The girl who stood up

“Girls,” we asked, “do you think you have the same rights as boys?” They all nodded.

It was the end of a long week and the room was at least eighty degrees. Forty-five girls were slouched together in a semi-circle around the projector. We were in the middle of an afternoon session of Camp GLOW, a week of intense leadership training at a university campus for Jordanian high school girls. We’d just finished watching a TED talk focusing on the work of Sakena Yacoobi, the director of the Afgan Institute of Learning- an organization that created underground schools for girls in Afganistan when girls’ education was banned by the Taliban in the 1990′s.

My friend Alexa was facilitating the discussion and battling the 4pm lull.

“Girls, do you think you have the same opportunities as boys?” They all nodded again. I raised my eyebrows at the other counselors.

“Malak,” I said, pointing to one of the nodders, “What kinds of opportunities do boys and girls both have in Jordan?”

“We can all go to school,” she stated simply.

“And we can all play sports,” chimed in Hiba.

“What else can both boys and girls do in Jordan?” Alexa asked. We got a lot of examples: driving a car, going to college, deciding what to study, choosing a career.

“Alright,” Alexa said, stepping closer to the group, “I want you to stand up if you think you would be allowed to do some of the things I’m about to say, okay? And you can stay sitting if you don’t think you could do those things because you are a girl.” The girls nodded. They follow directions well.

“Most families in Jordan would send their sons to study in America if they got into a university there. Stand up if your parents would let you go to university in America.” Two girls stood.

“Stand if your parents would let you live away from home before you were married.”

“With a relative?” asked Ensam hopefully.

“No, by yourself.” One girl stood.

“Okay. You can play sports in school, right? But boys can play soccer anywhere they want, even in the street. Stand up if your parents would let you play soccer in the street.” No one stood.

“But wait,” said Ensam, “I don’t want to play soccer outside.”

“Why don’t you want to play outside, Ensam?” I asked.

“Because I would be embarrassed. Everyone would look at me. It’s better in the school where it is only girls.”

“But Ensam,” I tried to explain, “if all the girls played soccer in the street, just like the boys, no one would look at you.”

She shook her head. “But girls don’t want to play soccer in the street.”

People in the States say that women in the Middle East are oppressed.  And before I lived in Jordan, I might have said the same thing. But for some reason now, I balk at that word. Maybe it’s because of what Ensam said. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived with these women and I’ve seen their strengths, their skills, their courage. Maybe it’s because when we ask girls here if they have the same rights as boys, they nod. And I think in a lot of ways they’re right- most girls in Jordan are not oppressed. There’s a reason girls don’t play soccer in the street and it’s not because their parents say no. It’s because they don’t want to.

Girls in Jordan don’t play soccer in the street because they don’t want to make a scene. They don’t want to cause a problem. Standing up and being a leader means being looked at. It means being different. I haven’t met very many Jordanian girls who are comfortable being different.

Gender roles are deeply cultural and, for most Jordanians, very closely tied with religion. It is not my job to tell anyone that their perspective is wrong and if I did, I’d be a hypocrite. I’m an unmarried 24 year old with a boy’s haircut and baggy clothes. What do I know about gender roles? Yet somehow 45 Jordanian families have agreed to put their daughters in my care for a week. The very least I can do is respect their perspective. Still, the annual UNICEF report from 2012 showed that the number of Jordanian women who believe that a husband is justified in beating his wife under certain circumstances is 90%. And despite being known as one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East, Jordan has one of the highest rates of honor killings in the world.

These are the problems we are trying to begin solving with Camp GLOW.

“Okay,” Alexa said, “I want to ask you another question now. The girls that Sakena Yacoobi knew in Afganistan were not allowed to go to school, or to even have books. But she helped them go to school anyway, even though it was against the law. If she had been caught, she could have been killed. Why do you think she did it?”

Malak stood up. A crowd of young girls in hijab looked up.

“Because she knew she was right.”

Although Peace Corps Jordan is currently working to make GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) a more economically sustainable project, the current funding for our camp is obtained almost entirely through donations from family and friends. We are very close to reaching our projected goal of $7,749, which we need to raise within the next two weeks. Please consider supporting our work here in Jordan by donating at

https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=13-440-001.

The vegetable stand

Normally I buy my tomatoes from the other side of the street. There’s a guy there who knows me now.  His wife is my friend- I eat lunch at her house at least once a week and sometimes on a slow day when she’s working the vegetable stand I’ll sit inside with her for awhile. She feeds me cucumbers while she waits for customers and we watch the buses go by. But today I was late coming home from work and I needed tomatoes, so I went to a different stand.

It felt a little risky, which I guess is ridiculous. But I’ve become protective of myself lately- sticking to the families I know and the routines that I trust. Maybe it’s the gradual wear from a year and a half of being the foreigner, but I guess at least part of me knows now that there’s risk in going to a different vegetable stand, just like there’s risk in sitting in a double seat instead of a single on the bus, or saying hello to a stranger on the street. Some days people are kind and they say hello back. Most days the people in my life are supportive and generous and unbelievably good to me. But on some days strangers look back at me with fear and even anger. Some days they laugh at me. Some days they say things in Arabic that I wish I didn’t understand.

But I’m not making any new friends by sitting in the single seat on the bus and by going to the same vegetable stand every time, so I was glad today when I put my tomatoes on the scale and the man working said hello. I told him that I am American and he told me that he is Syrian. He has lived here for six months. He lived his whole life before that in Dera’a, a place that has now become famous for being the first city to protest in the Syrian uprising. I told him that I used to live in Ramtha, which is 6 kilometers from Dera’a. I used to wake up in the night to the sounds of shelling in his city.

I don’t know what to tell someone whose home has been destroyed.  I told him that I am sorry- something that has never been useful in any culture. But he undercharged me for the tomatoes. His home has been destroyed and he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to go back and he undercharged me for my tomatoes.

I am astonished by the strength that I see around me when I am brave enough to look.

The dukan club

I am sitting in a plastic chair on a concrete floor covered in sunlight. Today is one of those strange spring days, clear and bright one minute and gray and cold the next. It’s the kind of weather that pulls the rug out from under your feet. The sunlight, when it comes, is as immobilizing as hope. I sit here in the late afternoon warmth, surrounded by women at least 40 years older than I. We are the sole operators of the neighborhood corner-store, known by all as the “dukan”- an establishment that deals mainly in chips, candy, soda, gum, and on a good day eggs and clothespins.

I’m here because I was walking home and they demanded that I sit. This happens regularly in Jordan- among strangers, friends, and family alike. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in the states if neighbors, grocery store clerks and bus drivers all felt equally comfortable inviting a stranger in for tea. And if the strangers said yes.

We eat cookies and gossip and wave to everyone who walks by. Eventually another member of the club passes by, a hadja with the traditional face tattoos and a heavy embroidered scarf wrapped around her head. My landlady throws out the order- “Taali agrode ma na, tali hone” (“Come sit with us, come here.”) The hadja grumbles, “Lo esh?” (“Why?”) But she’s already through the door. I try to give her my chair but she slaps me on the ass and sits on a crate instead. She is at least 75 years old.

I have an English lesson to teach, grant forms to submit, and laundry to do, but I have no problem sitting here for an hour with these women. This is something I have learned to do, to recognize a good moment when I see it. Maybe it’s because every day here is so filled with extremes- one minute I feel so discouraged or angry I might scream; then a beaming five year old with Down’s Syndrome takes me by the hand and leads me to the playground to push her down the slide. These are the moments that I live for and I think it’s the contrast that really makes me really stop and take notice. To wonder at the goodness, to throw my head back and grin.

The four o’clock call to prayer echos through the streets and I ask my neighbor how her week has been. “Shu akhbarik?” I ask- “What’s the news?” “Hamdilulah,” she says, “Praise God.” She’s my favorite neighbor- always grinning at me and forcing me into her house for cookies when I walk by. A few months ago her husband died unexpectedly of cancer. I visited her a few days before his death and I saw her kiss the top of his head as she walked past his bed. She stayed in the house for 40 days of mourning after his death, but now that spring has come she is out under the blue sky with the rest of us. She turns to me and says, “Alei birda bayeesh.”- “Whoever is content will live.”

We turn our faces up to the sun.

Camp GLOW

I know it’s February, but it’s time to talk about camp. Actually, I haven’t stopped talking about camp (more specifically, Camp GLOW- Girls Leading Our World), since last summer, when I hung out with 40 amazing young Jordanian women for a week at Mutah University. Every year these girls apply to camp from all over Jordan and are selected by Peace Corps volunteers based on their English language skills and leadership potential. The camp is conducted entirely in English, and the program focuses on  the leadership skills and dialogue important and relevant to girls growing up in Jordan.

Camp GLOW has been a part of Peace Corps worldwide since 1995. The program was developed by a group of volunteers in Romania and has since been implemented by 60 Peace Corps countries throughout the world. Every country has a different interpretation of GLOW- in some countries the program runs multiple times throughout the summer and in others it runs for just one week. In some countries girls are educated on subjects like HIV/AIDS prevention and in others they discuss women’s’ development in the workplace or their cultures’ perception of beauty compared to what they’ve seen in magazines or on television. In every country girls and women have different struggles, different challenges, different perspectives on what it means to be a woman in a growing world. What unites GLOW worldwide is its commitment to the development of skills all women need to grow into strong leaders in their communities: self-care, trust-building and teamwork, creativity and perspective taking. and community involvement.

I was struck by my experience with GLOW last July, and since then I’ve been working with a few other volunteers to expand the program beyond the one week program at a university. Girls who want to participate in GLOW face a number of obstacles- not only does the current program require girls to have excellent speaking skills in English, but they also have to be willing to leave their homes and families and travel to a place they’ve never seen before to spend a week with complete strangers.  Most teenage girls in Jordan have never spent a single night away from their families. For the past few months I’ve been working on a project that will help remove some of the obstacles GLOW applicants face by bringing the camp curriculum to villages around Jordan. Together with a group of volunteers I’ve created a program called Day GLOW, which matches the goals and curriculum used in the university camp, but that can be  led in Arabic by volunteers all over Jordan at a village level. Two weeks ago with the help of four other volunteers, I put the program to the test- and despite a number of issues (we may or may not have conducted the entire camp in another volunteer’s living room, for example), it was a clear success.

I’ll be spending the next few months taking steps to make the program available to other volunteers- writing a manual, putting together powerpoint slides, and materials and leading a workshop for volunteers who will then be ready to put on Day GLOW from villages all over Jordan. It’s been very exciting to see all of this begin to take shape, especially because I know these girls and I know how much opportunities like GLOW can change lives. In the words of one camper last summer, ”I will close my eyes and I will think of my future as a leader, then I will open my eyes and I will realize that it isn’t a dream because I know that women can do everything.”

America and back

My plane back to Jordan landed directly into a snowstorm. I peered out the fogged windows of the airport and the blurry white haze seemed fitting for my mental state. I had no idea what time it was. I’d been back home for three weeks (actually, to Brussels, Seattle, Portland, and then San Diego), and coming back was like being jarred awake from a very strange and comfortable dream.

I spent my first week in America doing laundry every day, just because I could. I took two showers a day. I ate anything and everything I wanted at any and all times- because I could also drive anywhere I wanted at all times! Around 5pm on the first day I started checking the sky for signs of approaching sunset, calculating how much time I had before I’d need to head home before dark. And then I realized that in America there were absolutely no limits to my travel. I found excuses to drive places at night- the gas station, the grocery store- just because I could.

I ate waffles. In public.

And then there were the social rules that I no longer had to follow. I realized I was getting anxious every time I entered someone’s house and it was because I hadn’t taken my shoes off at the door. But of course there was no need- no one was praying on that carpeting. I spent the first week flinching at proximity to men and avoiding eye contact, and it occurred to me that in Jordan I hardly ever look anyone directly in the eye. We don’t eat at tables- we sit on the floor in a circle. We don’t sit on couches or chairs- we lean on cushions against the walls. We hardly ever find ourselves directly facing one another, which makes a lot of sense given the less-than-confrontational nature of Arab culture. But in the states confrontation is built into the furniture. Restaurant booths made me uneasy. So did subway cars and kitchen tables. But after about a week I started to get comfortable. True to the 22 years I spent in the states before I became an honorary Jordanian, I put all the rules and habits and customs I’d picked up in the past year on the back-burner and fell right back into a lifestyle that was undeniably much easier than I’d remembered. Within two weeks I was hugging my uncles and leaving my shoes on.

It’s of course been much harder to adjust in the other direction- to return to the culture that’s only been mine for a year. I stumble over basic phrases and kiss people too many or too few times and on the wrong cheek. I make accidental eye contact with bus drivers. I keep telling everyone that my body’s in Jordan but my mind hasn’t caught up yet- it’s still in America, or at best drifting somewhere out over the Atlantic. But my friends and neighbors are patient with me, just as they always have been. “Shway shway,” they tell me- “Little by little.”

And of course things do move slower here. I spent my first day back in village covered in blankets on the floor of my landlords’ living room, watching old movies with the family and listening to the wind sweeping against the windowpanes. Today I ventured out to hang up my laundry and found the sun shining. I brought out a blanket and ended up on the roof for most of the afternoon, reading and listening to the music wafting up from the street. After awhile my neighbor’s daughters spotted me from the rooftop where they’d been doing the same. They hopped over the dividing concrete and settled in for the day, the older one reading the Qur’an and the younger ones swinging from the rebar like monkey bars. The sun sank down over the mountains and we practiced making shadow puppets against the low walls of the rooftop.

In that moment it seemed completely impossible that a week ago I was drinking Jamba Juice and driving a car down the freeway, steering with one hand. But I am not interested in living in two worlds at once. I am here now, all of me out on this roof with these children who are my neighbors, our hands determinedly forming the vague shadows of a camel, a rooster and a spider against the cinderblocks. The sun sinks low behind our backs, 7 thousand miles away from where it will set again, 11 hours later, over the town where I was born.

Eid al Adha

Last weekend was the three-day Islamic holiday Eid al Adha (spelled عيد الأضحى, which means “festival of the sacrifice.”). I was here for Eid al Adha last year, but since I spoke about 4 words of Arabic at the time the experience was pretty confusing for me, so I figured I’d wait until I got the details cleared up this year to describe it. Basically Eid al Adha celebrates the story of the phrophet Ibrahim’s (in the Bible, Abraham’s) willingness to sacrifice his son Isma’il (Ishmael) as submission to God’s command. In the story, God intervenes just before the sacrifice and they kill a ram instead. Muslims generally celebrate the sacrifice by killing a sheep, cow, or even a camel on the first day of Eid and then dividing the meat into three parts- one for the family, another for relatives and friends, and one for charity.

I knew we were approaching Eid again this year when I started seeing sections of the sooq in my village and the nearby cities fenced off and filled with brightly marked cattle. At my center we got ready the week before by making these cards:

And by talking about it endlessly.

Everybody gets pretty excited about the whole process and just about everybody comes out to watch the sacrifice in the early morning on the first day of Eid- even the youngest kids. Most Jordanians I know are a lot more comfortable  than Americans with seeing animals killed before they’re eaten, which seems admirable to me (although I was not at all disappointed that my landlord’s family skipped the sheep this year).

I woke up at dawn on the first day of Eid to the chanting of the Takbir (the traditional Eid prayer) that was played over loudspeakers from the mosque across the street from my house. The prayer went on for two hours and it sounded like this. After the prayer ended there was a sermon (also played on loudspeakers) and after everybody finished praying, the sacrifices went down. My landlord’s family didn’t buy a sheep this year, so they got their meat personally delivered by a tiny girl in an impeccable white dress, heels, and frilly socks who came running into the house to hand my landlady a large transparent bag filled with bloody lamb.

At around 9am the family visits started. The procedure for visits on Eid is the same, except that everybody buys new fancy clothes and gets all dressed up, especially the kids. I definitely saw significantly more rhinestones, clip-on ties, and hair gel than usual. The kids run around to all the adults with hands outstretched, because it’s tradition to give out money to children during Eid. The kids then turn around and spend it on huge amounts of candy, chips, and toy guns, which pretty much lays out the entertainment for the rest of the day. I hung out and ate sweets and got wired on Arabic coffee with the moms pretty much the whole first day, and on the second and third days I visited my host family from my training village.

This is what we do.

The whole experience is pretty overwhelming (albeit delightful), and after three days of marathon visiting and way too much caffeine I was about ready to return to normal life. But even so, when I sat upstairs with my landlady and her daughters, just talking and watching the kids run around (and shoot plastic guns) I was struck by how quickly they’ve become my family in the past two months and how readily they welcomed me into this tradition that means so much to them. So Eid mubarak (happy Eid!), everybody.

One year in

A year ago at 2am I stepped off the plane with a crowd of strangers in business casual who would become my co-workers, my confidants, my comiserators, and my closest friends. We drove from the Queen Alia Airport in a bus completely covered in gold fringe, velvet hearts and flowers, and photos of King Abdullah II. Back then that seemed strange. I remember craning my neck out the window to make out the shapes of houses and tents and cars in the darkness. I saw families crowded around fires, giant neon-lit gas stations, men smoking hookah on the side of the road, and at one point, a fully armed tank. I’ve spent the past year wandering this strange and beautiful land and I’ve become something new in the process.

These days I am a bus-monitor, an artist, a therapist, a camp counselor, an environmental educator, an English teacher, a builder of playgrounds, a dreamer of project after project after project. I am vastly unqualified for most of the work that I do here and that’s something I’ve grown startlingly comfortable with. These days when anyone asks me for anything I say yes out of reflex and trust that my lack of experience will be balanced out by endless enthusiasm and the ability to Google what I don’t know. I have, of course, failed or been shot down many, many times. There have been plenty of occasions when I’ve tried and failed, when my assumptions have been proven wrong, when I’ve looked around me and wondered how in the world I ended up in this strange little village in the middle of a desert. There are moments every day when I know for certain that I will never understand this place completely. But living in Jordan has only increased my willingness to accept what I don’t know, to say yes, to offer what I can and to be glad for what I am given.

I learned from the start that I have to trust the people around me. How can I live any other way, with all these mysteries around me every day? Why did school start an hour late today? Why do all the falafel shops close at night during Ramadan? Why do we leave cats in the garbage cans and hand-feed the pigeons? Why did my bus driver bring me pistachio ice cream at 7:30am  this morning? Why is everyone so obsessed with John Cena and Titanic? And of course, whenever I am invited anywhere- Where are going and who will we see and when will we get back? Most of the time no one has an answer for me. A year ago this was a problem, but lately I’m okay with it. The difference isn’t that I’ve gotten better at Arabic or that I know more about the culture or that I’ve built stronger relationships with the people around me (although I’m happy to say that all of those things are true). The difference is that at some point during the past year I stopped needing an answer. These days I put on my shoes and grab my bag and get in the car- because I’ll find out where we’re going when we get there.

So happy one year anniversary to all my fellow J15 volunteers. Here’s a photo montage so we can all get sentimental.