Spring Cleaning

It’s the end of May and the grass that was green and knee-high last month has all been dried by the sun and eaten by sheep. The sight is a little bleak, but everyone around here is smiling. May is almost over, the school-year is ending, and all around us people we love are coming home. Students all over the country are coming back for the summer, and here in Ramtha my landlady’s daughter is returning from a year in the US on a Fulbright. It’s all anybody’s been talking about upstairs for the last 3 months, and in a week she’ll be here. As for me, I’m smiling because tomorrow someone from home is coming to visit me too. I’ve been looking forward to it for months and tomorrow I’ll take a series of buses to Amman to pick her up from the airport… and somehow, preposterously, invite this person I love into this strange world that’s now my home.

We’ve all been a little crazy around here the last few weeks- I guess it’s something to do with the fact that pretty soon people we love will drop out of the sky into our arms. My landlady seems delighted and also very anxious about the whole thing, and I guess my feelings are about the same. Turns out, cultural differences or not, we express those feelings in the same way- by cleaning everything in sight. I guess it has to do with having all these huge, crazy feelings of joy and wanting to show them somehow. There’s no way Om Yazzim’s daughter would ever show up demanding freshly mopped floors and squeaky clean toilets, and maybe she won’t even notice. But my landlady and I can’t stop ourselves- we need to get our worlds ready in whatever way we can.

Today I went upstairs to return some dishes and found Om Yazzim on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the hallway. Her hair was all frizzled and pushed up from her forehead, she was covered in dust and soapsuds, and she was wearing a nightdress that she clearly hadn’t bothered to change out of- probably because she’d been cleaning since she woke up. She told me she was tired from all the work but she still had the bathroom and kitchen to go. She said all of this with a giant grin. I came back up a few hours later (after cleaning my bathroom and kitchen) and we sat in the living room and ate watermelon on the floor in silence (all of the farshas, curtains, and rugs were in the laundry). I guess we both had a lot on our minds. For the past 5 months I’ve spent a lot of quiet meals glancing at Om Yazzim and wondering what she was thinking about. But tonight anybody who’d seen the two of us wouldn’t need to guess- you’ve never seen anyone look so happy while cleaning a toilet.

A day in the life

Before I left for the Peace Corps, I would tell people about my assignment in Jordan and they would say “That’s so nice!…so what’ll you be doing?” And I never, ever knew how to answer. Peace Corps provided me with the basic information- that I’d be working in a center or at a university, maybe as a teacher, maybe not?- and very little else. I had no idea what specifically I’d be doing at my center until I got to Jordan, and even after that it wasn’t always clear. As it turns out (like most things in the Peace Corps) my role at my workplace is something I’ve had  to define on my own. But now that I’ve had a couple months to figure it out, I guess it’s about time I explained what I do everyday.  So here’s a breakdown of a day in the life of a special education volunteer in Jordan:

7am: Wake up, eat breakfast, go for a run in the fields around my house. Try to avoid wild dogs, construction crews, and the shepherds and their herds.

9am: Roll in to my center, say good morning to my mudier, teachers, tea ladies, and bus driver.

9:15am: Go around to all of the classrooms and say hi all of the kids individually to help them practice shaking hands and greetings.

9:30am: Check my schedule and go around to remind teachers whose classrooms I’ll be in that day, make copies and set up whatever I need for that day’s activities. Here’s the schedule I made with my teachers:

I like to follow the schedule when I can, but at least 75% of the time it doesn’t work out that way. The work environment here is a lot more spontaneous and a lot less schedule-driven than my American mind ever assumes, and that’s something that I’ve had to get used to. Today I walked in to my center and everyone was outside sitting on a rug spread out under the trees while the bus driver shook berries out from the branches on to the kids’ heads. So instead of doing worksheets we sat in the shade and ate berries all morning. Not a bad trade-off. I leave Thursdays open for the activities that got post-poned during the week and things tend to work out alright.

Berry picking day is the best.

10am: Snack time! Help pass out falafel sandwiches to the kids and drink tea with the teachers while the kids eat. Try to follow the teachers’ conversations while also trying to keep the kids from taking each others’ sandwiches. Two things usually happen during snack that I love:

1. The kids will all unfailingly drop whatever they’re doing, get out of their seats, shout my name, and wave to me when I come into the snack room. Sometimes they all chant my name in unison and it never fails to make me feel like a complete rockstar.

2. My teachers, bus-driver, and tea ladies are all on a united front to make sure I eat as much as possible every day. Sometimes I get a handful of berries, dates, or even ice cream, but there’s always falafel. There is. always. falafel.

10:30am: Work on materials and worksheets for the teachers, like this:

11:00am: Go to whoever’s class I’m scheduled for and bring worksheets I’ve made  to help with the kids’ IEPs or an activity of some kind. So far I’ve done water-bottle bowling, a couple art projects, play-dough, and simple games like charades, Simon Says and I-spy.

11:30am: Go to the second room I have scheduled that day and bring a worksheet or activity. Here are a couple we’ve done so far:

12:00pm: Go around to each classroom and take the kids who’ve had good behavior that day outside to help feed and play with the rabbits. (We have rabbits now! More on that later.) I’ve been working a lot with the teachers on behavior modification this semester, so I made these charts for their classrooms to help them keep track of the kids’ progress throughout the day:

We go out to the rabbit/pigeon/chicken coop outside, usually all holding hands because my life is adorable. Then the kids help me bring grass in to the rabbits and we spend a couple minutes petting them and talking about how soft they are.

(There are four rabbits, and their names are Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Falafel, and Hummus. The teachers named them.)

12:30-1pm: The bus rolls up and everybody gets ready to leave. The kids love riding on the bus- partly because they are all obsessed with buses and cars in general (obsessed.), and partly because our bus driver is the best. He routinely brings them rabbits, frogs, snakes, baby pigeons, and iguanas.

And that’s pretty much the way things go around here. Here are some other pictures of the other stuff I’ve been making for the center this semester:

As with most things in Jordan, my work at the center is crazy, largely unpredictable, and really, really fun. I mean, how many people get to go to work and pick berries, have dance parties, and pet baby rabbits? As my fellow SPED volunteer Megan said the other day, “I get on the school bus and I just can’t stop smiling. I guess I’m really happy here.”

The chickens in my kitchen

I have a personal policy here in Jordan of saying yes to pretty much everything. When my school principal comes to me with 6 bags of buttons and a 5×6 orange sheet and requests that I make a mural, I say yes. When strangers on the street invite me to their houses for tea I say yes and then I follow them home. And during training whenever my host family told me to get in the car with my camera and a bottle of water and to tell Peace Corps I would be gone for the day, of course I always said yes. So last week when one of the teachers at my center told me I should come with her to visit her sister’s husband’s poultry farm, I said yes without even thinking about it. This is my standard of normal now.

So after work we convinced the school-bus driver to drop us off at her sister’s house and we spent the afternoon making and eating  lunch and then hanging out and eating ice cream with all the family members that showed up to meet the awkward foreign American. Eventually (after I dropped a lot of hints) all 5 women, 1 man, and 4 children piled into the car to drive up the road and visit the farm. I’d been picturing the whole red barn, rooster on the roof, lots of hay- type scenario, but the reality was a little more business-like:

We took a tour through the building, which was all white tile and giant carts filled with egg trays that, according to our guide (teacher’s sister’s husband Hammud), get tilted at 40 degree angles to the right and then to the left every hour. Then we practiced picking up the eggs with an anxiety-producing suction machine.

And then it was time to move on to the incubation rooms, which were heated at 95 degrees and filled with tiny, fluffy, out-of-this-world-adorable baby chicks packed in floor-to-ceiling stacks of plastic crating. Hammud casually pulled one of them out and plopped it down on the floor.

At which point we all reached in and started to make friends.

After a few minutes of bonding with the most adorable animals on earth it seemed like it might be time to leave, so I started to get up and put my new friends back in their crate. But instead Hammud and the kids all handed more chicks to me (I had like 5 in my hands at this point) and insisted that I take them home to live with me forever. So of course I said yes.

I didn’t consider the fact that I have no experience raising anything ever, that I’d never actually even encountered a baby chick in my life before that day, or that  I own a cat. Whatever, someone had just offered me an armful of baby animals and I wasn’t going to turn them down. So we put them in the trunk and drove home.

The first step when I got home was locking my bloodthirsty, attention-starved cat in the bedroom while I googled the business of raising 5 day-old chicks without any equipment or experience. Fortunately there are a lot of people that have already done this (special thanks to the DIY movement and Barbara Kingsolver), and I was able to figure out pretty much everything that I needed, which included a brooder and a lot of birdseed. so after a little research and a trip to the hardware store in Amman I was able to produce this:

It’s constructed mostly duct-tape, cardboard, and fire-hazards, but the chicks are alive and happy so I’m calling it a success. When they get a little bigger I’m planning to move them to my center so our students can help take care of them. Farming is big out here, so the more skills our kids learn in that department the better. And I guess I’m learning with them.

The Visits

Before I left for Jordan I spent a lot of time reading through websites, volunteer blogs, and of course, my invitation packet, which looked like this:

and I remember one day coming across this sentence: “Visiting is the national pastime of Jordan.”

Kind of a bold statement. Especially if you don’t really know what “visiting” is supposed to mean. But now that I’ve lived here for 5 (close to 6!) months, I get it. Because most Jordanians really do seem to spend the bulk of their free time visiting, hosting visitors, or preparing for visits (i.e., making food) for their family members and neighbors. In Al Manshiya, my training village, that meant that every afternoon and evening would find me on the farshas of someone’s living room, drinking tea and smiling at several people I’d never met before and couldn’t understand. Here in Ramtha I’m on a pretty solid visiting-every-other-day kind of schedule, which is a little more healthy for my personal space. Visiting can last anywhere from 45 minutes to 6 hours to several days, and there’s actually a pretty dependable procedure that’s followed. Here’s the breakdown:

Arrive at someone’s door, pretty much always unannounced. Ring the doorbell, which will unfailingly make a screeching sound like birds mating/fighting.

Kiss the child or woman who answers the door in whatever way your region recognizes as appropriate. In Ramtha it’s your right cheek to their right for one kiss, then three to their left.

Awkwardly remove your shoes on their doorstep while they watch you. Never wear boots unless there’s a side-zipper. (Thank god for the side-zipper.)

Follow your host to whatever room has the soba. Everyone in the room will stand up when you come in, and then you’ll do kisses with all of the women (children are optional but I always kiss them too because it’s the cutest), and mutter all of the appropriate greetings at each other as fast as you can without listening to their responses or providing your own. You’ll talk later, right now you have 5 other women and 3 toddlers to get through. If there are men in the room (which is unlikely because they tend to hide from foreign female visitors), you’ll each put your right hands over your hearts, bow your heads a little at each other, and say “peace be upon you.” But probably there aren’t any men.

Then everyone gets to sit down again on the farshas and you’ll awkwardly arrange yourself so that  your feet aren’t exposed to anyone (it’s an insult!) and your legs are together. Probably you’ll sit with your legs tucked to the side with your feet underneath you, and when you start to get crampy and try to switch sides your hosts will notice and a kindly old woman will bring you a blanket to drape over your feet.

Whoever answered the door will probably leave to make tea, so you’ll feel a little abandoned and exposed. But don’t worry, she’ll return with a plastic tray bearing the teapot, several tiny glass cups, and some kind of slogan in English like, “Tea is for everyday!” or “Crazy for Cafe!” They’ll pour and distribute the tiny cups and it’ll be way to hot to drink or probably to hold, so you’ll put it in front of you on the floor and guard it from roving children.

It’s black tea, kind of weak, with at least 2 cups of sugar for an 18 oz teapot. If it’s not 2 full cups of sugar people will comment. Usually sage goes in the tea, but sometimes they do mint or cinnamon bark (which is the best).

If there are enough people present, conversation will flow naturally about illnesses, meals people have made recently, and things that happened to people you don’t know. You’ll smile benignly and drink. If there are kids you can play with them. If there aren’t that many people around then conversation will be more centered on you, which is harder if you’re like me and not that great at Arabic yet. But after you go on enough visits, you’ll have memorized the questions:

“Where do you live?”

“You live alone??!!!”

“Oh thank God you have a landlady. What food does she make for you?”

“Are you married?”

“No??! Why not??”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“Only one brother??!!! Why.”

“How old is he and what does he do and where does he live?”

“Are your parents here with you?”

“No??!! Where do they live? How often do you talk to them? When are you going to see them again?”

“What are you doing in Jordan?”

“Which is better, the United States or Jordan?”

The fun part is that if you make it through this battery with one family member, she will provide all of the answers to the next person who asks you (and there will be others). A new family member will walk in halfway through the visit and start in with the first question and your compatriot will put a hand on your shoulder as if to say “You can tap out, I got this,” and then race through all your answers for you as you drink tea and try to overlook the fact that she just said you’re working as a nurse and that you don’t have kids because you’re waiting to find a husband in Jordan (God willing).

It’s all part of the process.

After the tea, there will be a snack- usually dates but sometimes sweets or baklava (or once, Turkish delights! Like in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe), followed by Turkish coffee (again, the sugar ratio applies).

By this time you’ll probably be ready to go (you’ve been dropping hints about how dark it’s getting and how worried your landlady will be for the past hour), but just as your getting up someone will come out with giant bowls of fruit and several knives, and you will be required to sit back down again. Everyone will eat at least three pieces of fruit. They will peel everything for you, especially after you jump into the apple American-style without cutting it. They will tell you that’s how Tom eats apples on Tom and Jerry.

After three pieces of fruit and probably a glass of juice or Pepsi (pronounced “Bebsi”), you can maybe go home. They will be upset. They will command you to stay and eat more with them and spend the night. You will firmly refuse, because otherwise you will end up moving in with them.

You kiss everyone in the room again, promise to visit again soon, put on your shoes in the doorway while the kids watch and giggle, and you’re on your way.

As you stumble home you realize that both of your legs have fallen asleep from sitting on the ground so long, your stomach is making crazy noises from the inopportune combination of food and carbonation and sugar, and you’re completely wired from all the caffeine. But you’re smiling- because you’re a Jordanian now, and this is your national pastime.

Visiting my host sister with my training group...perfect chaos.

Iguanas, formal wear, and what I ate last night

I’m living in a crazyworld. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jordan and my center, my kids, my landlady, my neighbors- it’s all great. But frequently during my day there are moments where I just have to stop and look around me, wondering how in the world this could be my life. There’s no other way to react. Today, for example, our center’s bus driver appeared at the door of the older girls’ classroom grinning and cradling an iguana. For the last 3 weeks one of my students has come to school wearing the same pinstriped suit and a clip-on tie. Last week I got into a heated discussion with my school’s principal about the spelling of the word “butter.” (He insisted that in British English it’s “buttle.”), and yesterday I walked into the older boys’ classroom where they all immediately fell to the floor and started doing push ups.  Frequently I’ll be talking to someone and they’ll just casually flip open their phone and start filming me, and the number one conversation starter I get every day is invariably “What did you eat last night?” The guy who works at the post office has my cell phone number, and when I come in for my mail, it is understood that I will sit down for tea and cake he can ask me how my family is doing. Every morning I go for a run in the fields around my house, and sometimes I get chased by wild dogs.

This is my life. When people ask me how I’m doing, I usually just give an answer that reflects the last 20 minutes or so- “I’m good- I just ate some really good falafel with my landlady!” Giving an answer that reflects the whole day’s experiences usually seems daunting. The upside is that I am never, ever bored at work (or any other time I’m away from my apartment). The downside is that so many things happen every day that there’s no way I’ll ever be able to remember them all. But maybe by the end of these 2 years I’ll be completely used to everything that seems so crazy now. I’ll be back in the U.S., drinking endless cups of sugar-tea and flipping open my phone to film strangers on the bus. So when I demand to know where you’re from and everything you’ve recently eaten, be patient with me. I’ve been off in another world.

My first day

First days anywhere are weird. My first day of 8th grade I ran into a pole. My first day with a driver’s license I drove the wrong direction down a one way street and sat in the intersection for a complete chorus of “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” before I realized what was happening. Last summer I threw up on my first day of work. So it’s no surprise that the first day at my center was…uncomfortable? confusing? overwhelming? But I didn’t throw up, so I guess it could have been worse.

The day started with a funeral. Everyone arrived at the center, kids went to their classrooms, we drank tea, and so far everything seemed normal. And then all at once all the teachers got up from the table where we were sitting, grabbed their purses and phones, and yelled “yela!” (it means “let’s go.”) I’ve gotten used to the fact that when people say “yela” in Jordan, I have to drop everything and go with them. Most of the time I don’t know where we’re going, but I’ve gotten used to that too. So we all left the center, walked across the street, and were ushered into a house by the 9 year old standing out in front. We walked into someone’s (I still don’t know whose) living room, took off our shoes, and then proceeded to shake hands and kiss everyone in the room. It was a big room, and all four walls were lined with farshas,  and all of the farshas were filled with women.There was about a 6 foot space that was empty, so after the kisses were done all 7 of us squeezed in there. Then we drank Arabic coffee (it tastes like cardamom!) and ate dates and sat in respectful silence for about 25 minutes, after which all of my crew stood up, said “yela!,” shook hands with everyone again, and left.

The kids were waiting for us when we got back. While we were gone they had been eating chips and cookies, getting into fights, falling asleep, and wetting themselves, and I was the only one who was surprised. After some personal hygiene and more tea the teachers and kids gradually divided themselves into classrooms, with some kids still kind of roaming, and I roamed too. I’m supposed to be spending the first month just observing, but that got pretty monotonous after about an hour, so I gave it up and got down on the floor to play with the kids. I also broke up 4 fights, changed the pants of two different children, repaired a backpack, and wiped more noses and opened more chip bags than I can remember. At some point in the day the teachers all shouted “yela!” again, and we all went into the mudier’s office for a meeting.

The bus driver had apparently taken a bag of dates from the funeral (or it was a gift?), so we drank tea and ate those and stood around while everyone talked about how cold it is. I’ve had to work pretty hard to adjust to the accent here in Ramtha (they add a lot of b’s and ch’s to everything), but after a month I’ve gotten a lot better at understanding people. The problem is that understanding someone in a conversation is different from trying to follow what 10 different people are saying when they’re talking over each other. So I lost track of things (still not sure what the meeting was even about), and during the whole thing one of the kids wandered in- a little girl with Down’s Syndrome who I’d met earlier. The office is pretty small and seating is limited, so all 10 of us were crowded in a circle around the mudier’s desk, and this kid somehow kind of wedged herself into the middle of that circle. I gave her a handful of dates and even though a couple of teachers told her to leave, no one seemed particularly bothered that she was there. So she stayed, and just kind of bumped around from person to person while the meeting went on. Every time she found herself in front of someone new she would hold her hands out to them, tilt her head a little to the side, and just stare at them in this sweet wide-eyed way, just taking it in. After awhile I gave up trying to understand what everyone was saying and just sat watching this kid, and wondering if she and I didn’t look about the same to the 9 other people standing around us. And I think even if I spend the next 2 years wandering from one place to the next, confused as shit, I’d like to do it just like her, with my arms out and my eyes wide open.

How to make friends in Jordan

Today I was coming back from a trip into town (and a 3 hour wait to pay the bill for my internet. Found out there are no public restrooms in Ramtha. Anyway). I was walking past a patch of houses across the olive orchards from mine when I saw the most adorable kitten in Jordan, just hanging out in front of a trash can. Black and white, tiny, super fluffy. So I dropped all of the stuff I was carrying and picked it up (it seemed like the logical response) and I immediately fell in love. There was purring, nestling, etc, so I think the feeling was mutual. I decided to adopt this animal and take it home with me to become best friends forever, and I picked up my stuff and started walking away with several bags and a cat in my arms. I was that person. Anyway I made it like 300 feet before a little boy came running out into the yard and shouted “WEIN! WEIN!!” (where! where!!), at which point I realized I had stolen his cat.

Just so we’re clear, no one owns cats in Jordan. No one even likes cats in Jordan. When told my landlady I wanted to get a cat, she was horrified and confused. So it was reasonable for me to assume that this cat didn’t have an owner….apparently I just happened to try to adopt the one cat in Jordan that already had a home? This could only happen to me.

Anyway, I apologized to the poor kid and gave him his cat back, and probably it would have ended there, with that being his first (and possibly only) impression of Americans- people who try to steal your cats. But his mom was watching the whole thing from the roof and just about dying with laughter, so she invited me in. I gave them some of the cookies I’d just bought and apologized a lot, and then the five other children who live there popped out of the back rooms to start building farsha forts, wrestling on the floor, and having jousting contests with the broken curtain rods lying on the floor. Basically it was a scene of perfect chaos, and their mom and I sat on the floor drinking Turkish coffee and eating cookies while she told me about how much she loves yoga (??!!), and how great my Arabic is.

And that’s how I made friends with my neighbors.