly more based on money than it used to be as well.   But even if one doesn’t care about class (and I know many Brits who don’t) they still notice it.   As Brief Encounter starkly showed, social differences that my more egalitarian-trained brain couldn’t pick up on without help where obvious to Cordelia.   And that conception of class effects a wider scope of societal norms than you might at first think.  The Manifest Destiny, for instance, is a central American tenant.  The concepts of the economic individual actor, that anyone can be rich or be president are pervasive and ubiquitous parts of our heritage.  And I think that I, for one, didn’t really account for differences that arise from a history of class as a currency as real as our dollar.

As we left the theatre, I asked Cordelia where I, any American, and for that matter, any foreigner fell on the social class scale.  She looked at me, and, as if it were obvious, said, “We don’t look at foreigners in terms of class.”   Good, I thought, as I pocketed my playbill, because I wasn’t going to switch over to covering the stem of the fork while I ate anytime soon.

In particular, the very idea of a national culture has been called to account for itself. I’ve argued that Grid-group cultural theory offers some insights into the kind of lifting work the concept of the nation is supposed to do for us. It also helps explain why some might not like the idea of national cultures.

The Other Gardener took me to task for apparently supporting censorship. My rely can serve as a conclusion:

I support the line of Amnesty International on Chinese censorship of dissidents, but I’m trying to examine my own biases. This isn’t an idle speculation: we all want the world to be a particular way (in my case, freedom of speech), and find it hard to come to terms with justifications of other ways of being. Is it reasonable to argue that different countries just have different cultures and that this extends to different censorship regimes?  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims to be, well, universal. Is any regime exempt? If so, how so? If not, how not? If Google is having trouble with the concept of free speech via Chinese gmail accounts, why is this? How does the ‘universal’ nature of human rights get negotiated with a government that only recognises human rights with a Chinese spin ? Can we even talk like this? Is there anything distinctly and appropriately Chinese in internet censorship, or is that just special pleading?

Conversely, where does the idea of universal human rights gain traction? I’ve argued that this can be seen as an Egalitarian, or Individualist, weak-grid approach to national differences. By understanding this, perhaps the international work of groups like Amnesty can be strengthened in a small way.

To shine the spotlight back on the US, we could ask how this ‘freedom loving’ nation ends up executing so many of its prisoners (and how it comes to have so many prisoners in the first place). Is there something peculiarly and appropriately American that makes the penal regime so distinctive (the US along with China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran carry out more than 90% of all executions)? If we are all expected to be free with our speech, as in the US, are we also supposed to be free with our sentencing to death, as in the US?
Cross-cultural theory seems to assume that we would want to fit in with another nation’s patterns of social activity in order to make our business relationships work better. But what if we really don’t agree with those patterns? I’m concerned that to naturalise national cultures is to concede too much, and that we would be wrong to suggest there’s something Chinese about censorship and something American about lethal injections. But if we don’t make national comparisons, what kinds of comparisons can we make instead? That’s where grid-group cultural theory comes in.

Read Part 1

Part 2

excursus: are the guardians of national boundaries beginning to look pathetic?

References

Abbott, T (1990) ‘The real issue is the changing face our society’, The Australian, 31 May , quoted in Adam Jamrozik (2002) From Lucky Country to Penal Colony: How Politics of Fear Have Changed Australia . Keynote Address to ‘Refugees and the Lucky Country’ Forum, RMIT, Melbourne 28-30 November 2002 , accessed at http://www.tasa.org.au/docs/public/2002/281102%20From%20Lucky%20Country%20to%20Penal%20Colony.pdf

Ailon, Galit (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Culture’s Consequences in a value test of its own design. The Academy of Management Review, 33(4):885-904. Accessed at http://aom.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&eissn=1930-3807&volume=33&issue=4&spage=885

Delaney, Rob and Ari Levy (2010) China Bosses Davos as Nobody Discusses What Happened to Google. Bloomberg Online. Accessed at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aUvrtIRc80JA

Foner, Eric (1999) The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W.Norton

Hofstede, Geert (1997) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstede, Geert (2005). Cultures and organizations: software of the mind (Revised and expanded 2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstede, Geert (2009) AMR Dialogue: Who Is The Fairest Of Them All? Galit Ailon’s Mirror. The Academy of Management Review, Volume 34, Number 3 (July)

Marcus, Aaron and Emilie West Gould (2002) Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-Interface Design: What? So What? Now What? AIGA Archives [October 11]. Accessed at http://www.amanda.com/resources/hfweb2000/hfweb00.marcus.html

McSweeney, Brendan (2002) Hofstede’s Model Of National Cultural Differences And Their Consequences: A Triumph Of Faith – A Failure Of Analysis Human Relations, Vol. 55, No. 1, [January], pp. 89-118. Accessed at http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/b329/readings/mcsweeney.doc

Mill, John Stuart (1869) The Subjection of Women. Fourth Edition. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

Prasad, S. Benjamin, Michael J. Pisanib and Rose M. Prasad (2008) New criticisms of international management: An analytical review International Business Review Volume 17, Issue 6, December 2008, Pages 617-629.

Thompson, M and A. Wildavsky (1986) A cultural theory of information bias in organisations. Management Studies 23 (3), 273-286.

Woodrow, Alan (1998) The Church and Human Rights. The Tablet (January 3). Accessed at http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/6569

“Good enough for our transatlantic friends … but unworthy of the attentions of practical or scientific men.”

Good enough for our transatlantic friends?

This was the verdict of a British Parliamentary Committee , on the implications of Thomas Edison’s new electric lamp, which had been patented in the US in 1879.

In the gloom of the gas-light they couldn’t see the significance of Edison’s invention. But equally they misunderstood national differences. If the lamp was ‘good enough’ for American use, why would that change just by crossing an ocean? And if it really had no ‘practical or scientific’ worth, why wouldn’t practical or scientific Americans be able to spot that flaw just as well as their British counterparts?

I’m exploring differences across national boundaries, specifically with reference to Geert Hofstede’s Cross-Cultural Theory, which is explored most fully in his book, Cultures and Organizations. Software of the Mind. I’m doing so to try to discover whether the recent argument between Google and the Chinese Government on censorship comes down to cultural misunderstanding, or something else.

Cross-Cultural Theory

Based on research he undertook among different national offices of IBM, Hofstede identified four, later five essential dimensions of culture against which nations can be measured and compared. Each country analysed gets an aggregated score against each of the five scales. If there is such a thing as national culture, Hofstede has the figures to show it (1997; 2005). Hofstede’s approach has been widely adopted in industry, but has been questioned in the management literature (McSweeny 2002), most recently by Galit Ailon, who researched cultural differences in the Israeli takeover of an Israel-based American business and claimed to find Hofstede’s approach lacking (Ailon 2008, cf. Prasad et al 2008). In the to-ing and fro-ing of academic claim and counter-claim (Hofstede 2009) the image of a mirror is used and re-used. The metaphor suggests that researchers on national cultures are tricked by their methodologies into seeing what they set out to see. Like the wicked queen of the fairy tale, they already know who is the fairest of them all and they aren’t about to accept any evidence to the contrary.

Questions for Cross-Cultural Theory

This web site focuses on a different theory that deals with a different kind of culture. From a Grid-Group Cultural Theory perspective differences across national borders and within nations, cities and households are at least as significant. From this perspective there are some obvious questions:

1. What is essential about national boundaries? For example, Hofstede gives clear scores for an Australian national culture, and certainly there is evidence of a programme of ‘Australianness’ within the country, with annual recognition of Australia Day as a public holiday and active media interest in questions of what constitutes the Australian spirit or the true Australian. Is it OK, for instance, for a leading supermarket chain to sell a t-shirt that reads ‘Australian born and bred’? In 1990 the now leader of the Federal opposition said:
   “The issue is the sort of Australia we want our children and grandchildren to inherit. Will it be a relatively cohesive society that studies Shakespeare, follows cricket and honours the Anzacs; or will it be a pastiche of cultures with only a geographic home in common… Race matters – but only because it usually signifies different values, attitudes and beliefs. The real problem is not race, but culture. ” The political exploitation of anxieties about national culture demonstrates that perceptions of nationhood are far from settled. Note also the impoverished account of cohesion (Shakespeare, cricket and ANZAC is a recipe for cultural sclerosis, rather than something to celebrate). Since approximately 40% of the population of Sydney, Australia’s largest city, was not actually born in Australia, the boundary between Australian culture and non-Australian culture is, to say the least, more permeable than Hofstede seems to allow for.
2. What grounds the five dimensions of culture identified by Hofstede? They appear to have been intuited first, then empirically confirmed. But there is nothing to say there aren’t ‘really’ four dimensions (as Hofstede used to claim), or six, or two. CT at least attempts a logical rationale for four cultural biases, based on two measurable scales.
3. What makes a culture homogeneous, either within an organisation (like IBM, Hofstede’s main subject) or within a nation? CT suggests cultures are multilayered, with different cultural biases in evidence at different scales of observation.
4. Like the Parliamentary Committee examining Edison’s lamp, we might further add: What practical or scientific use is Hofstede’s theory? It appears to have found a market among globalising firms seeking to ‘localise’ their working practices, marketing, public relations and so on. It is, surely, helpful for there to be some reflection of the question of whether all places and peoples are the same, or whether there are differences. It seems evident that there are differences, and if so there is likely to be a market for those who claim to be able to explain and codify those differences to the benefit of someone’s bottom line. An interesting use of Hofstede’s work is found in an analysis of web sites (Marcus and Gould 2002).The authors sought to classify different web sites along the lines of the five dimensions of culture elaborated by Hofstede. Interestingly, though the web sites they considered ack at the turn of the century now look distinctly dated, on returning to the same web sites in 2010, one finds, more often than not, the same kinds of underlying features, with no more than a superficial makeover.

Information bias: as much national difference as we care to see

Cultural Theorists Michael Thompson and Aaron Wildavsky claimed that organisational cultures can be defined in terms of their ways of accepting information and also rejecting it. So among what kinds of cultures might it make sense to have distinctive national characteristics? And conversely, which cultures might want to reject such a claim? (Thompson and Wildavsky 1986).

Read more in part two, coming next…

That’s sort of how I feel right now. I’m writing from the venerable Cafe String. Anybody who has been to Stockholm with me knows String is sort of a favorite of mine. It is a rather unappetizing cafe full of used furniture and high schoolers in vintage clothes. Still, I can’t help myself. They have couches and free wireless access. The place was probably 10 or 15 years old back when I was in high school and well, that’s 10 or 15 years ago by now. I saw a girl I could have sworn was my friend Ellen, then realized she probably looks 10 years younger than the real Ellen. Weird.

(Clicking the photo will take you to my Flickr set for this trip)

The weather just keeps on being wonderful. I spent the weekend meandering across Stockholm by foot and on bike meeting various people for coffee and drinks. If I could export all my friends to New York life would truly be perfect. For me at least.

This morning I had my appointment to apply for a visa at the U.S. embassy (I have the work permit but need a new entry visa.) Always an odd experience. The embassy is a heavily fortified brutalist cold war structure by Gärdet. You wait on line on the sidewalk for 1.5 hour to clear security (no cell phones or other electronics allowed). Then you come in, wait on one line, hand over your stuff, sit on another line and eventually get called up to a window. A uniquely American style of bureaucracy. Not saying Swedish bureaucracy is less maddening, just different. Swedish bureaucracy has no air-conditioning, pastel walls and “nummer lappar” (numbered tickets).

This evening I am having dinner at Maria’s and Pelle’s in Hökarängen. Tomorrow I take the late evening train to Lund. I’m supposed to be working on an article there so perhaps I will have more exciting stuff to tell in a few days.

Hasta Luego