Eight Months in Jordan: A Mosaic

[Jenn! 918]

I read this essay in my High School Bulletin written by one of the English teachers and thought some of you might enjoy:

Eight Months in Jordan: A Mosaic

By Peter Greer

My third morning here (Tuesday, I think), I was awakened at 5:15 a.m. by the call to worship echoing over the land in the crepuscular light, and I thought, How beautiful is this, and I AM IN JORDAN!

I wrote those words on October 7, 2008, during my first weekend as a full-time member of the faculty of King's Academy in Jordan. Learning of an emergency opening in the English Department, I had willingly come out of retirement to help out. And suddenly there I was: 5,500 miles away from home and teaching four sections of 11th-graders whose names in some cases I couldn't pronounce. Small wonder I was awake before sunrise.

King's Academy is the manifestation of a dream of Jordan's king, His Majesty Abdullah II. His experience as a student at Deerfield Academy had so shaped his life that he wanted to establish in his country a coed boarding school that educated students as he felt Deerfield had educated him. He also wanted that school to include students from all socio-economic backgrounds, just as Deerfield and Exeter do. I thought his goal an admirable one, and I was eager to help.

But the adjustment was not easy: The academic culture at King's was different from what I had grown used to as a teacher at Exeter. Many of my students in Jordan seemed more interested in the pragmatic value of their education than in the intellectual satisfaction that it could provide, and their classroom deportment sometimes undermined the serious work that I was asking of them. In addition, Jordan is not a bookish country, so my students tended not to be readers. Nonetheless, even as I learned to pronounce their names, I grew fond of them, and they, along with the rest of the school community, provided me with many enriching experiences. And Jordan itself gave me and my wife, Dale, many more. Here, adapted from my journal entries, are but a few of those experiences. They are tiles in a large mosaic, an unfinished portrait of a country renowned for its stunning mosaics.

One weekend day in the fall, Dale and I decided to climb Mount Machaerus, less a mountain, really, than a hill whose primary claim to fame is that the castle of Herod the Great stood on its summit and that John the Baptist was beheaded there. So we drove the 30 miles to its base, left the car in the parking lot, and started walking on the gentle trail that spiraled up the mountain.

Once on top and in the ruins of Herod's castle, we wandered our separate ways, until I heard Dale calling me over to the northern edge of the site. Soon at her side, I looked down, and in the valley far below us, I saw a Bedouin shepherd riding on a donkey in the middle of a herd of perhaps a hundred sheep that were spreading up the sides of the wrinkled hills in search of a blade or stem to eat. Suddenly I heard the sweet music that had brought Dale to call me over; the shepherd was playing a flute-like instrument. I listened, mesmerized, the volume of the music greater than I would have expected, the result probably of a kind of amplification produced by the breeze sweeping through the valley and up the hillsides. And as I listened, I felt that I was looking back in time, perhaps 2,000 years or more, looking back by looking down on one who lived in a present not so very different from the past in which his tribal ancestors had lived. Undoubtedly they had made similar music with a similar instrument in that or another valley for millennia. It was 2009, but it could have been 1009, I was sure, or even just 9. It was as if I were hearing the past come up to me as a clear melody on a brisk breeze.

In December of 2008, the conflict in Gaza grew into a war. On New Year's Day, I returned to King's fresh from a long vacation in Exeter and ready to start the winter term. But the sadness and anger on the campus was palpable. Some three-quarters of the Jordanian population have Palestinian roots, and the majority of students at King's are Jordanian, so sympathy for the Gazan Palestinians was understandable. It led to a vigil for Gaza, which I attended.

Shortly after I had found a place in the crowded dining hall, the evening vigil having already started, the door behind me opened slightly, and in came Wisam, the small man who worked at the library and brought coffee and tea to those who asked for it, the man whose name I remembered initially because it sounded like Wee Sam. And now, at an hour when usually he would not be on campus, there he was, passing in front of me, a Palestinian keffiyeh wrapped about his neck. The scarf was low enough to reveal his smile of greeting, but the look on his face was complicated by sadness and maybe anger. Wisam, I realized, had Palestinian blood in his veins.

The vigil moved along. One of my students sang; four students spoke, pain conspicuous in the timbre of their voices; a fifth student spoke who could hardly control his anger as he told the story of having lost an uncle in the war. At the end, students and young faculty circulated through the crowd distributing candles. A flame passed from candle to candle as we prepared to go outside and up to the school's Spiritual Center. I passed the flame from my candle to that of Wisam, who was standing close to me. Then, we moved slowly outside, and into a swirling wind. I cupped my hand around my flame and protected it until I stood in the Spiritual Center, out of the direct wind. There I was able to relight the candles of others. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the relatively small space and listened to more speakers. I couldn't hear well, but it didn't matter; my attention was more on the flickering light. People began to move out of the center and back into the wind, candles quickly extinguishing, shadowed bodies drifting apart in the darkness. Wisam, I knew, would be going home to his extended family in nearby Madaba, but I knew also, now, that pain underlay the friendly smile that I so routinely enjoyed. Wee Sam: My mnemonic device felt suddenly dismissive. Wisam he was, and he was a Palestinian. And as such he lived within one of the dreadfully conflicting narratives that date back in this region more than 2,000 years. Indeed, the conflicts in those narratives are what was fueling the fire of the war being waged some 90 miles from King's Academy. From how far back in time that fuel came, and how close the war came to where we were! In a sense, it had come into our dining hall. And in a deeper sense it flowed in Wisam's veins.

Two thousand years. That span of time was so often at the base of our experiences. In even the most casual of day trips, our observations about the different ways Jordanians live reminded us of those many centuries.

It was Friday, the holy day of the Islamic week, and Dale and I decided to drive north, to the Ajloun Nature Reserve, one of several areas in Jordan established and overseen by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature. A long hike there would give us our preferred devotional time, the land itself the altar of our faith. And classes wouldn't resume until Sunday. I was eager, even impatient to get started.

The day was beautiful, bright with the usual sunshine. After passing through the gauntlet of Amman's traffic, we moved easily along a well-maintained road. On straight and wide stretches, one parked truck after another created a kind of beaded necklace along the roadbed, filling the unpaved shoulder. Displayed in the trucks' open flatbeds were various wares: fruits in one series of trucks; vegetables in another series; even plantings for landscape design in a third. How odd, I thought, that vendors of the same ware bunched themselves in such a fashion. Dale suggested that each vendor must have a few regulars who guaranteed him at least some small income. But be he comfortable with the income or not, what I couldn't imagine him being comfortable with was the prospect of sitting for hours waiting to make a sale, in some cases in the shade of a large umbrella or an isolated tree but in most cases under the fire of that glaring sun. Nonetheless, men and boys by the score hunkered down close to their trucks and waited. And waited. And waited.

How much waiting there is in Jordan, Dale said. And how much patience one must develop, patience and the capacity to put up with discomfort. What these people must tolerate to put a few coins in their pockets, enough perhaps for a little bread and fruit to bring back to a large and hungry family. But these Jordanians showed signs not of hunger but of will, the will to wait, the will to make do with what little came their way, the will to endure, in a land so arid and austere that for millennia it has demanded such will from its human population.

On we drove until we stopped at the edge of a bluff, to look for raptors above and to listen to the sermons and prayers issuing from the mosques in the valley below. Once satisfied, we walked back across the road, to discover that another car had parked behind ours on the shoulder; on the slope that rose beyond the parked cars was a family sitting on a blanket under a cedar tree, picnic supplies spread out before them. We smiled and nodded, and they waved. And suddenly it was clear that they wanted us to join them. We hesitated. Then, responding to more waves and a call, we moved up the slope and joined the family of six; the four children, we soon found out, were 10, 8, 6 and 2 years old. Immediately, the father gave us each a cup of tea, then offered us hummus, olives, tabouli and freshly baked pita bread. Of course, they didn't have eight cups, nor did they have enough food for eight, but Dale and I were the guests of honor at an impromptu banquet, so we ate first and, at their insistence, ate heartily. At one point I returned to our car to bring up our offerings: peanut butter and HobNob biscuits. The HobNobs were received with greater gusto than the peanut butter, which they had difficulty swallowing.

While we ate, we talked. And we talked. And we talked. Both of the older children delivered the occasional stock phrase in English, but it was the father, an English teacher, who carried the conversation. The mother said little; however, when I asked, given the ages of their children, what had happened to 4, he didn't understand the joke, but she did. It was clear that, under her headscarf and modest manner, she was keen, with a better command of English, perhaps, than that of her teacher husband. But most important was not the English that they could speak; it was the hospitality that they spoke in their every gesture. Arab hospitality has been legendary for centuries. But here were real people living out the legend, a modest family who on their holy day had invited strangers to join them for a picnic. It was a memory that even then Dale and I knew would give definition to our time in Jordan.

At one point, I was asked to read some 30 essays submitted by students explaining why they would like to travel with the king on his next voyage abroad. It is his generous habit to take students with him when he visits heads of state in other countries, and he wants to take those who offer the most compelling reasons. The complete experience proved to enlarge my understanding of the world I had entered.

After reading the essays twice and deliberating for some time, I sent six names to the administration, indicating the two students who were my choices. A couple of days later, the head of school announced the decision. The students accompanying His Majesty would be…one of the students I had indicated but not the other. I was surprised, and I confess to a disappointment tinged with irritation; I had given the project quite a bit of time, in short commodity with my workload, and I had been confident in my choices. But at the same time I had known from the beginning that the final decision was not mine, and I had also known that the essay would be only one of the qualifications under consideration. Thus, I shrugged off my reaction, thinking it mildly petulant, and moved on. I had, after all, essays written by my own students to evaluate and grade.

Not long thereafter, I was flipping through a coffee-table book entitled The Best of Jordan, and I came across the names of three families that had been prominent in the immediate region since the 800s. Well, one of those families carried the name that the student I had not chosen carried. Suddenly I found myself wondering: Had that student won the competition solely on her own merits, considerable as they were, or had she been aided by over a thousand years of regional history? It might have been that she was not related to that family; I really didn't know. But even if she wasn't, I was already aware of many examples of what in Jordan is called wasta. Wasta in the Arab world means roughly what we in the United States mean by "connection" or "pull," the social force that leads to favoritism. And I don't like it in my country any more than I liked it in Jordan.

One day in our discussion of Hamlet, looking at the burial scene in Act V, we noted that a gravedigger, referring to Ophelia's apparent suicide, makes this comment: "If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o' Christian burial." "Ophelia had wasta," one student blurted out. We all laughed, but he was right: Ophelia did have wasta. And so do millions of others all over the world, for almost every society has its version of wasta. It has promoted favoritism for centuries, and it will continue to promote favoritism, I am certain, in Jordan and elsewhere, for as long as any of us are breathing on this planet. And probably for eons after that.

Khamsin is the Arabic word for 50. It gives name to a wind that blows across the Sahara onto the Arabian Peninsula during the period of transition from winter to spring. The wind earned the name because it seems usually to blow for about 50 days, to blow hot and to blow dry, to blow death, it is said.

The day was wild with wind. For the first time, I thought, I was experiencing the Khamsin, and it was blowing away the tedium of routine. As I moved over campus, leaning into the gale, angling my body so as to stay on my feet, I understood why the cedar trees along the road to Amman are angled as they are; they have been beaten by this annual wind for all of their many years, and they have had to find the posture to survive. I was not threatened as they were, but I was angled. My public day over, I moved determinedly toward my apartment in Meissa House. And then I felt the first spit of rain; this version of the Khamsin was surely not blowing dry. I tucked my copy of Hamlet under my jacket and began to run.

Once in the dry warmth of the apartment, I changed my clothes, put on my slippers and watched in the fading light as the screen to the kitchen window blurred from the water collecting in its interstices. And slowly there arose the sound that I had long been waiting to hear: drops of a downpour splatting in fast-growing puddles. Knowing that Dale was in the art building without rain gear, I kept looking out to see if she was coming home, but primarily I was taking pleasure in the sight of the path lights reflecting off the swirling surface of the puddles and in the sound of the unstinting wind driving the rain nearly horizontally across our patio. It was good to be warm and inside, but it had been better to experience the water in the blustery air. It was late in the rainy season, which had not produced nearly enough rain to fill the reservoirs and add to the aquifers, but this rain would help if it lasted long enough. This wind had not blown death; it had blown the life of water. Nothing in this arid land is more essential than that.

Some weeks later Dale and I actually experienced what that rain had promised.

Our spring in Jordan was both beautiful and brief, a teasing combination. Fields that were brown and dry in February and March suddenly became green, the grasses and grains appearing as if from the ashes of the previous summer's bake oven. The rolling hills that dominate the topography around King's Academy and Amman itself were blanketed thinly with the promised fertility, and Bedouins had their flocks of goats and sheep and camels grazing everywhere. I had the sense that these poor animals had to ingest enough to last them for the rest of the year. But then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the green turned to brown, and the landscape returned to its former sere self. We knew, however, that beneath that dry crust lay seeds waiting for the rains of next January and February and the cool temperatures of March, at which time up they would produce new green shoots and the Phoenician vegetation would again give food to those poor animals, who would eat of it heartily. The whole manner of this turn of the seasons has a biblical feel to it, and why wouldn't it: Surely sheep and goats and camels that had flocked at the base of Mount Machaerus, let's say, 2,000 years ago had had a similar annual chance to ingest heartily. Thus does time move along, and thus do we move along with it.

And so went our time in Jordan. We will return: On June 3, 2010, Dale and I will attend the first graduation of King's Academy. My former students, now part of the first senior class at this fledgling school, will receive their diplomas, and I will be watching. The momentous occasion will produce many tears, I know, but they will not be restricted to the graduates and their families; some, without doubt, will also be mine.

[~Jackie~ 30]

Wonderful article! Thanks Jenn for posting it.

Jackie

[illnevergetthis 5]

That was great Jenn! Thanks for sharing the story. I really enjoyed it.

[Mommy2ZaidnSalma 11]

<3 it thanks

[sara535 15]

He should write a book based on his journal entries - thanks for the post Jenn